Chronic Pain Program

It hurts. Your pain is awful, and you can’t get rid of it.

If you suffer from chronic pain, it’s likely holding you back from experiencing life fully — and the joy and vitality you long for...

Maybe you’ve tried various healing methods, such as physical therapy, injections, medications, surgeries or alternative therapies... and you’re frustrated by the lack of success...or relief that’s been only temporary.

You are afraid of certain activities, or you avoid them altogether. You are becoming more and more limited and frustrated with each passing day.

But there is hope. With the Chronic Pain Program, we focus on eliminating the pain, not just managing it. It’s an evidance-based approach for treating chronic pain using Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET) and Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS).

Chronic Pain

Researchers have discovered that chronic pain such as back pain, Fibromyalgia, pelvic pain, neck pain, migraines, and headaches are often not structurally caused, but occur due to psychophysiologic processes in the brain.

Non-structural chronic pain has over the years gone by many names – tension myoneural syndrome (TMS), mind-body syndrome, psychophysiologic disorder, psychosomatic pain, somatoform disorder and somatic symptom disorder. Neuroplastic pain or Neural circuit pain are the more recent terms. Most people diagnosed with one of these conditions worry their pain is all in their head. However, studies have found that pain with no structural cause is real and occurs in the brain.

Recurring and chronic pain influences your neural pathways, reinforcing pain patterns over time.

This pain “loop” often runs long after the original physical injury is resolved — and your efforts to manage or fix it can perpetuate the loop. Even focusing on or complaining about pain reinforces these patterns.

These loops, which reside in the subconscious mind, are powerfully affected by stress and emotions.

For too long, the accepted approach to pain management relied on physical intervention alone, but the truth is, there are complex mind-body interactions at work...

As it turns out, 90% of chronic pain isn’t connected to anything structurally wrong with us — it’s like a habit that our body, mind, and subconscious get stuck in.

We begin to anticipate pain on a subconscious basis and create neural loops that keep it in place...

And it’s not that your pain isn’t real — it very much is — it’s that we can break the neurological cycle that’s producing the pain by working with a consciousness intervention. Even if you’ve had pain for years or decades, you can reverse the pain loop by retraining your brain.

Who is the Chronic Pain Program for?

The Chronic Pain Program is designed for chronic pain, which is pain lasting longer than 3-6 months. The program is beneficial for a wide range of diagnoses and symptoms including:

• Back pain, including most disc bulges and degenerative changes

• Neck pain, including most disc bulges, degenerative changes and whiplash

• Other musculoskeletal pain

• Chronic headaches and Migraines

• IBS – Irritable Bowel Syndrome

• Repetitive Strain Injuries (ie. tennis elbow)

• CRPS (Complex Regional Pain Syndrome)

• Fibromyalgia

• Some arthritic conditions

• Some endometriosis presentations

• Other medically unexplained chronic pain

• Other medically unexplained chronic fatigue

What’s involved?

• 5 - 1 hour sessions to get to the root cause of your pain and provide techniques to reverse the pain loop. Some people with chronic pain require more PRT and some more EAET or IFS. Getting to the root cause is key to providing the proper treatment.

• Pain Reprocessing Therapy - (PRT) is a system of psychological techniques that retrains the brain to interpret and respond to signals from the body properly, subsequently breaking the cycle of chronic pain.

  Pain Reprocessing Therapy has five main components:

  1) education about the brain origins and reversibility of pain,

  2) gathering and reinforcing personalized evidence for the brain origins and reversibility of pain,

  3) attending to and appraising pain sensations through a lens of safety,

  4) addressing other emotional threats, and

  5) gravitating to positive feelings and sensations.

• Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET) - processing challenging, difficult and or supressed emotions.

  An article about EAET and Chronic Pain

• Internal Family Systems Therapy (a.k.a. Parts or Ego State Therapy) - Internal Family Systems therapy, or IFS, is a therapy modality that believes that we all have an internal family system that is made up of different parts or subpersonalities. These parts or subpersonalities work together as a unit to help manage our lives. When we understand how this unit operates, we can help our parts work together to harmonize our entire internal family system.

  An article about IFS and Chronic Pain