About Healing From Chronic Pain and Health Conditions:

Because we’ve been conditioned to believe that our physical ailments are completely separate from the events that happen to us in life, it can be difficult to imagine a path forward without chronic pain. The process of getting out of pain is actually relatively straight forward and simple to begin to apply. The hardest part is often the paradigm shift from believing that healing your body needs to be done through your body, to understanding that all pain comes from the brain and in order to heal it, we need to work with your brain. We do this in several steps:

Step 1: Psychoeducation and Pain Reprocessing Therapy. Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) is a technique developed by Alan Gordon, LCSW and Dr. Howard Schubiner. PRT is a relatively simple and effective way of relieving pain. It’s the first order of business because it gives you relief quickly and is something you can do on your own.

People often ask: If PRT is so simple and effective, why haven’t I heard of it? The best explanation I have for you is simply that the medical community has not yet caught up to the neuroscience on this yet.

Step 2: Healing from trauma and releasing repressed emotions. In 1995, The CDC and Kaiser Permanente released a study correlating Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) with chronic health conditions. ACEs were categorized in three areas: physical and emotional abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. When children experience multiple ACEs over time without the protective barrier of a supportive or nurturing caregiver, their systems become chronically stressed. Experiencing ACEs activates the stress response systems of the immune system, cardiovascular system, and metabolic regulatory systems.

In the 1950s and 60s, Dr. John Sarno discovered that the root of a lot of chronic back pain was often trauma and decades of repressing emotions. He found that teaching clients to access and release their anger was often an effective way of healing back pain. Some of his contemporaries, including Nicole Sachs, have continued to teach and spread the message of his work. We have found that while PRT can provide immediate relief from pain, doing the deeper emotional work is often what keeps the pain from returning, in addition to preventing future stress-based pain and health conditions. The deeper emotional work also helps with stress-based health issues that do not involve pain.

Step 3: Discovering opportunities for deeper healing. Once you have reduced or eliminated your pain and have gotten the hang of identifying and releasing emotions from your body, the deepest work in the process can begin. Clients who engage in this work begin to report feeling more healed than they imagined possible: physically emotionally, and spiritually. While this last step in the process is not entirely necessary or required for keeping pain at bay, those who begin it, want to continue it because they “just feel better” when they do it. This final step involves identifying and getting curious about the ways trauma and difficult experiences have influenced how you show up in the world. The discovery process typically happens organically: you may notice yourself unable to speak up to a domineering co-worker, or not wanting to let the waiter at the restaurant know that they brought you the wrong order. When we notice ourselves shrinking or otherwise not showing up as our fully authentic and empowered selves, we have an opportunity to dive in and to ask “why?” to get curious about where, when, and how we learned to deny our fully actualized and authentic selves. Once we are able to identify these things, we are able to offer ourselves healing on the nervous system level so that we can begin to approach the world from a regulated and empowered state.