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Chronic pain can evoke feelings of despair and helplessness, shaping the way you navigate daily life. It entails constantly monitoring your energy levels, bandwidth, or “spoons,” just to maintain your usual activities. Moreover, it frequently intersects with anxiety, depression, trauma, and challenges in relationships.
A big part of shifting chronic pain is learning to find safety and peace in the present moment. With lightness and curiosity, taking a mind-body approach, we can navigate the processes that are keeping you in pain.
All pain is real, and researchers now know that all pain originates in the brain. It is a message from your brain telling you to be careful, that there is something to fear. Chronic pain, once medical problems have been ruled out, can be a product of that system being overactive. This is called neuroplastic pain, or learned pain. Brains are plastic, perpetually learning and changing. The same plasticity that led to pain leads to healing.
Along the road to recovery, pain often passes once your brain realizes you are safe and are taking care of yourself. The pain of a broken bone lessens long before it has healed. Sometimes, the brain learns to send pain at the wrong times, misjudging the danger signals – whether it’s an old and healed injury, past trauma, chronic people pleasing, anger, or a lifetime of fear. There are many experiences that result in chronic pain, and they all share a root in neuroplasticity.
Chronic pain is like an over sensitive smoke detector that alerts when you boil water. When you are injured, we want that alarm system to be active! With neuroplastic pain, the alarm system needs to be recalibrated.
Injuries generally heal within a year, usually sooner. Many people without pain have disc degeneration, arthritic joints, and other ‘normal abnormalities.’ These are normal wear and tear on a body from living life, that don’t have to cause pain, and don’t for many people. Some have awful posture, and no pain. At other times, people suffer with chronic symptoms that are labelled with a diagnoses that medicine has not found an explanation for – there is no structural reason the person should be in discomfort.
Often, pain is linked to incidental findings, or normal abnormalities. However, evidence shows that chronic pain shows up in a different area of the brain than acute pain – the meaning making area – and those with chronic pain find improvement with a mindbody approach. It is important to rule out structural or disease causes for pain, and Pain Reprocessing Therapy can be used to help manage pain as part of other treatment, in those cases with structural components.
Through mind-body activities that teach your brain what safety feels like, how to seek that sense of safety, and learn the difference between safety and un-safety, on a felt-sense level. Sometimes this is as simple as practicing and creating some new habits and decoupling old associations. At other times, this may involve working through some deeply held beliefs, old patterns, or healing from a trauma.
I’d like to help. If you would like to get to know yourself better, explore how you could find relief, and get back to living your life, lets have a quick call.
