Pain Reprocessing Therapy

Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) is a technique that aims to specifically address chronic pain or other types of chronic body-based symptoms. In this approach to dealing with chronic pain, I come from the standpoint that all pain is both real and created in the brain. It may be the case that the pain or symptoms started out as a structural issue in the body, but that over time, the body healed, but the brain didn’t quite get the message. It keeps creating the pain and interpreting ordinary movements or body sensations as dangerous. To make matters worse, our fear of the symptoms (whatever they may be) starts to reinforce these signals of danger for the brain so that they become a negative feedback loop and the pain is again created. In PRT, we call these symptoms neuroplastic or neurocircuit symptoms because they are part of an overall system of faulty messaging from the brain.

There is hope. I have seen people recover from years of chronic pain or other symptoms using the techniques in PRT. There have been research studies and clinical examples of patients who have either eliminated or reduced in a meaningful way the nature of their symptoms. In my work with patients using PRT, we begin by educating and implementing messages of safety that have us “talking” to ourselves and starting to break the neurocircuit that is part of the pain cycle. We also may need to do a fair amount of emotional work in learning to feel and express our emotions that can be contributing to the maintenance of the neurocircuit.

If you are at all interested in learning more about this type of work, I would love to talk to you.