A new model called Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) is a mind-body approach that is helping thousands of people overcome chronic pain. All pain is generated by the brain, even when the cause is physical or structural in nature. You may have heard of soldiers in battle who were injured but carried on with no pain until later, when it was safe to actually feel it. Or phantom limb syndrome, where pain is experienced in an area of the body that no longer exists. While we are evolutionarily conditioned to associate pain with physical injury, these examples show how that is not always the case.
Most pain that lasts longer than the normal course of healing time is neuroplastic in nature, meaning the brain has the ability to change and adapt, and the pain is able to be resolved. Even when diagnostic imagining shows things like bulging discs and osteoarthritis; studies show that 64% of people with no back pain have these types of findings as well (this number increases with age), and up to 85% of chronic pain conditions are neuroplastic in nature, meaning they can be resolved with a mind-body approach. In a recent study (the Boulder Back Pain study), 98% of people experienced improvement with PRT, and 73% were pain free or nearly pain free at the end of treatment.
There is a story of a little girl who asks her mother “Why do you cut the ends of the pot roast?” “Well, I guess because my mother always did, so let’s ask her.” They ask grandma, who responds with “I don’t know, my mother always did.” So they go visit great-grandma and when they ask her she says “Because my pan was too small!”. We learn to do things for one reason, but often carry on long past the relevance of that reason Sometimes our brain can generate pain because of an injury, but then it keeps doing it long after the original reason is gone. The purpose is to protect us, but sometimes we have to retrain our brain when the pain is no longer serving us.
Sometimes the brain can get stuck in a loop, and in other cases a traumatic emotional event can manifest as pain or a symptom in the body. Even a perceived injury can be the cause, or the pain can appear with a gradual onset. The body is an expression of the subconscious mind, and so we can also work with dreams as part of a mind-body approach towards physical healing.

Having experience working with many mind-body modalities, and as a chronic pain survivor myself, I am pleased to offer Pain Reprocessing Therapy to my clients. I am passionate about helping people experience emotional and physical healing from chronic pain and other long-term health conditions. If you are interested in learning more, you can email me or book a discovery call.