Why We Hurt

Why We Hurt is full of information you wish you knew about yourself at a younger age. It is written from the perspective of an experienced physiotherapist explaining the layers of knowledge required to understand how your body actually works. The author empathetically weaves real-life stories with discussions on healthcare, consciousness, human nature, stress, trauma, injury, and healing. The book details the physical toll of being an emotional human being in an imperfect world. It explains how the emotions of stress, anxiety, fear, and loneliness are more physical experiences than they are cognitive. You will come away with an empowering understanding of how your body holds onto tension in relation to everything that you have experienced up to the present moment, and how that tension impacts the experience of being you. 

Brent Stevenson is a physiotherapist in Vancouver, Canada with a non-traditional approach to helping his clients. He starts by teaching them about how their bodies work and approaches the process of feeling better with the mantra of education before intervention. His first book Why Things Hurt: Life Lessons From An Injury-Prone Physical Therapist was his cathartic means of helping people makes sense of their situations while he continued to process his own challenges. Clinically, he integrates education with IMS dry needling, visceral manipulation, and movement training. Personally, he is married, has three teenage children, plays hockey and part time chauffeur.  

"People experience the world through their bodies," Brent Stevenson writes in this remarkable book, but as an innovative physiotherapist he has witnessed all too often just how out of touch humans can be with their bodies, as with the emotions that tense up and limit the movements of those bodies, causing pain, fear and even disability. In plain English Why We Hurt explains how our minds, memories, brains, muscles, ligaments, viscera, and connective tissue interact in subtle ways to foster suffering, origins and healing of which transcend the narrowly mechanical views of conventional medicine. Stevenson's understanding of these dynamics is keenly insightful, his many case histories are fascinating, and his explanations are clear and illuminating.

Gabor Mate, MD, Author, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture