Pain & Neuroplastic Symptoms Reprocessing Techniques:

To understand this section, you have to suspend your doubts and be open to new ideas that are science-based and experience-based.

What do we include under neuropathway/neuroplastic conditions or neuroplastic pain?

Fibromyalgia, Non-Ulcer Dyspepsia, Post Viral Symptoms, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, EMS, RSI, IBS, Migraines of all sorts, Tension Headaches, Chronic Pain in any part of the body, Chronic Vertigo, Chronic Dizziness, Anxiety……

What is neuroplasticity?

The ability of the brain to form and reorganize synaptic connections, especially in response to learning or experiencing or following injury. The brain is constantly learning from our day to day experiences.

What is pain?

Pain is a danger signal.

It was designed to alert us of physical damage needing attention, rest and repair.

Pain is determined in the brain by the balance between safety and danger.

At the time of a physical injury, the brain will generate pain. But later the brain will have to decide whether to continue generating it or to stop it. The brain will make this decision depending on our past experiences, thoughts, states of being, and emotions towards the current pain.

What is chronic pain?

A persistent pain, intermittently or continuously for at least 6 months and over.

The field of pain reprocessing therapy calls this persistent pain (after it is diagnosed as such): neuropathway or neuroplastic pain.

Survival/alarm mechanism to remain alive:

As an organism, our job is to stay alive. For millions of years, the danger was a predator. But now, it is rarely the case. However our nervous system (NS), espacially the primitive brain, continuously scans our outer and inner environments for danger: “This is safe, that is not”…..24/7/365.

When the primitive brain detects a potential harmful situation- psychological, emotional or physical- its alarm system will go on. This alarm system alerts us to a potential danger in different ways. The alarms varies according to the needs for safety: feeling hungry, thirsty, cold or hot, having a muscle ache, feeling nauseous, feeling fear, having pain in one or different parts of the body, ringing of the ear, feeling fatigued and so on.

What the primitive brain does when it believes that we are in danger, is to amplify safe incoming stimuli. For example, the little muscle tension in the neck will become painful. The protective part of your brain wants your attention so that you can take action to remain safe.

What is neuroplastic pain?

When the brain misinterprets safe signals from the body – position, motion, thoughts, muscle activity, emotions – as if they are dangerous.

Neuroplastic pain occurs when the brain feels that you are in danger. The danger can be real or perceived. The danger can be emotional, mental, physical, within or outside ourselves.

Pain, even in the absence of acute physical hurt, will occur when the part of the NS in charge of perceiving threat, the primitive brain, is not aligned with the actual threat or stimulus.

Pain = Sensation + Fear.

When we are in a state of high alertness due to high levels of anxiety, stress and/or intensity at work or in our personal life, our primitive brain is in fear mode (even if you are not aware of it) and is likely to misinterpret a non-threatening stimulus as a dangerous threat, and it can generate pain.

Let’s take an example:

You are experiencing high levels of stress in your life. And one day you bend forward and feel a lot of pain in your lower back (Whether or not it is true, your primitive brain believes that you did something dangerous to the integrity of the body). This pain should dissipate within a few days or a few weeks. But it doesn’t. You have gone through months of conventional treatments but keep having pain even past six months the onset of the pain. However our body is naturally designed to heal after 6 months of an actual physical injury.

You now have chronic pain, which might show up systematically when you bend forward or sit or walk. To protect you, your primitive brain is now keeping you from doing some specific motions and will generate pain and fear for you to avoid those “dangerous” motions or activities each time you are engaging in them or want to engage in them.

The fear of moving due to anticipating “breaking or damaging something” in our lower back, and/or the fear of triggering pain, will keep the cycle of chronic pain going in the absence of a true physical injury or after the injury has healed. Neuroplastic pain and symptoms are conditioned responses.

But things become complicated when a physician diagnosed you with a back abnormality that could justify why your lower back hurts so much. You believe your doctor and that this abnormality is the reason why you have this chronic pain when you bend forward. So you are left with either waiting for the healing to eventually occur, taking pain medications, having surgery or trying more conventional treatments. You might have some temporary relief but eventually the pain comes back as strong as it used to be or even stronger. I know too well this painful journey.

We could generalize this process to migraines, chronic vertigo, IBS, fibromyalgia, chronic nausea and any chronic pain as long as an underlying diagnosis of cancer or a damage to a nerve has been ruled out.

Neuroscience and a large body of studies have repetitively shown that there is no causal relationship between “normal abnormalities” of the back and chronic pain. I encourage you to read the book, The Way Out by Allen Gordon or to read or listen to Dr. John Stracks and to Dr. Schubiner, MD and researcher who greatly contributed and continue to contribute to the field of mind-body medicine.

We are neurologically and evolutionarily wired to think the cause of the pain is physical.

How do I know that I have chronic pain or/and one or several neuroplastic conditions?

When after a thorough evaluation and intake, an expert, a coach, a physician, a therapist or a clinician trained in diagnosing neuropathway pain has gathered enough evidence to diagnose you with neuroplastic pain or conditions.

Pain reprocessing: A different approach.

We acquire knowledge in the psychophysiology of neuroplastic pain or neuroplastic symptoms.

We understand why conventional treatments didn’t work.

We regain hope because we know what we need to target to heal.

We build skills at responding to our nervous system. We learn techniques to change how we relate to ourselves, our symptoms and the world.

We understand what are our symptoms mean in the contexts of our life and who we are. And therefore we learn to be guided by them.