If you have chronic pain, you know how debilitating it can be. It can force you to give up things that you used to love doing. It can put a strain on your relationships. Your feelings about your body can suffer.
Being in pain on a daily basis for months or years is demoralizing and incredibly stressful. It can bring up scary questions like “What if my life is like this forever?”
Perhaps you’ve struggled to find relief through medical interventions. If so, you are not alone. Many people with chronic pain benefit from a combination of approaches to address both their physical and psychological health.
A great deal of chronic pain has a strong psychological component. Our bodies and minds are incredibly effective at learning how to protect us from danger, so effective that we can inadvertently teach ourselves that certain body sensations and signals are dangerous when they’re really not. The result of this process is neuroplastic pain (also called central sensitization or primary pain).
Neuroplastic pain is highly treatable through approaches that help you learn to break the fear-pain cycle. I am certified in Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), a mind-body approach for the treatment of neuroplastic pain. This treatment directly targets the brain circuits that keep you in pain, helping you feel safe and comfortable in your body again.
PRT may be useful if you have already ruled out a physical cause for your pain (structural problem or disease process), if you have a physical problem that doesn’t adequately explain how much pain you are in, or if you’re interested in exploring a mind-body approach to pain. Please contact me to discuss whether this approach might be helpful for you.
Additional Resources:
- Dr. Yeterian’s webinar on Mindset Changes to Reduce Pain, given as part of the Mass General Brigham/Spaulding Rehab FINER Program seminar series
- Dr. Yeterian’s group-based pain coaching program, Slow Down and Soothe