Founder learns to feel, laugh and love life again, beyond chronic pain

"I had been in therapy for years, but this work was different. I wasn't spending our sessions retelling my life or trying to understand it better. I had already done plenty of that. We were going underneath it."

Writes Carly de Castro, who co-founded Pressed Juicery.

I guided her to feel, laugh and enjoy life again. This is her story.

"For years, dealing with chronic pain, most of my attention had been directed toward my body. I wanted to know what was wrong with it, why it hurt, and, obviously, how to make it stop. 

I did all the self-care things: meditation, yoga, journeying, therapy, the daily practices to care for my mental health.

But as I hit a breaking point and began seeing a somatic coach named Nat van Zee, we started to explore the beliefs I was carrying that might be exacerbating my pain, and not just my symptoms.

I had spent years searching for the right doctor, treatment, diet, supplement, explanation. But the one thing I had somehow missed entirely was to just be kind to my younger self.

I learned to turn toward the parts of myself I had spent most of my life managing, overriding, or trying not to feel.

After this work, I've started to notice a real difference. The things that used to take me down don't carry the same charge. There is a little more space between the feeling and the reaction, enough to understand what is happening and sometimes choose differently.

I feel that space in my body. I feel connected to my kids and husband. We've been laughing a lot. This presence feels like a gift. I'm not sure I would have understood how much I'd lost it until it started coming back.

Carly de Castro, who co-founded Pressed Juicery, as a young girl and today

On her website, Nat says,

'I help when nothing else works.'

That was certainly true for me.

The biggest investment I made in my healing was working with her for nine months. We met twice a month, and in between sessions she offered unlimited WhatsApp support. There were days she truly felt like my lifeline.

Nat helped me learn how to sit beside the frightened, angry, ashamed, grieving parts of myself without immediately trying to improve them. 

In addition to IFS, she draws from hypnotherapy, somatic work, visualization, and nervous system regulation, all aimed at reaching the places that are harder to access through thinking alone.

Beliefs surfaced that I hadn't known I was carrying. Memories I thought were settled revealed themselves to be very much alive in my body. Again and again, she asked me to do the thing I had become exceptionally good at avoiding: stay with what hurt.

I spent years treating pain as proof that something was still wrong with me, and that healing meant getting rid of it. It was always another problem to solve, another failure to correct. I don't believe that anymore. Or at least, I'm starting to question it.

That's where the goalpost has moved. Not toward certainty, or even toward being pain-free, but toward questioning what I once considered absolute. About myself. About my body. About what can change.

Because once something you thought was fixed becomes permeable, you start to wonder what else you might have been wrong about. And strangely, I find that idea incredibly hopeful.

What has changed is not that I no longer hurt. It is that pain no longer feels like an edge of my life. There is still joy, connection, desire, presence, laughter, all of it existing alongside what hurts."

This is an excerpt from The Part I Was Missing by Carly de Castro, first published on her Substack, Tutto Passa.

Read her full story, including her in-depth account of how we worked together, shared in full with her permission.

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