Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT)
for chronic pain in Seattle, WA.
in-person in Seattle & online throughout washington
You’ve tried everything you can think of to treat your chronic pain, but nothing seems to help.
You might be suffering from migraines, back pain, fibromyalgia, or one of the many other forms of chronic pain that can make daily life an uphill battle. Even when you aren’t in the middle of an intense episode, your pain is often in the back of your mind, steering you to avoid any possible triggers and keeping you on high alert for the smallest sign of a flare up.
The constant cycle of fear, vigilance, and physical suffering leaves you just plain exhausted, your energy and capacity for engaging with the people and activities that matter to you overshadowed by the constant threat of pain.
Perhaps you’ve tried several types of treatments, but even if something helps for a time, your pain always persists in the end. It could be that your doctors struggle to explain your symptoms, or perhaps they even appear not to take your pain seriously. The people in your life may struggle to relate to your experience, and they may feel unsure of how to help you.
At this point, you’re desperate for any form of relief.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy can help the brain unlearn chronic pain.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) is a neuroscientific, evidence-based treatment derived from the research demonstrating that, in many cases, our brains learn chronic pain and, therefore, can unlearn it.
Pain is a danger signal. When you get a paper-cut on your hand, the pain you experience is processed in your brain and nervous system. When the brain recognizes that your tissue has been damaged, it produces a pain signal to warn you that you are in danger so you can prevent further damage to your tissue.
This is one of the many ways our brain works to keep us safe. Sometimes, however, our brain can misinterpret a safe or neutral sensation from our body as dangerous, sending a pain signal even when there is no actual tissue damage to our body, effectively producing pain as a “false alarm.”
Why would the brain do this? In many individuals with chronic pain, the brain has learned through experience to become hypersensitive to certain stressors, sensations, and stimuli. In fact, brain imaging studies that show marked alterations in brain structure and function in chronic pain patients (Seminowicz et al., 2011; 2013). The good news is that many of the changes in the brain that lead pain to become chronic are reversible—sometimes completely (Ashkar et al., 2022).
As a certified PRT provider, I will work with you to apply techniques from neuroscience that have the potential to help you rewire neural pathways, deactivate chronic pain, and regain the energy and capacity to engage in your life more fully again. Using PRT, we will work toward calming down your brain’s fear response and tapping into your brain’s natural ability to reprogram itself, with the goal of decreasing the intensity and frequency of your pain, as well as improving your relationship with your pain.
How Pain Reprocessing Therapy Works
Chronic Pain & The Pain-Fear Cycle
Remember how pain is a signal the brain produces when it believes we are in danger? Well, the less safe the brain feels, the more likely it is to believe we are in danger, and therefore the more likely it is to produce pain. Unfortunately, pain itself often triggers us to feel fear, which in turn can lead the brain to believe we are in danger and, therefore, to produce more pain. This is known as the Pain-Fear Cycle.
The brain produces pain → Pain triggers fear → Fear triggers the brain to believe we are not safe and, therefore, to produce more pain. More pain leads to more fear. More fear leads to more pain. And so on.
No wonder it can seem impossible to end the cycle of chronic pain!
The good news? In many cases of chronic pain, PRT has been shown to help the brain put an end to the Pain-Fear Cycle and offer significant relief from chronic pain (learn more).
Here’s our roadmap…
While PRT unfolds in a unique way for each person, according to your particular context and needs, my approach typically utilizes the following framework.
1
Gathering Evidence
We’ll spend time getting to know your unique pain symptoms, what triggers them, and what seems to help. Together we will look for evidence from your life linking your pain to emotions, thoughts, and other processes in the brain so that you can experience, rather than just cognitively understand, the brain’s involvement in how we experience pain. We will help you see the Pain-Fear Cycle at work in your own life.
2
Cultivating Safety
Using research-based, neuroscientific methods combining mindfulness, safety reappraisal, positive affect induction, and exposure therapy (don’t worry, we will not be intentionally triggering your pain, but rather simply paying attention to it when it comes up), we will work to help your brain attend to pain sensations through a lens of safety, with the goal of putting an end to the pain-fear cycle.
3
Lowering Threat Level
When the brain is on high-alert, it tends to interpret many things through a lens of danger. By helping you process and address other areas of your life that may be preventing your brain from feeling safe (including relationship difficulties, anxiety, perfectionism, stress, and so on), we’ll work to lower your overall threat level and help your nervous system find relief.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy Goals…
While every individual’s experience of chronic pain is unique, and there is no guarantee that you will reach these goals, here is an idea of what you can work toward in Pain Reprocessing Therapy.
✓ Finding relief from your pain & reduction in your chronic symptoms
✓ Reducing your fear & anxiety about your pain
✓ Increasing your engagement with the activities that are important to you
✓ Calming your nervous system and lowering your hypersensitivity to threat & pain
✓ Experiencing a greater sense of safety in your body
Areas of Focus
I work with individuals who are experiencing chronic symptoms that include the following:
→ Back pain
→ Neck pain
→ Migraines; tension headaches
→ Acid reflux; irritable bowl syndrome (IBS)
→ Fibromyalgia
→ Other forms of chronic pain