Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent annually on the complexities of chronic pain. (American Chronic Pain Association & Stanford Division of Pain Medicine, 2021). Treatments are often unsuccessful due to primarily focusing on the structural aspects of pain and leaving out the crucial role of the mind. However, thanks to advances in neuroscience, many forms of chronic pain including back pain, fibromyalgia, headaches, complex regional pain syndrome, IBS, chronic fatigue syndrome, long-COVID and other forms of chronic pain are often not the result of structural causes, but of psychophysiologic mechanisms that can be eliminated and reversed.
Pain is a danger signal and from an evolutionary perspective, pain is a helpful tool with keeping you safe and preventing further harm to your body. However, the brain can sometimes make a mistake. Neuroplastic pain results in the brain misinterpreting safe signals from the body as dangerous. Although this false alarm happens, it does not mean the pain is imaginary! Neuroscience studies indicate the pain is quite real and is frequently the result of learned neural pathways in the brain. Research has illuminated common characteristics in those with neuroplastic pain such as high anxiety, childhood adversity, having any experience that makes someone feel unsafe, and more. These qualities can contribute to a person’s brain being in a state of danger or on high alert, consequently fueling pain.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) is an evidenced based treatment for chronic pain that involves retraining the brain to respond to messages from the body properly, thus breaking the chronic pain cycle (Gordon & Ziv, 2021). An essential technique of PRT is somatic tracking, which is a combination of mindfulness, safety reappraisal and positive affect induction. Somatic tracking is a form of graded exposure that allows individuals to attend to pain sensations through a lens of safety, subsequently deactivating pain signals.
Book a free consultation today to learn more about how pain reprocessing therapy may help you.
