If you’ve ended up on this post, I’m willing to bet you’re living with some form of chronic pain. Perhaps that’s pain from a past injury, pain from a chronic illness or disease, or perhaps a mystery pain that you haven’t been able to solve. Either way, you’re in the right place.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy is an incredible tool for all kinds of chronic pain, and as you’ll learn in this article, is more widely useful than you might have thought. Allow me to walk you through the process of Pain Reprocessing Therapy, why it works, and the types of pain that it can be useful for.
What is Neuroplastic Pain
To understand how Pain Reprocessing Therapy works, it's helpful to understand what pain really it. Pain is a danger signal sent from the body to the mind. There are tiny receptors all over your body that are constantly monitoring sensations. When they pick up on a sensation they send a signal to the brain, where the brain decides if that sensation is safe or dangerous.
If the brain decides the sensation is safe or neutral, we might feel a pleasant sensation, or perhaps we feel nothing at all. If the brain decides the sensation is dangerous, we feel pain which urges us to attend to the perceived danger.
For normal injuries, this process works very efficiently. If, for example, you’ve sprained your ankle, the receptors would signal the brain and the brain would decide that sensation is dangerous (a.k.a. threatening to your wellbeing) and you would feel pain.
This would cause you to immediately get off your ankle, and the persistent pain of the injury would keep you off your ankle until it heals. If you didn’t get that danger signal, you may keep using your ankle and do unrepairable damage, causing long tern disability to your leg. You can see how, when working properly, the mind and body have a great system for pain.
However, when the brain starts to misinterpret those signals from the body, deciding that they are dangerous when they are actually safe, you start to experience pain without any actual threats to your wellbeing. We call this neuroplastic pain, or psychosomatic pain.
The body can misinterpret signals from the body for a few different reasons. It could be that your fear of the pain is causing your body to continue to send danger signals – this usually happens when you’ve had an injury which has healed but the pain persists.
It could be that your stress levels are high, which has caused your brain to start to interpret everything as threatening and dangerous – this is usually what happens when you wake up with mystery pains that didn’t originate from an injury, such as mystery back pain, joint pain, nerve pain, etc.
Or it could be that your body has been operating in a stress response for the long term and has become hypervigilant to sensations in the body. This is usually the result of unresolved trauma, or ongoing stress without resolution such as stress from a demanding job, financial stress, family drama, etc. and can show up in the form of chronic illness and disease such as fibromyalgia, MS, chronic fatigue syndrome, lupus, chronic migraines, etc.
When the brain misinterprets safe signals as dangerous, we experience pain that can become chronic. The key to healing this pain is to break the pain-fear cycle. That’s where Pain Reprocessing Therapy comes in.
What is Pain Reprocessing Therapy
Pain Reprocessing Therapy is a technique that retrains the brain to interpret and respond to signals from the body properly, subsequently breaking the cycle of chronic pain. The amazing thing about this technique is that the moment your mind interprets sensations as safe, the pain immediately dissipates or disappears completely.
In most Pain Reprocessing Therapy sessions, my clients experience a decrease in pain within just 10-15 minutes of using the technique. This has been the case regardless of whether my client’s pain is in the form of fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, IBS, migraines, back pain, joint pain, scoliosis, or pain from a prior injury. When the brain interprets the sensation as safe, the pain goes away.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy is a process of retraining the brain, this means that although my clients experience a decrease or elimination of pain within the first session, the pain will likely return, in which case, they will use the same technique to help their brain interpret the sensation properly again.
It’s as if we are teaching your brain a new skill. It takes a little practice but may not take as long as you think. After just a few sessions, my clients are usually quite proficient at the technique and progress starts to speed up.
The real trick to healing chronic pain is to completely change the way you perceive it. This is the biggest shifts my clients experience. Before, they saw the pain as the enemy, something to “fight against”, or the result of a fragile, failing body. After their first experience of decreased or eliminated pain, they realize their body is not failing, and the pain is not the enemy. This alone helps disassemble the pain-fear cycle.
Breaking the Pain-Fear Cycle with Pain Reprocessing Therapy
The pain-fear cycle is an essential part of neuroplastic pain. When there is fear, there is a greater sense of danger, and therefor, a great chance of experiencing pain. The more fear, the more pain. The tricky thing is that when we experience pain, our instinctual response is fear – it is our body’s danger signal after all.
However, the fear we feel towards the pain actually creates more pain, in which case, we experience more fear, and then more pain, and this cycle keeps going around and around. The fear you feel toward your pain can come from your fear of being in pain, your fear of what this pain means about your wellbeing (‘am I going to be okay?’), or it could be the fear of what this pain could mean about your future (‘if this pain doesn’t go away, how will this impact my life?’). All of these kinds of thoughts create more fear, and in turn, more or prolonged pain.
In a Pain Reprocessing Therapy session, you are being guided through techniques to help you release the fear of your pain. This might sound like quite the feat is you’ve experienced fearful thoughts about your pain, but trust me, its very possible to break this pain-fear cycle.
What is a Pain Reprocessing Therapy Session like?
Your first Pain Reprocessing Therapy session will consist of an introductory discussion about your pain where you will describe the pain, and give a brief history. There will be time to answer any questions you have about Pain Reprocessing Therapy, then we will begin with the technique.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy can be done in office, or conducted virtually via video call. My sessions are completely online, where my clients are in their homes and are joining their session via Zoom. When we begin the Pain Reprocessing Therapy, I ask my clients to find a comfortable position, typically sitting upright in a chair, (unless this induces a high level of pain) and when we begin, I’ll ask them to close their eyes.
With their eyes closed they can more easily tune into their body and the sensations they’re feeling. As we begin the process, I’ll continue to guide them to bring their attention to the sensations in their body as we begin to interpret the sensations as safe.
Its very typical for my clients to experience a decrease in pain within 10-15 minutes of this process beginning. However, in some cases, it may take a little longer. That first moment where they realize that the pain has shifted simply because they’ve changed the way they are thinking about it is a huge milestone in their recovery.
This milestone creates a sense of hope that there is a future where they are no longer in pain. It’s evidence that their pain can be healed.
We will continue to use different techniques throughout the session to retrain the brain, and at the end of the session I will instruct my clients on how they can continue this process in the days between their next session.
The work my clients do daily between sessions can rapidly speed up their recovery. Typically, the next session is scheduled for 1-2 weeks.
How Many Pain Reprocessing Therapy Sessions will I need?
The short answer is that it depends, but for the sake of giving you an actual number, typically I see clients for 4-8 sessions. That number can change dramatically depending on the client’s consistency, history with trauma, and number of symptoms, amongst other things.
I offer Pain Reprocessing Sessions as a single session, and as a bundle. Since Pain Reprocessing Therapy is about retraining the brain, I usually recommend going with the 4-Session Bundle as you will likely need at least four sessions and the bundle gives you the best rate.
If you’re not sure which option would be best for you, I also offer a Free Consultation where we can meet and discuss your specific needs and I can make a recommendation from there.
The Verdict: Yes, Pain Reprocessing Therapy Works
Pain Reprocessing therapy is an incredible technique that has already helped thousands of people get out of pain. Whether your pain stems from a past injury, a chronic disease, or is simply a mystery pain that’s shown up overnight, Pain Reprocessing Therapy can help.
I’ve personally worked with clients who’ve suffered from chronic pain for decades, having seen all kinds of doctors and specialists, spent thousands on painkillers and medication, to have Pain Reprocessing Therapy be the answer.
If you suffer from chronic pain and feel like you’ve tried everything with no long-term relief, perhaps it’s time to try a new approach.
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