Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT)
PRT was founded by Alan Gordon who is the director and founder of the Pain Psychology Center in California. He recently wrote a book called, “The Way Out”, which I highly recommend.
There have been many recent studies that show, for example, that chronic back pain, neck pain, fibromyalgia symptoms, headaches and other repetitive chronic pain injuries are not the result of any structural causes in the body, rather they are due to psychophysiological processes that can be reversed and we call this kind of pain, neuroplastic pain. (1,2,3)
Pain is a danger signal that we should not avoid. For example when we get injured, the unpleasant sensations in the body sends signals to the brain and the brain responds with pain. When we get injured and feel pain this is often classified as structural pain, such as spraining an ankle. There are many signals in the body and the brain can also make a mistake, leading to inform us that there is pain when there is nothing structurally wrong. All pain is real but in the case where the brain makes a mistake, we’re feeling pain that is actually a misinterpretation in the brain. In other words, the brain is misinterpreting safe messages in the body as if they were dangerous. This type of pain is called neuroplastic pain.
In fact neuroplastic pain is very real pain, but it is often the result of learned neural pathways. This type of learning can be reversed and unlearned. This possibility is very exciting and within our grasp, and can give many of us new hope about living pain free or with reduced pain. (4,5)
What I’m teaching people to do is to rewire neural pathways in the body to deactivate pain.
How do we do this?
One of the main techniques is called Somatic Tracking (ST).
ST involves learning to “be with” the pain from a lens of safety, not the usual lens which is worry and/or fear.
Pain is also often felt in association with another stimuli. For example, we sit down and the back starts to hurt, or we begin to walk and a knee starts to become painful. In these examples, sitting down now becomes a dangerous behavior as well as taking a walk. Breaking these kind of associations is also another aspect of becoming free of pain that is explored.
Learning to find safety and a sense of well-being in life in general is key to neutralizing the danger signals that encourage pain. These and other aspects are brought into the foreground as we explore decreasing pain together.
1.Castro WH, Meyer SJ, Becke ME, Nentwig CG, Hein MF, Ercan BI et al. (2011). No stress – no whiplash? Prevalence of ‘whiplash’ symptoms following exposure to a placebo rear-end collision. International Journal of Legal Medicine, 114, 316-22.
2.Bigos SJ, Battié MC, Fisher LD et al. (1991) A prospective study of work perceptions and psychosocial factors affecting the report of back injury. Spine, 16(1),1-6.
3.Baliki MN, Petre B, Torbey S, Herrmann KM et al. (2012) Corticostriatal functional connectivity predicts transition to chronic back pain. Natture Neuroscience 15, 1117-1119.
4.Derbyshire SW, Whalley MG, Stenger VA, Oakley DA. (2004) Cerebral activation during hypnotically induced and imagined pain. Neuroimage 23(1), 392-401.
5.Wager, T., Atlas, L., Lindquist, M., Roy, M., Woo, C.W., M.A., Kross, E. (2013) An fMRI-Based Neurologic Signature of Physical Pain. New England Journal of Medicine 368, 1388-1397.