Over 20% of American adults live with chronic pain, which is defined as the experience of pain that persists for over three months. If you experience chronic pain, you have most likely tried everything that our medical system has to offer in order to heal. You may have had some success along the way, but you may not have had any. Doctors may have thrown their hands up and concluded that nothing is physically wrong with you. You may have been told, directly or indirectly, that it must be “psychosomatic.”

If you have received discouraging responses from medical professionals, I don’t have to remind you how frustrating, invalidating, and pathologizing it can feel. However, what I can add to your inner knowing is this: it’s also scientifically inaccurate. 

“Psychosomatic” suggests that you are creating their pain by way of your psychological processes, and if you could only treat your underlying depression or anxiety or “negative thinking,”  then your pain would disappear. The heavy burden of pain becomes even heavier with this faulty understanding.

What traditional medicine and pain management approaches tend to miss is a mindbody perspective that is rooted in recent breakthroughs in neuroscience. This science tells us that the majority of chronic pain - no matter where it is experienced in the body - is “neuroplastic,” which simply means that the very real physical experience of pain is coming from neural pathways that have gotten stuck in “danger” mode in the brain. This may have happened after an initial acute injury, a time of intense stress, or even due to emotional trauma. The pathways in the brain activated by all of the above are actually exactly the same, and the brain can send sensation into any part of the body. This science explains things like phantom leg syndrome as well.

The important good news is that this type of pain - neuroplastic pain - can be reversed. I am trained in a modality called Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) that aims to significantly relieve or fully resolve the experience of chronic pain using a mindfulness-based safety reappraisal process that rewires our brains out of these stubborn pain pathways. 

PRT is a breakthrough evidence-based approach to this type of safety reappraisal that has had enormous success in randomized controlled trials with chronic pain patients, proving itself to be the most effective pain therapy currently available, even in comparison to medication. If you are interested in learning this modality with me and you have a high level of motivation to interrupt your experience of pain, we might be a good fit to work together.