Fibromyalgia: The Boulder You Were Never Sentenced to Carry

What an ancient myth reveals about living with fibromyalgia — and why pushing harder isn't always the answer

Let me tell you about Sisyphus.

He was a king in Greek mythology, condemned by the gods to push an enormous boulder up a steep hill for eternity. Every time he neared the top, it would roll back down to the bottom. So he'd begin again. Straining, pushing, willing himself forward. Over and over. Forever.

No rest. No reward. Just the same relentless, exhausting cycle.

If you live with fibromyalgia, I wonder how much of that sounds familiar.

The cycle nobody talks about

The flare that eases, then returns without warning. The morning you wake up feeling almost normal — daring to feel hopeful — only to find your body has other ideas by midday. The treatments you try, the routines you carefully build, the good days that make you think you've finally turned a corner, before the pain rolls back in and you find yourself at the bottom of the hill again.

It is exhausting in a way that is almost impossible to put into words. Not just physically — though that alone is immense — but emotionally. The relentless cycle of effort, hope, and setback wears something down deep inside a person over time.

And yet, most people with fibromyalgia keep pushing. Because what else do you do?

You try harder. You research more. You pace more carefully. You manage, adapt, and push. Because the boulder is there, and it feels like your job to move it.

What nobody ever stops to ask is this.

What if the pushing itself is part of the problem?

What's actually happening beneath the surface

Here's what I see consistently in the people I work with through Fibro Freedom Therapy.

Fibromyalgia doesn't exist in isolation. It sits inside a system — your nervous system — that has been under significant load, often for a very long time. And that system, in its effort to protect you, has learned a set of automatic responses.

Anticipate pain. Brace. Withdraw. Monitor. Repeat.

Your brain and body are extraordinarily good at learning patterns. That's normally useful — it's how we develop skills, build habits, navigate daily life. But when the pattern being learned is one built around threat, pain, and unpredictability, those automatic responses start working against you.

Pain increases anxiety. Anxiety increases sensitivity. Sensitivity increases pain. A loop, quietly reinforcing itself — and one that no amount of pushing your way through will break. Because the loop isn't happening at the surface. It's happening underneath, at the level of learned patterns and nervous system responses.

This is what I mean when I say the presenting problem is rarely the real issue.

The pain is real. Profoundly, undeniably real. But the cycle keeping it locked in place is driven by something deeper than the symptoms themselves.

When the boulder becomes your identity

There's something else that happens over time with fibromyalgia that rarely gets spoken about directly.

Somewhere along the way — after enough cancelled plans, enough misunderstood symptoms, enough battles with a body that won't cooperate — the condition stops being something you have and becomes something you are.

I am a fibromyalgia sufferer.

It makes complete sense that this happens. When something shapes every aspect of your daily life, of course the mind begins to organise itself around it. This is the brain doing what it always does — building a framework to make sense of your world.

But that framework comes at a cost.

Because when fibromyalgia becomes your identity, the boulder becomes yours too. You're not just managing a condition. You're carrying the story around it. The fear of the next flare. The grief for the life you had before. The quiet belief, built up over years, that this is simply how things are now.

That belief sits in the subconscious. And the subconscious is very good at proving itself right.

The question worth asking

Sisyphus kept pushing because he believed he had no choice. It was his punishment. His boulder. His hill.

But here is the thing — Sisyphus was condemned by the gods. He genuinely had no choice.

You are not Sisyphus.

Nobody sentenced you to carry fibromyalgia as your entire identity. The condition was not handed down as punishment. It developed — through a combination of experience, nervous system load, and patterns your mind and body learned along the way.

And what experience creates, it can also release.

The most important question isn't how to push the boulder more effectively. It's whether you're carrying more than you need to — and whether there's a different path up the mountain entirely.

A different way of working

This is at the heart of Fibro Freedom Therapy — a programme I developed specifically for people with fibromyalgia who feel trapped in exactly this cycle.

Not a cure. Not a promise that everything disappears overnight.

But a way of working directly with the subconscious mind — where the fear, the identity, the learned patterns of pain response, and the nervous system load are actually held — to begin loosening their grip.

We look at what's driving the cycle, not just what the cycle looks like. We reduce the load on the system rather than forcing outcomes through it. We interrupt the loop at the level where it lives.

It's not about willpower. It's not about pushing harder up the same hill.

It's about understanding that you were never condemned to this — and that change becomes possible when we work at the level where the pattern is actually running.

Many of the people I work with describe a point in the process where something shifts. Not just in how they feel physically, but in how they relate to the condition. A sense of separation between who they are and what they experience. A quiet but significant realisation that the boulder, heavy as it is, does not define them.

You're not stuck. You're running a pattern.

That distinction matters more than it might first appear.

Stuck is fixed. A pattern is learned — and learned things can be changed. Not by trying harder, not by finding more willpower, but by working at the level where the pattern is actually stored.

If you have been pushing uphill for a long time and something keeps pulling you back, it might be worth asking what's happening underneath.

That is the conversation I'm here to have.

Fibro Freedom Therapy is a specialist programme for people living with fibromyalgia who are ready to move beyond symptom management and address the patterns driving their condition at a deeper level.

If you'd like to find out more, or simply have a conversation about whether this approach might be right for you, I'd love to hear from you.

Get in touch and click here