Therapy for Chronic Pain, Fatigue, & Other Physical Symptoms
Chronic physical symptoms – like pain, fatigue, itching, dizziness, or nausea – have a depleting effect. Over time, these chronic problems begin to chip away at what feels possible in life.
Diagnosis attempt after diagnosis attempt is followed by treatment attempt after treatment attempt: Physical therapy, supplements, orthotics, dietary changes, a new mattress. Often, any relief gained through these attempts vanishes sooner or later.
As symptoms persist, hope dwindles.
Many people feel that the longer their chronic physical symptoms last, the more their lives narrow (and narrow, and narrow) until they’re left holding onto just a sliver of what they hoped their life would encompass.
You may no longer be able to work, exercise, socialize, relax, travel, or care for yourself or others in ways you once did.
I know what it’s like to live with chronic pain and symptoms from my own personal experience. So — setting aside my therapist hat for a moment here and wearing only my human hat — human to human, I have wonderful news to share with you:
There is a new mind-body treatment for chronic pain and other chronic symptoms that produces better results than many pills, surgeries, or other talk therapy approaches (including cognitive behavioral therapy, previously the ‘gold standard’ in psychotherapy for chronic physical symptoms).
The treatment is called Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT).
Recent studies have found it’s effective in providing anywhere from a degree of relief to total relief from chronic physical symptoms.
“Yeah, right, this sounds like an infomercial. Definitely too good to be true!”
To be honest, that was my first thought when I first read about PRT. I quickly wrote it off. I had been reading about it online, and I left the website. Having been a patient myself, it felt dismissive of the chronic experience. “As if it’s that simple.”
Somehow, information about PRT made its way back to me again. This time, as I read, the more hopeful I became. I decided to delve deeper. A part of me was saying, “Hey, if this is actually real, this is really, really important.” I know how many people suffer unbearably every single day, and I also know intimately what it’s like to feel hopelessly at war with your body.
Eventually, after training in PRT and using it with my own clients, I came to understand how so much of what PRT entails is exactly what helped me overcome many of my chronic symptoms years ago – just more neatly packaged.
Because PRT protocol made it sound so simple, I had my doubts. But I came to see that PRT has actually accurately distilled the essential ingredients that helped me in my own journey as I engaged, over many years, in practices of meditation, yoga, exercise, physical therapy, and psychotherapy to address my struggle with chronic symptoms.
One reason I decided to explore PRT further was the research I saw being cited. When people are selling too-good-to-be-true “miracle cures”, they don’t point to research studies with sound methodologies conducted by reputable scientists and organizations.
Side note: When I say PRT is “new”, it has been being developed, studied, and refined for two to three decades now, alongside with similar mind-body treatments such as Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy. So it’s “new” in the science world, but not so new you can’t count on it being tried-and-true. Mind-body research is in a wonderful phase right now, where researchers are very confident in how well mind-body treatments work in simple, straightforward cases of, say, lower back pain, and have already laid groundwork in applying that solid foundation and understanding to even more complex cases of symptoms and syndromes, yielding good results.
Here’s what I learned:
Most common perceptions of what pain is and how it is works are not accurate. New science from the past 25 years or so has showed us this, but it hasn’t caught up with the public yet, including many doctors and healthcare professionals.
When pain is generated in response to tissue damage in the body, it’s called “secondary pain” because the pain is created secondary to an injury. But pain can also be generated in the brain when there is no structural damage at all, and our nervous system can get stuck, like a switch in the “on” position, continuing to generate this pain.
The pain is 100% real. The person is feeling it! We can see in functional brain imaging scans that the areas that process pain are activated. There is nothing “made up” going on here. But there is no structural reason for it – at least, not in the area of the body that hurts. This type of pain is called “primary pain”, and it is fueled by the threat-detection and fear response of the human nervous system, which happens in the brain.
This changes everything about how we approach difficult-to-explain, difficult-to-treat chronic symptoms. Not only do we now know that primary symptoms exist and are real, but we know how our natural fear response perpetuates it, and how to stop it.
Here’s what treatment looks like:
Getting caught up on pain science
We’ll go over how pain works and evaluate your experience with your own chronic pain (or other chronic symptoms), assessing for any presence, or absence, of evidence that points to primary pain or symptoms as the cause.
Practicing paying attention to your pain in new ways, with your new knowledge
You’ll practice relating to your pain or discomfort in a new way, both inside and outside of session. We’ll focus on reshaping your conditioned fear response to your symptoms, cutting the symptoms off at their fuel source to decrease your brain’s continued generation of primary symptoms.
Exploring your relationship to your emotions and their physical cues
The mind-body connection is powerful. The mind and the body can’t be separated. The mind and its contents – our thoughts, beliefs, emotions – are generated in the brain, which is part of the body. Our brain attaches to our spinal cord, which together form the central nervous system. Connections throughout the nervous system cause humans to experience emotions largely as physical sensations in the body, and there is significant overlap between the areas of the brain where emotional pain and physical pain are processed. So getting a better understanding of how you relate to all distressing sensations you experience – whether physical pain, interpersonal conflict, or emotions like sadness, anger, or shame – is essential. This understanding will help you to recalibrate how your brain and body function on a daily basis, so they are functioning to support health rather than to perpetuate chronic symptoms.
That’s Pain Reprocessing Therapy in a nutshell.
So, can PRT help you?
PRT can treat chronic symptoms, whether those symptoms have carried on after an initial structural injury healed or it was unclear what caused symptoms in the first place.
No matter where you feel your symptoms in your body, if doctors can’t identify a straightforward, physical cause with a corresponding medical treatment that acts directly upon that cause, there is a good chance the process is taking place in the brain and that we can do something about it with PRT.
PRT only treats primary symptoms generated in the brain – it can’t cure secondary symptoms resulting from a structural problem. So it’s important that we talk through your chronic symptom history to gather the facts and collect any evidence that supports or debunks that what you’re dealing with are primary symptoms.
That said, the mind-body connection is present and at work in each of us, whether we have primary symptoms or secondary symptoms.
This means that even if your symptoms are secondary to a structural disease, such as rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis, your brain is likely to do what brains do and, at times, fuel the existing symptoms through the nervous system’s fear response. This is why it’s often said that emotional stress impacts our physical health, and can cause diseases to “flare up.”
For this reason, while people with symptoms that are strictly primary in nature can experience anything from partial to total relief with PRT, it's also possible for people with symptoms that are secondary to structural damage to experience some improvement in their symptoms with PRT, too.
Chronic conditions research suggests strong evidence of having a “primary” component – and therefore that PRT can help with – include:
Chronic back, neck, knee, ankle, wrist, shoulder, or hip pain
Chronic tendonitis
Repetitive strain injury (RSI)
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)
Tension headaches / Migraine headaches
Trigeminal neuralgia / Facial pain
Burning mouth syndrome
Chronic itchiness / Pruritus / Neurodermatitis
Tinnitus
Vulvodynia
Painful bladder syndrome (PBS) / Interstitial cystitis (IC)
Temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMD)
Chronic regional pain syndrome (CRPS) / Reflex sympathetic dystrophy (RSD)
Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS)
Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) / Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) / Post-exertion malaise
Fibromyalgia
Long Covid
Ehler’s-Danlos syndrome, hypermobility-type (hEDS)
Chronic Lyme disease
Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)
Multiple chemical sensitivity
Mast Cell Activation Syndrome
Brain fog
Insomnia
The most important takeaway here is that your chronic physical symptoms may be due to nervous system processes, and if so, that would be great news, because these are
incredibly common, reversible, physical processes that are initiated involuntarily, and would mean your symptoms are
(say it with me!)
definitely not your fault and treatable!
It would mean there’s something we can do about it, together.
If you’re interested in learning more, I would love to connect and answer any questions you have. Please use the button below to schedule a consultation call so we can talk about your specific situation.