These are only my thoughts and they only pertain to chronic pain situations. I have not cured my chronic pain, nonetheless, I likely have more experience in the field than many sufferers and can share a few observations and tips.
Thoughts:
Your brain thinks you are injured, but you actually aren’t. The injury you are diagnosed with is likely so insignificant that many people have physical conditions 10x worse in the same local area and feel no pain. That is because normally the brain stops interpreting pain signals if nothing can be changed. If a limb is damaged beyond repair, the pain signal is useless, and so the brain/body naturally stops using the signal over the course of a few weeks/months. With age, spines damage beyond repair; that is a normal process. (Ie. golfers with all their twisting likely have terrible spine preservation, nonetheless they have no pain). Your brain is just stuck in an infinite loop, and you aren’t actually hurt.
To escape, you can’t ignore it or try to heal it; you have to actually lean into it. It is like a Chinese finger trap—the more you pull away, the tighter it gets; the more you push in and embrace it, the more you see the way out. Your fear of the expected pain is what tightens the trap.