Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) is “an evidence-based treatment for chronic pain.”* It centers on “retraining the brain” to reduce and in some cases, eliminate cyclic pain.
Paulina Assaf, ASW, serves as Director of Operations at Pain Reprocessing Therapy Center in Los Angeles, CA. The center’s goal “is to expand awareness around this novel treatment model and effect the beginning of a paradigm shift in the way chronic pain is treated and understood.”
To familiarize you with the basics of PRT, Assaf explained it “aims to eliminate the fear around the pain in order to deactivate the brain’s danger signals and help patients interpret sensations more accurately.”
She knows that many individuals may hesitate to initially believe the correlation, but through experiencing PRT, “they begin to gain corrective experiences, or instances where pain is relieved when it normally would not be.”
This, in turn, “[brings] less fear, acting as a positive feedback loop,” she emphasized.
Many conditions lead patients to seek out PRT. The top three conditions in which their clinic treats patients for include, “back pain, pelvic pain, and fibromyalgia,” Assaf noted.
A statement from Assaf that I feel is vital to magnify is, “All pain is real.” She dove deeper by explaining that “All pain is generated by the brain.” An explanation of the pain scale can be read here.
The example she provided is easily applicable to each of us. “Normally when we injure ourselves, the body sends signals to the brain informing us of tissue damage, and we feel pain. But sometimes, the brain misinterprets safe messages from the body as if they were dangerous.”
I think it’s safe to say we all have a basic way to define “fear.” Britannica Dictionary defines it as: “An unpleasant emotion caused by being aware of danger; a feeling of being afraid.”
As touched on before in this blog, we all define our various levels of pain (i.e. the Stanford Pain Scale) in an individual sense.
Pain: “The physical feeling caused by disease, injury or something that hurts the body”; “Mental or emotional suffering: sadness caused by some emotional or mental problem,” Britannica Dictionary.
Assaf continued, “Because pain is a danger signal, the perception of potential tissue damage can cause the brain to generate pain even in the absence of damage.”
The good news is, “Just as pain can be learned, it can also be unlearned,” she said. “Interestingly, brain scans of chronic pain patients show brain activity related to the subjective perception of pain in regions related to emotions, beliefs, learning… and meaning making!”
Once seeking out PRT, what can one expect?
I learned from her, “There are two prongs to our treatment model. We approach both the patient’s fear around their symptom, and their relationship to fear in general.”
“To treat the fear around a sensation, I first guide patients to bring awareness to the pain, then cognitively reappraise the sensation as physically safe, and finally work to reinforce this lens of safety to the primitive brain with techniques such as somatic tracking or leaning into positive sensations.”
The benefit of following this model allows therapists to “aim to minimize sensations that have been amplified by the brain’s fear response,” she explained.
Fear is an incredibly powerful emotion that when lessened and/or eliminated from the picture can bring about profound positive change in our lives.
Many have shared with me that fear almost serves as a gate, but once they get through the gate, opportunities abound.
Its common in PRT to need to identify, focus and shift attention to emotional threats.
Assaf unraveled this by stating, “The perception of emotional threats in one’s environment actually intimately connects with the perpetuation of pain symptoms, as there is an overlap between the different physical systems that assess for threats.”
In her patients she “finds that the most common emotional threat … is a fear of uncertainty.”
This is not isolated to PRT. “For chronic pain patients, there is often so much uncertainty around their diagnosis alone,” she expressed.
If you are living in chronic pain and open to exploring new treatment options, perhaps PRT is worth looking into.
*To learn more about PRT you can visit: www.painreprocessingtherapy.com.
If you have tried PRT — send me a message and let me know your experience.
Coming next: How do opinions affect your health?