Pain Reprocessing Therapy and Dreams

Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) is a recent modality that addresses chronic physical and emotional pain, and chronic health conditions and symptoms. I am happy to be adding this to my practice along with hypnotherapy, dream work, and mind-body coaching.

Pain is a normal response designed to protect us; for example if we break a bone and it hurts, the pain signal is the brain's way of telling us to take it easy on that body part until it heals. When pain is caused by tissue damage, the pain should go away by the time it heals and most things will be completely healed within three to six months. Unfortunately it is all too common for the pain to linger much longer, in many cases for years or even decades.

How is this possible? All pain is generated by the brain, rather than physical causes as we have been taught for the last few hundred years. But this does not explain how wounded soldiers in battle don't always feel pain until later when they are safe, or phantom limb syndrome where pain is felt when the body part experiencing it no longer exists. FMRI studies show that acute pain lights up certain brain regions including those having to do with sensory input from the body, which makes sense. But over time, when pain becomes chronic, the regions that light up transition to different areas including the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. These areas of the brain have to do with meaning making, learning, story telling, and emotion.

What else involves these brain regions having to do with to do with meaning making, learning, story telling, and emotion? That's right, dreams! While the areas of the brain having to do with chronic pain and dreams are not identical, there is enough overlap that dream work can become a valuable part of recovering from chronic pain and other chronic physical and emotional conditions.

Working with stories, emotions, exploring the meaning we make of things, and examining our thoughts and beliefs can help us retrain our brains in whatever area of life we are looking to change. Dreams can help us identify emotional conflicts, traumas, or inner tension that may be contributing to the persistence of pain or other challenges in waking life. Notic if there are any themes involving the body, emotions like fear, or plots like being attacked, stuck, or trapped. Sometimes what is happening physically in the dream can reflect what is going on with us emotionally in waking life.

One of the ways I work with stressful dreams is to have the dreamer re-script (or rewrite) the story to have a better outcome for themselves. We can also explore the emotions of a dream, and connect them to waking life. Our emotional experiences are directly linked to our sense of safety in the world, and fear perpetuates things like chronic pain and anxiety. We can also investigate what meaning the symbolism holds for the dreamer. How we hold the stories of our lives, how we make meaning of them, and the emotions and beliefs associated with them, can play a large role in our overall well-being in life.

If you are interested in learning what your dreams have to tell you, be sure to record them as they can slip away quickly from conscious awareness. Working with dreams can be an excellent way to heal chronic physical and emotional pain, and so can Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT). If you'd like to learn more about either or both, you can book a discovery call with me by clicking on the button below.

Some of the many conditions that can be treated with Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) include:

Chronic back pain

Fibromyalgia

Long Covid

Neck pain

Tension headaches

Migraines

Complex Regional Pain Syndrome

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)

Pelvic pain

Anxiety

And many other medically unexplained pain and other chronic conditions

To learn more about mind-body coaching, hypnotherapy, and Pain Reprocessing Therapy, book a free call with Mimi!