Chronic Pain Relief
Chronic pain affects millions of people.
Even when pain is only mild, it can stop you from enjoying normal daily life.
When pain is intense, it can bring your daily activities to a complete stop and steal all the pleasure from your day.
Every second of the day becomes about how to escape the pain. Depression increases from what you can’t do anymore because of the pain.
Anxiety spikes as you can’t figure out how to reduce the pain or make it go away. You watch your movements like a hawk to make sure you don’t make it any worse.
You may be at your wits end. I know I was.
I struggled with chronic pain for many years, and that is exactly how I felt: hopeless.
My first chronic pain patient was myself.
I finally found relief through Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT). PRT healed what surgery, injections, physical therapy, MRI’s, acupuncture, massage, and medications could not.
PRT is a proven mind body program that can eliminate chronic pain and transforms your life.
Rooted in neuroscience, PRT has shown that while chronic pain feels like it is coming from the body, in most cases it is generated by misfiring pain circuits in the brain.
Pain is a danger signal. If you put your hand on a hot stove, the pain lets you know to move your hand so that you don’t injure yourself further. But sometimes, these danger signals can get activated even in the absence of structural damage.
The brain can make a mistake!
Neuroplastic pain results from the brain misinterpreting safe messages from the body as if they were dangerous.
In other words, neuroplastic pain is a false alarm.
Recent research shows that learned neural pathways in the brain cause many forms of chronic pain instead of structural problems in the body.
Though the pain can be addressed psychologically, this does not imply that the pain is imaginary. It really hurts, I know, mine did too!
And just as pain can be learned, it can also be unlearned.
Pain can start from an injury, slowly come on or start with an acute attack. Let’s imagine for the sake of my example, there was an initial injury to your back that brought the pain on. When you develop an injury, there is acute tissue damage. During this time, the brain creates pain pathways. But the brain simply doesn’t forget these pathways once the injury has healed. So, the body can heal, but the pain pathways in the brain are still there and can still cause pain.
You see, right now, you’re sitting here and you’re feeling something in your back. But I’m feeling something in my back as well. We’re sitting, we’re using back muscles, so of course, we’re going to feel something in our backs. We have nerve fibers in our back that are sending messages to our brains. These messages are safe. They are neutral. Just a sensation. But your brain is interpreting these messages as if they were dangerous.
It’s like if I were to toss you a hot potato, but your brain thought it was a hand grenade. You’d respond as if it was dangerous, even though it’s safe. There are nerve fibers in my back that are sending messages to my brain as well. But my brain is interpreting these messages accurately: “A light amount of pressure, just a sensation, no cause for alarm.”
Your brain is getting the same messages, but is interpreting these messages as dangerous. So, as a result, amplifying the sensation. So, here is the best analogy I can think of: Imagine you were wearing a hearing aid. Right now, I’m talking at maybe a 2 out of 10 volume. But imagine if you cranked that hearing aid all the way up, you’d be hearing me at like a 7 out of 10 volume.
I’m still talking at a 2 out of 10 volume, but your brain interprets it as louder than it is. It is the same thing with neural pathway pain. And if this volume knob gets turned up, we can interpret sensations as louder than they are. And the thing that determines whether the volume knob gets turned up or down is how much danger your brain thinks there is.
All chronic pain patients have the same fear…..
“There has to be something going on in my body that’s causing this.”
And when the brain believes that the body is damaged, it responds with pain. So, treatment involves teaching the brain that the signals it’s receiving from the body are actually safe.
I’ll give you specific techniques to help you break the pain cycle and overcome your symptoms.
PRT is a set of techniques that retrain the brain to interpret and respond to signals from the body properly, successively breaking the cycle of chronic pain.
There are 5 main components of PRT that I will guide you through to get relief from this chronic pain cycle:
- Education About the Brain and Neuroplastic Pain:
- I will teach you how the brain generates pain and how it can be reversed.
- It is important that you also learn how to recognize your own individual pain/fear cycle. As you learn to eliminate the fear around the pain, over time your pain will fade.
- Gathering and Reinforcing Evidence:
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- It is difficult to overcome the fear around pain when you believe that it is an accurate reflection of tissue or structural damage in the body.
- A goal of treatment is to help you embrace the idea that your pain is due to neuroplastic pain, as opposed to a structural or physical problem in your body.
- This can be challenging for three reasons:
- We are wired to associate physical pain with physical injury.
- Previous Diagnoses: Many chronic pain sufferers have been given a structural diagnosis.
- Learned Associations: Many chronic pain sufferers have developed learned associations, like physical positions (sitting or standing) or activities (walking, running, bending) that have been connected with the onset of pain, reinforcing the belief that there is something structurally wrong with them.
- The best way to combat the belief that there is a “structural” cause of the pain is by gathering as much evidence as possible to the contrary. I talk about some indicators that your pain maybe neuroplastic vs an actual structural problem just below this section (scroll down).
- We will work together to gather and reinforce evidence that your pain is not a function of an underlying structural problem and develop your very own Evidence List.
- Attending To and Appraising Pain Sensations Through a Lens of Safety:
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- An essential technique we will use is called “somatic tracking.”
- The goal of somatic tracking is to help you attend to pain sensations through a lens of safety. It involves three components:
- Mindfulness: Explore the pain sensations with a sense of curiosity and without judgment or fear.
- Safety Reappraisal: Continuously helping you reassess the sensation as safe.
- Positive Affect Induction: Lighten the mood, foster feelings of pleasure, lightness, and ease. Humor is one of the best ways to achieve positive affect induction. (I have been known to tell some pretty funny dad jokes!)
- I will be leading you through somatic tracking exercises in-session and guide you on how to practice on your own.
- Address Other Emotional Threats:
- When we are in a state of high alert, we are more likely to interpret everything through a lens of danger. Loud noises will make us jump, light touches will cause us to flinch, and sensations in our body are more likely to be experienced as painful.
- One of the aims of PRT is to lower your overall threat level. This can include helping you process difficult emotions, a history of trauma, difficult relationships, and more.
- As overall levels of fear and stress decrease, the brain is more likely to interpret signals from the body as safe, leading to a reduction in pain.
- Gravitating to Positive Feelings and Sensations:
- In additional to reducing your overall threat level, we also want to increase an overall feeling of safety. For example, techniques for increasing self-compassion and gratitude can help further generate that shift from “danger” to “safety.”
How to determine if you have neuroplastic pain?
There is one question I get more than any other, “Is my pain neuroplastic?” My answer is always the same, “It could be.”
Luckily, there are certain signs you can look for that point to neuroplastic pain.
Here is a list of guidelines that can help you make this determination:
- Pain originated during a time of stress
- Pain origination without an injury
- Inconsistencies in how the pain presents: instances where the pain wasn’t present, despite engaging in physical positions or activities that generally bring the pain on.
- Experiencing a variety of different somatic symptoms: headaches, body aches, leg pain, tooth pain, stomach pain, tinnitus, fatigue. Having 3 or 4 unrelated physical conditions is extremely unlikely unless you have a systemic disorder like multiple sclerosis or lupus.
- Symptoms spread/move
- Symptoms triggered by stress: pain increasing when feeling upset or stressed or decreasing when engaged it something pleasurable.
- Triggers that have nothing to do with your body: weather, sounds, smells or even time of day.
- Symmetrical Symptoms: develop pain on the same part of their body on the opposite side.
- Delayed Pain: pain comes on after an activity, like hiking, but not during.
- Childhood Adversity
- Common Personality Traits: perfectionism, conscientiousness, people pleasing, anxiousness.
- Lack of Physical Diagnosis: even if you have been given a diagnosis, do not despair, the majority of us have.
Together, we will review these guidelines and determine if you may have neuroplastic pain.
You may see yourself in some of these sections or even all of them. That’s great evidence that your pain is neuroplastic.
But perhaps none of these guidelines resonate with you. You may be thinking “I don’t have pain in multiple areas and it doesn’t bounce around. It’s only in one place in my body, it never moves and is not affected by stress.”
Even if none of these guidelines apply, you could still have neuroplastic pain.
Neuroplastic pain is very good at mimicking structurally caused pain. As people practice the techniques I outlined above, often people start seeing evidence that their pain is neuroplastic.
You can be pain free! Research is proving it is possible.
Want to learn a lifestyle that can keep you out of chronic pain for the rest of your life?
Ready to be able to go about life without the nagging fear and worry about pain?
Ready to go to the store or hang out with your friends with a peace of mind knowing that you are ok?
Ready to get all of that time back in your schedule spent on managing the pain and going to appointments?
Let’s get you stated on your own recovery from chronic pain. Call today for a free 20-minute consultation: (615) 219-9932.