Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) is an elegantly designed intervention developed by psychotherapist Alan Gordon with the goal of “reprocessing” how you respond to signals in your body that currently produce pain. Chronic pain is disrupted by interrupting the feedback loop which creates it. This loop is the way that you and your nervous system habitually respond to signals from your body.
The nervous systems responds unconsciously, and it is this fear-based habit that needs to change in order for chronic pain to resolve itself. The seeming miracle is that it will resolve itself, when you learn to stop the feedback loop. How?
Polish and refocus your lens of attention—so that you come to experience your body through a “lens of safety”.
Pain Reprocessing has five main components, and they involve changes in thinking and attention.
The first step involves learning about where chronic pain originates (in short: in your brain, not in the location it appears in your body), through which you can prove to yourself that it is reversible.
The second step involves your unique experience of pain, the gathering of evidence that will show you, in your direct experience, that pain is reversible.
The third and crucial piece is to retrain your way of attending and appraising pain sensations—literally to polish and refocus your lens of attention—so that you come to experience your body through a “lens of safety”.
The fourth is expanding the lens of safety so that you become resilient in the face of emotional threats.
And the fifth is to learn gradually to switch your polestar from negative to positive sensations, to seek out and find positive feelings and sensations and allow yourself to take them in. People who have been in pain a long time may forget that positive feelings even exist, but we will find them.
Pain Reprocessing has its roots in the pioneering work of Dr. John Sarno in the 1980s, who described the root of chronic pain as Tension Myositis Syndrom (TMS), the creation of pain by the mind, and described his findings in books such as Mind Over Back Pain and The Mindbody Prescription. The work was furthered by innovative physicians including Dr. Howard Schubiner and Dr. David Schechter, as well as psychotherapists and chronic pain sufferers who found relief and shared their insights.
But it has taken until very recently for this method to be refined (especially, to my mind, with Alan Gordon’s work) and to truly gain traction as the most effective current treatment for chronic pain. Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) has recently been validated by a randomized controlled study at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The Colorado study treated 100 chronic back pain patients for only four weeks. Half of them received PRT twice a week, and half of them received treatment as usual. The results? In the PRT group, 98% of patients improved and 66% of patients were pain-free or nearly pain-free at the end of treatment. Even more important, these outcomes were largely maintained one year later.
We can work together to find the same results for you.