29. How to know if your pain is physical or psychologically based

In this episode, we delve into the concept of neuroplastic pain, a phenomenon where psychological rather than structural causes drive chronic pain. I share my personal experiences and insights into pain reprocessing therapy (PRT), the importance of regulating the nervous system, and the role of mental and emotional health in healing. Learn how symptoms like migraines, fibromyalgia, and IBS can be addressed by retraining the brain and creating neural networks of safety. Discover the pathways to reduce and even eliminate chronic symptoms and understand that healing is not only possible but attainable.

• Mind- Body Healing Method Group Program
• Episode 24 with Vanessa Blackstone
• Pain Reprocessing Therapy Website
  
  

Resources & Links:

• FREE Top 3 tips to regulate your nervous system Training
• Work with us in therapy or coaching
• Curable: https://getcurable.com/healwithgrace

Connect with Grace:

• Connect on Instagram
• Check out my website

Transcript

Hey, welcome back. I'm excited to talk with y'all. I really love doing these podcasts and today is an important one because one, I'd say. It's very informative and educational but also very much so needed when we're healing and or whether we're starting to heal or whether we've been on this journey for a while.

I wanted to do this because I was actually just sick a couple weeks ago, I got a virus. But it was weird. It wasn't just a normal, like, cold or flu virus. Didn't really have much congestion, just like, deep body aches. And to be honest, I questioned for a couple days. I was like, is this a, you know, quote, unquote, real virus?

Or is this some weird new symptom popping up for me? And I found out and realized, okay, no, this is truly something that I picked up and it's just going to take some, a while, to move through and it definitely lingered for way more than it was welcomed. but it made me realize, okay, you know, we really need to understand what is the difference between.

a true physical disease or symptom, or what we call a neuroplastic symptom. So first of all, the premise of neuroplastic pain are, and this is taken from the pain psychology center website, by the way, that recent studies have shown that things like chronic back pain, neck pain, fibromyalgia symptoms, repetitive strain, injury, headaches, and other forms of chronic pain are often not the results of structural causes, but of psychological processes that can be reversed.

This is known as neuroplastic pain. And I want you to understand that when I say pain, see it as a broad word. Pain can mean anything from chronic physical pain to symptoms like fatigue, headaches. gut issues, things like that, right? So, so pain can is we're learning that it is more broad than just physical chronic, for instance, back pain.

That's just where a lot of the research has started and come from, but we are way, we are understanding more and more that it's really not just the physical, joint muscle back pain type of issues. there's a lot more that we can put under this umbrella of neuroplastic pain. It's important. And helpful to understand how pain happens.

So for instance, when you put your hand on a hot stove, all of a sudden you feel pain and you take it off. That's super important. We need those signals. But let me break that down for you. When you put your hand on a hot stove, the sensation of that heat goes up to your brain and your brain categorizes it as dangerous or not dangerous.

So for that instance, it says danger, danger, and send signals back to your hand where your reflexes go, Oh, okay. I'm going to take that off. That's important. We need that process. Of course, right? Chronic pain happens when our brain is sending danger signals to our body all the time when we don't really need it.

So like maybe you're sitting on the couch after a long day of work, your brain might say that you're safe and you don't have any issues. Now, one day you sit down, you are probably been under a lot of stress for a long time. You get up really fast and you strain your back. That is your brain being on over high alert, sending you danger signals.

It's the miscommunication of your brain and body. So what we need is to learn more and more about how to release that danger and reinforce safety pain is a danger signal. Normally, when we injure ourselves, the body sends signals to the brain, informing us of tissue damage and we feel pain. But, like I said, sometimes the brain can make that mistake.

Neuroplastic pain results from the brain misinterpreting safe messages from the body as if they were dangerous. In other words, neuroplastic pain is a false alarm though. The pain can be addressed psychologically. This does not imply that the pain is imaginary. In fact, brain imaging studies have demonstrated that the pain is quite real. Recent research studies have shown that pain is often the result of learned neural pathways in the brain. And just as pain can be learned, it can also be unlearned.

So I want you to understand this is not, we are not saying your pain is not real. It's all in your head. Not at all. We can actually show on brain scans. No, your body is actually Feeling pain, it is demonstrating pain. It's just that we need to unlearn that chronic sense of pain because it doesn't need to be there.

So, another example of neuropathic pain is there's been lots of different research studies shown that, 2 people can have the same type of x rays on their body. So maybe they have an x ray of their spine and they each have the same exact disdegeneration in their spine, or maybe they have the same misalignment in their neck.

One person has pain and the other does not now. Okay. That begs the question. Well, why? Right? Why is that the case? Another really great example of neuroplastic pain is the construction worker story. Such a fascinating story. And there's a couple of other instances like this. So, this is a real story about a construction worker who was working on site and, stepped down on a nail and could see it come out the top of his shoe of his boot.

He's wearing a big hard boot. So the pain went through the bottom up through the top. Now he saw it and immediately went into intense pain, screaming, you know, obviously like thinking that it went straight through his foot, rushed him to the ER, took a scan and the scan showed before they wanted to take off the boot, you know, to see how to take it off.

The scan showed that the Nail never even touched the skin, did not puncture the foot, did not touch it, just went straight through the boot and missed the foot. And so this helps you understand actually how signals, how, what we perceive can be interpreted by our brain as dangerous as pain. All it takes is the brain and the nervous system to go into a danger mode for us to feel pain in our bodies.

And so what we want to understand is that in order for us to help identify what neuroplastic pain is. You also have to understand how it's coming about, which is what I'm talking about. And I'm going to say this another time because I don't want you to feel dismissed. I don't want you to feel dismissed that, you know, the pain is in your brain and not in your body.

It's just that oftentimes when we address pain or symptoms, we're addressing it from a symptom level or addressing it just from the body base level, like the physical level. We feel pain somewhere, we have a migraine, we have a headache, we have pelvic pain, we have IBS issues, something along those lines.

That's the symptom. That's not the root cause. So if we're just addressing the symptom, if we're just putting a bandaid over it, we're not actually ever going to stop the pain from happening in the first place. So we have to understand the root and the root cause is a dysregulated nervous system and a brain that's stuck in danger mode.

The good news is that just as pain can be learned and get stuck, we can totally get it unstuck because our brains are malleable. Our brains are ever changing our neural networks and our brains that have created this pain and get stuck. We can change those neural networks.

We can create neural networks of safety instead of danger so that we don't need that pain anymore. Okay. So. Let me go through a few lists of different symptoms that we already know through research through different stories of people who have healed using this work. And when I say this work, I mean, more often than not pain, reprocessing therapy, which I'll talk about in a little bit as well as nervous system regulation, mental health therapies, things like that.

So some symptoms that we know, and I say symptoms instead of disorders or disease, because. I really actually want you to understand that I want you to know and think about it as your pain as your disease or disorder, just as a symptom, because when we talk about disease, when we talk about disorder, sometimes we start to identify with it and then it becomes our identity.

And when these issues and these symptoms become our identity and we get very fused with them, it's really hard to misidentify with them. It's really hard to break away because there's a reason why we feel these things. There's a reason why these symptoms are taking over our life, or they're just at the forefront of everything, forefront of our mind, forefront of our body.

And so, in order to help Untangle these issues and untangle them from our identity. I want you to start seeing the things that you're experiencing as symptoms. They're just symptoms of something they are not you. They're not going to be you forever, even if that's been your experience for many, many years.

So what symptoms can manifest as neuroplastic some certain disorders like migraines, tension, headaches, fibromyalgia, when we know there's no tissue damage, headaches, long COVID, joint pain, muscle pain, pelvic pain, IBS. Any kind of symptoms that have gone on for longer than six months and haven't found much of a diagnosis or a cure, or you really don't know much people don't there.

There isn't any type of medical professional that can give it a name. That's more often than not. Neuroplastic.

So, how do we assess this? How do we assess whether something is psychologically based, which is more neuroplastic, or is it truly a physical root cause issue? So, first and foremost, I just want to give you a little bit of information. There's 88 percent of low back pain is actually nonspecific. Is actually non structural.

That's a huge percentage, huge, which means that we can actually treat it. We can actually teach your brain and your body to unlearn that it's pain. 60 percent of people have degenerative structure with no pain. And it really goes up from there. Oh, think about it this way. Like over time, our bodies go through wear and tear, totally natural.

We're not perfect. Our bodies are never going to operate in a perfect way. And over time, over years, it's completely natural and normal for our bodies to go through this ease disorders, degeneration in our spine. That's natural, but it doesn't mean we need to have symptoms associated with it for a long period of time.

When we have mild to moderate arthritic changes. When you have labrum tears. Those are normal in people with no pain. So whenever we can rule out structural and we have an open mind to find out whether this is neuroplastic or not can be really helpful. So one indication is if you have pain or symptoms without physical provocation, meaning when you're waking up at night. And you automatically have pain or pain just comes on in the morning or in the evening or just randomly, randomly have pain that's not structurally based. That's neuroplastic based when pain will come on with no proceeding injury when all of a sudden pain just starts to kind of happen in your body.

That's not natural. That is not a physically based. pain when pain is inconsistent, when your symptoms are inconsistent, meaning that it happens at certain times of day. when it happens, when you're doing something specific or when it just happens randomly, think about it this way, when you have something like a fractured bone, right?

So you fall and break your wrist. That pain isn't going away for, what do they say? Four to six weeks. Right. That's that is, of course, normal to have an increase of pain when you have a direct injury. But when there are symptoms that just come on in life. without a real true cause, then that's more neuroplastic.

When you also have unrelated symptoms. So sometimes people will come in with, maybe they'll have some hip pain or back pain, but then they also have random occurrences of dizziness or fatigue. Or gut issues or IBS or things like that, or maybe you've had a certain symptom earlier in life and now all of a sudden you're having this and it just feels like there's always 1 thing after another that you're experiencing, but they don't necessarily relate.

That's a very high likelihood that you have neuroplastic pain. You have neuroplastic symptoms when symptoms move around in the body. That means that it's more psychologically based. It means that your brain is definitely more on danger and your nervous system is more This also means that when pain symptoms spread around your body.

Or when pain is triggered by stress, so more often than not, we can look back over life and when you see your symptoms pop up, maybe you have a stressful year or maybe there was a life event that happened around that time. It might not happen the same year or the same exact time, but you can probably look back over that the past couple of years to see that there was something going in life that was going on in life that was really stressful.

So for instance, like when I first started having chronic pain, I was in grad school and I was very stressed out. I had just gone through a breakup. I was actually really struggling even though I, I had wanted to be a therapist for so long, and I was so excited about this, but it was really hard for me.

And that was, I think, kind of like the last straw that made my body start to go into danger mode. And that's when I had so much chronic pain happen. But if you would have asked me at the time, if I was in a stressful situation, I would have been like, no, I mean, I'm stressed out, but that's just school, you know?

So usually in the moment we can't really see it, but we have to look back to see, okay, yeah, that would probably make sense. There are things going on that. I'm pretty stressful in my life. Another one is when pain dissipates or symptoms dissipate when you're more relaxed or at ease. So maybe you're watching TV and you don't have as many symptoms, or maybe when you're with friends or your partner or doing something fun, you notice that you don't have as high level of pain or symptoms.

maybe it happens more at night or happens more in the morning, when, when symptoms shift like this. That's more of a sign of neuroplastic pain when your symptoms get triggered that have nothing to do with the body. So maybe it's a certain smell or sound or food or environment. You might think it has to do with the body because of course, you know, we react to environment around us, but those things don't really make a lot of sense to have a reaction in the body when there's a delayed onset.

So, for instance, maybe you did a certain physical activity 1 day, and then the next day, you start to feel more pain or symptoms. That's not physically based that's neuroplastic nervous system based. So for instance, if you have, again, if you have a broken bone, you're automatically going to feel pain, but if you work out one day and then all of a sudden the next day you have such an increase in pain, that doesn't make a lot of sense.

This used to happen to me all the time. I'd feel totally fine doing a workout. And then the next day it would have some horrible, tight, insanely increased pain in some part of my body. Or maybe I had a really big dip in my chronic fatigue the next day, but it didn't happen the day before it happened the next day.

It was almost, who knows, overnight, 24 hours, something along those lines. That's an indication that there's more neuroplastic symptoms going on. Another really big one is if you have certain characteristics, things like perfectionism, people pleasing, anxiety, feeling pressure to be a certain way, feeling more self critical of yourself.

This is a big one and actually have a whole other podcast episode about this because it's really helpful to understand. And at 1st, it might seem like, wait, what, how do those things have anything to do with my physical body? But over time, we develop these certain characteristics to actually help protect ourself.

When our brain and our nervous system have been in a state of danger, we have to develop mechanisms to protect our core identity, our core, who we are. And a lot of these things turn up, a lot of these protection mechanisms show up as things like needing to be on all the time, needing to be doing all the time.

You need to people please to help protect yourself, feeling anxious, feeling pressure, feeling perfectionistic, always needs to get something right. So that we don't feel bad about ourselves, this contributes to this stressed out nervous system and, and our brain needing to be on danger mode on protection mode.

And last, but not least, if you have a lack of physical diagnosis. Right. If you've been, to doctor after doctor, and maybe there's speculation of something, or maybe they just kind of slap on the fibromyalgia, or they give you a generalized, syndrome. Usually that indicates that there's something more going on because syndromes aren't actually anything that we know.

They're just. A combination of symptoms that we categorize as a label just to help us kind of give a name to it, but there's no real cause or understanding behind it. That's when the light bulb goes off in my brain of. Oh, okay. Yeah. There's something deeper there. Let's look underneath. Let's look at the nervous system.

Let's look at the brain. Let's look at mental health, environment, lifestyle, because more often than not, those syndromes don't have to be your life, even if that's what you've been told. So how do we work with this? How do we work with neuroplastic pain a few different ways? So the way that we work in the mind body healing method is we work with brain, the brain, we retrain the brain.

And a lot of that is through pain, reprocessing therapy, and I'm going to get to that in a second. We also work with regulating the nervous system, really helping soothing the body, soothing our inner self, our inner child. We also want to look at mental health, how to integrate trauma and difficult life experiences because a big indicator of having chronic symptoms later in life is having any kind of adverse childhood experience.

And that means whether that's some big trauma that we've experienced or neglect. Or a lack of emotional safety and maturity in our lives. Whenever we've experienced something difficult in our childhood, we have a very high likelihood of experiencing chronic symptoms. And so we have to really look at that and understand our mental health or emotional health and our safety around that.

Okay, so brain training, what does that mean? First and foremost, let me explain pain reprocessing therapy. And again, this is taken from the pain reprocessing therapy website that I'll link below. Pain reprocessing therapy is a system of psychological techniques that retrains the brain to interpret and respond to signals from the body properly, subsequently breaking the cycle of chronic pain PRT, which is pain reprocessing therapy has 5 main components.

1 is education about the brain origins and reversibility of pain. To gathering and reinforcing personalized evidence for the brain origins and reversibility of pain 3 attending to and appraising pain sensations through a lens of safety. So, this providing safety to our bodies instead of danger is such a big part of this process.

I encourage you to go back to, the episode that I did with Vanessa Blackstone about how to create your authentic messages of safety, and I'll link it below as well. And then four, addressing are there emotional threats, understanding emotional regulation, which is what I kind of just talked about.

And then five, gravitating to positive feelings and sensations. And this is huge because when we. are learning the law of this. We want, what we're thinking is we want to get rid of the negative sensations. We want to get rid of the negative symptoms, right? Of course we do. That's, you know, a big part of it.

Yes. We don't want you to have to suffer negative sensations. At the same time, a huge part of this is really allowing our bodies to experience positive feelings and sensations, because I guarantee you, you probably don't have a whole lot of that going on in your life. And rightfully so you've had to build up a lot of protection mechanisms to protect yourself.

And sometimes that means we don't allow for feeling safe in our bodies, feeling expansive and soft and loving and positive sensations. And so a big part of this work is really allowing not only just positive sensations, like feeling the expansion of breath in your body, but also looking at our life, looking at our lifestyle, looking at our day to day.

How are we allowing for moments of joy? How are we allowing for moments of connection that feel really good with others and really good with ourself? That's such an important way to help our brain become more safe and regulated. And as I said, part two to working with this is regulating your nervous system.

And this is a really big way to do that. When we help understand our nervous system and we help our nervous system feel safe and secure, what we're really doing is healing a lot of the inner child parts that have been, have been stuck. And I've been afraid and we're changing how we treat ourselves and how we have been treated in the past.

So, all of this goes together, brain training, nervous system regulation, mental and emotional health. All of it goes together to really, at the end of the day, help ourselves build a different relationship with our bodies and with our nervous systems. When we're, even though when we're having chronic symptoms, it feels like we're so overcome by our, by our bodies.

And I know this might sound odd or counterintuitive, but usually we're actually very cut off from our bodies. And what I mean by that is that we're experiencing such difficult sensations. All we want to do is avoid that. All we want to do is not feel it. So we try our best, but then the pain and symptoms keep bringing us back to it.

And instead of learning how to have a different relationship with it, we more often than not push it away, self criticize, noted as bad and horrible and negative. But what we really want is to be able to find a different relationship with those symptoms. So that we can teach our bodies that it's okay.

Sometimes it's okay not to be okay, but in general, teach our bodies that actually we're okay and that we're safe and we don't need all these danger signals sent from our mind and sent from our bodies. So such a big part of this is one, recognizing that you have some neuroplastic symptoms, which can be overwhelming at first, but also is a really great thing to understand and learn because you can make so much progress when you know that you have neuroplastic symptoms, because there's so much evidence to show that you could really eliminate, if not get rid of, these symptoms by practicing.

Brain training, nervous system regulation, mental and emotional health, you can really eliminate a lot of what you're going through instead of actually, probably what you've been told is that you can't and you're just going to have to live with it and you just have to learn to manage the symptoms. Which is not what I want you to take away from this.

I actually want you to take away that it's possible to heal and to not experience some of those as much anymore. Now, are we ever going to be perfect? I don't think so. It's not natural. It's not human.but In my experience personally, and with so many of my students and clients, there's, I mean, a significant increase and our life and our health and really moving away from suffering day to day, you don't have to suffer.

So I really hope that this gives you the hope that you need to 1 understand that. If you're listening to this, I bet you, you have some neuroplastic symptoms. You wouldn't have been drawn to this podcast if not. And two, there's hope. There's totally hope and I hope that these resources help you keep listening.

Also, if you are interested in working with us, our mind body healing method addresses everything that I just talked about. Didn't really mean to go here, but I pretty much just talked about how we help people. and our program is open for enrollment and I would love to be able to support you on your healing journey.

And so if you want to get started. Feel free to reach out via the link below for the mind body healing method. I'm happy to jump on a call to see if it would work for you and see if you're a right fit. Don't wait. You can, you can feel better. You can. So, okay. Let me know if you have any questions. DM me on Instagram.

you could submit a question for the podcast on our website and I will talk to you soon.