PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANNE MENKE
For the past several months, I have been going to Moment Physical Therapy & Performance (Moment PT). There have been periods of clear progress, followed by days when movements that had started to feel easy have become painful again — not so much exercise, but the physical demands of a normal day. The hardest part has been understanding why my capacity seems to change from one day to the next.
“The gym is controlled stress,” explains Andy Fata-Chan, co-founder with his wife Kristianna Fata-Chan of Moment PT. “If all you did was train, you could gradually progress. But walking around the city, taking the stairs, carrying a heavy bag — they all contribute to your overall load. Add work, relationships, finances, and everything else life throws at you. Your body doesn’t distinguish between physical stress and emotional stress. It simply experiences stress.”
Physical therapy, Andy explains, isn’t about avoiding stress. It’s about gradually increasing your capacity to absorb it. Strength training, mobility work, and carefully dosed movement expand the body’s ability to tolerate more load over time. Improve mobility and the body gains more movement options. Build strength within those new ranges and stress is distributed instead of concentrated in one vulnerable area. Expose the system to manageable challenges until it learns that it is safe to move again.
Listening to Andy, I realized he wasn’t just describing physical rehabilitation. The protective mechanisms we develop emotionally follow a similar path. Just as physical therapy gradually rebuilds strength, mobility, and confidence in the body, emotional healing requires expanding our capacity to tolerate stress, letting go of protective patterns, and learning to feel safe again. It’s a journey Andy knows firsthand, and a foundation for rehabilitation at Moment PT.
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“For most of my life,” Andy told me, “I thought success would solve my problems. I believed that if I worked hard enough, became successful enough, made enough money, and helped enough people, I would eventually feel the way I imagined successful people felt. Peaceful. Confident. Secure. Enough.”
Andy had built a thriving physical therapy practice, became a respected educator and public speaker, and accomplished nearly every goal he had set for himself. “But I still wasn’t as happy as I thought I’d be.”
For years, Andy assumed the solution to any problem was to work harder. But eventually working harder stopped working. As the company grew, his biggest challenge was no longer treating patients or building the business. It was leading people. He struggled to give difficult feedback, hold people accountable, establish boundaries, risk being disliked.
What he thought was a leadership problem, however, was a manifestation of unresolved emotions from his childhood…
Andy was born in New York City, but when he was only a few months old, he was sent to China to live with his godparents while his parents worked in America. Childcare was too expensive, and sending him away felt like their only option. For the first five years of his life, he believed his godparents were his parents.
One day a woman arrived to take him back to New York. “She was my mother.”
Recently, while talking with his executive coach, Andy found himself describing that experience. “I can’t even imagine how hard it must have been for my mom and dad to be separated from their youngest son.”
His coach asked, “How did you feel?”
“I didn’t know how to answer,” he recalls. “I realized I’d spent my whole life understanding everyone else’s feelings while ignoring my own. Walking through Greenpoint later that day, I suddenly broke down in tears.”
Everything began to make sense. His people-pleasing, perfectionism, workaholism, fear of disappointing others, difficulty setting boundaries weren’t personality traits. They were coping mechanisms — survival strategies developed by a little boy whose nervous system had learned that love could disappear.
The patterns that helped him survive childhood also helped him build a successful career, but eventually, they became the very patterns preventing him from becoming the husband, leader, and person he wanted to be. Those strategies may have served an important purpose earlier in life, but over time they became the very limitations preventing growth.
He also began to recognize where he learned these behaviors. They had been modeled after his parents.
Andy’s mother had to retire for medical reasons when he was young. No longer contributing financially to the family, she seemed to believe that she deserved fewer of its resources. “She always gave the best piece of meat to someone else. I watched her eat rotten peaches and black bananas because she didn’t want anything to go to waste. She consistently put everyone else’s needs before her own.”
“I used to describe my mother as one of the strongest people I knew,” said Andy. “Then I realized: I am my mother. I let almost anyone put time on my calendar. I tried to please every person in my life. I believed my value came through sacrifice.”
He also recognized what he had inherited from his father. Growing up, work was always a reason not to disturb him. Years later, Andy found himself saying the same thing to his wife, Kristi: Give me a break. I’m working so hard.
“I was using work as a cop-out. I had recreated the exact conditions I claimed I did not want.”
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Long before opening Moment PT, Andy had struggled through school. He forged his parents’ signatures, failed classes, landed on academic probation, battled anxiety and depression, and was rejected by nearly twenty physical therapy schools. He believed he wasn’t smart enough to succeed.
“I try to appreciate that rehabilitation isn’t simply about getting stronger. It’s about expanding capacity. Not just the capacity to lift more weight or walk farther, but the capacity to tolerate stress, recover from setbacks, and trust your body again.”
Everything changed when a neuroscience professor recommended a book, The Brain That Changes Itself. Andy had never been one to read books, but didn’t want to miss this opportunity given to him now that he was in physical therapy school. The book introduced him to neuroplasticity—the idea that the brain can continue changing throughout life.
“Until then,” he says, “I thought my identity was fixed.”
That discovery transformed the way he thought about learning, healing, and ultimately himself. It also led to a simple framework for change: Input → Process → Output. Andy didn’t become a different person because he told himself he was different. He became a different person by repeatedly behaving differently until his identity had enough evidence to change.
“If you don’t like the outputs you’re getting, change the inputs. We don’t necessarily know what happens in the middle, because we’re complex individuals, but if we consistently change the input, and it results in a different output enough times, it creates what we call a ‘prediction error’. That’s when we see change.”
This is also true in physical therapy, and in regard to pain, which can often be the nervous system trying to protect us. If you are constantly exposed to it, that’s what you’re going to predict in anticipation. A patient may not be able to consciously control every biological process involved in healing. But they can change the inputs through movement, building strength, and progressively dosed stress. Recovery becomes a process of gradually giving the brain new evidence that it’s safe to move again.
As my own recovery continues, I try to appreciate that rehabilitation isn’t simply about getting stronger. It’s about expanding capacity. Not just the capacity to lift more weight or walk farther, but the capacity to tolerate stress, recover from setbacks, and trust my body again.
“A setback isn’t failure — it’s information”, says Andy. “Maybe the load was too high. Maybe recovery was insufficient. Maybe the system needs more time or a different input. We adjust the dose and continue building.”
And so the journey continues…
