Did you know that stress, anxiety, and unresolved emotions like fear, anger, and sadness can play a significant role in your chronic pain? Our beliefs have an enormous amount of power. When we believe there is a threat, our brain is more likely to send a danger signal. Just as pain can signal us to internal damage, another danger alarm, anxiety, can signal us to external threats.
Emotions put us in motion. Sadness can push us to connect with a loved one, fear can lead us to seek nurturing, anger can motivate us to exercise or move our bodies, or frustration can prompt us to do something meaningful to enact change in our lives.
It is important to recognize and attend to emotions. Emotions manifest physically, and ignoring these signals can intensify them and potentially send a more intense danger signal, like pain. By understanding the connection between emotions and pain, we can begin to address both to support long-term healing.
How Emotions Contribute to Pain
Your brain can learn to fear almost anything, including emotions. Perhaps you grew up in a home where certain emotions, like anger or sadness, weren’t allowed or expressed. Or maybe you had a caregiver who was always sad or angry, causing you to fear these emotions. Therefore, when you experience these emotions, your brain immediately goes into fight or flight, leading to an increased likelihood that you will interpret threat in your environment even when there is none. You might feel anxious, causing you to scan for potential threats and start interpreting everything, including sensations, through this lens of danger. So, you may even feel pain without any physical damage. Pain reprocessing therapy helps you learn to reinterpret and process these emotions as safe. After all, emotions themselves are not dangerous and never last forever.
PRT Formula for Emotion Reprocessing:
Identify what emotion you have learned to interpret as dangerous.
Accept that what you have learned to fear is objectively safe.
Gain experiential evidence to reappraise the physical feeling of the emotion as safe, by using somatic tracking! Start with mindfulness, use evidence to reprocess the feeling as safe, and learn to respond to it while maintaining a positive emotional state.
Research Roundup: Bodily Maps of Emotions
Did you know that chest pain-related visits to the ER turn out to be non-cardiac, and instead, emotion-related, about 60% of the time? Anger, fear, stress, and panic are often mistaken for a heart attack.
Following this statistic, researchers set out to discover where people feel emotions in their body. Study participants were asked to color where they experience certain emotions on a body map. And a pretty reliable pattern of where participants experience emotions was discovered.
Yet for some, the idea of experiencing emotions physically can be both scary and confusing. If someone is unfamiliar with emotional impacts to the physical body, they can easily mistake the tightening of their chest from an anxiety attack as a heart attack. Pain reprocessing therapy teaches patients to explore and observe how their emotions present themselves, learning to attend to these bodily changes with more reassurance and safety to regulate their nervous system and the lower threat level.
Nummenmaa L, Glerean E, Hari R, Hietanen JK. Bodily maps of emotions. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jan 14;111(2):646-51. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1321664111. Epub 2013 Dec 30. PMID: 24379370; PMCID: PMC3896150.
How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett
In this book, psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett presents her revolutionary theory on emotions. Dr. Feldman Barrett challenges the long-held belief that emotions are hardwired and universally expressed, instead suggesting that they are constructed in the moment by core systems across the whole brain. This new theory has wide-ranging implications for psychology, medicine, the legal system, child-rearing, meditation, and even airport security. The book addresses questions about the nature of emotions and their impact on various aspects of life, backed by the latest research in the field.
Upcoming Events
Dates: January 11–February 7, 2024
Details: A comprehensive, 21-hour training program combining asynchronous videos and live virtual trainings. Learn the neuroscience behind pain, help patients break the pain-fear cycle, and develop a toolkit of research-backed pain elimination strategies.
Perks: Join our first training of the new year, earn 12 CEUs, and build your referral network with a certified listing on our Directory of Practitioners.
Dates: Six-week course beginning October 28, 2024. Join us on Wednesday evenings or Friday afternoons!
Details: Already completed a Certification Training? Join a small group of PRT providers meeting weekly with an expert facilitator to discuss, share, and receive consultation on complex cases and patient barriers in your caseload.
Perks: Gain insight from practitioners across various disciplines, acquire new tools to overcome challenging cases, and earn an Advanced Application designation in our Directory of Practitioners.
Dates: Mondays, October 21–December 9, 2024Details: Join an intimate group of patients and expert PRT facilitators to understand why pain develops and persists, and learn the most effective brain-rewiring techniques to interrupt your pain-fear cycle.Perks: Find support among peers who understand the challenges of chronic pain, and take both your first and final step toward recovery.
Date: November 5, 2024
Details: Already completed a Healing Workshop? Maintain symptom reduction and refresh your toolbox alongside a supportive group of peers. Join us the first Tuesday of each month to reinforce your new habits and behavioral shifts to prevent relapse.
Perks: Maintain your highly-deserved recovery by tackling tricky behavioral patterns that can lead back into the cycle of fear and pain. Our next class will focus on self-compassion and shifting self-talk.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy Center, Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA
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