Chronic Pain Therapy in Los Angeles, California

Chronic Pain Therapy Los Angeles, A Mind-Body Approach

You’ve been to doctors, chiropractors, physical therapists, maybe even energy healers and you still are in daily chronic pain. Taking medication or even having surgery sounds daunting. Maybe you recently read one of Dr. John Sarno’s books such as Healing Back Pain. Or you’ve heard the term neuroplastic pain and are curious about what that actually means. Located north of Los Angeles in Ventura, California, our office specializes in chronic pain therapy and mind-body healing. Additionally, if you’re looking for a chronic pain therapist in Los Angeles, we see clients online from the convenience of your own home. 

What is Neuroplastic Pain?

Neuroplastic pain is real physical pain that can develop or persist when the brain and nervous system become sensitized to signals that are not necessarily dangerous. While pain often begins with an injury, illness, or physical stressor, sometimes the pain continues long after the body has healed.

Acute pain is typically short-term pain that occurs in response to an injury, illness, or inflammation. It serves as a protective warning signal, alerting us that something in the body needs attention. While acute pain generally improves as the body heals, pain that persists for more than three months is considered chronic pain. Additionally some studies have found that when pain becomes chronic, it changes areas of the brain.

Dr. John Sarno coined the name Tension Myositis Syndrome, TMS, to describe chronic pain conditions in which emotional stress and unconscious psychological processes contribute to physical symptoms. Today, the term neuroplastic pain is often used to describe pain that is generated or maintained by learned neural pathways,

Luckily with neuroplastic techniques and therapy, the brain can unlearn pain! Connect with a chronic pain therapist today!

Neuroplastic Pain Syndromes

Fibromyalgia

Chronic Back Pain

TMJ

Chronic Neck Pain

Pelvic Pain

Vulvodynia

Chronic Prostatitis

Neuropathic Pain

Migraines

Interstitial Cystitis/ Bladder Pain

Why Our Approach is Different

At Centerwise Therapy, we are not just helping our clients with pain management therapy. We help our clients experience meaningful pain reduction, with the goal of lasting pain resolution. While our chronic pain therapists use Pain Reprocessing Therapy with every chronic pain client, we also help uncover the deeper emotional roots that may be contributing to chronic pain. Importantly, unresolved trauma, suppressed emotions, personality types and patterns of stress can play a role in how the brain and nervous system process pain.

To dig deeper we use experiential therapies that facilitate memory reconsolidation, such as Coherence Therapy, Internal Family Systems/ Parts Work, and Somatic Therapy. Additionally, we incorporate Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET), developed in part by mind-body physician Dr. Howard Schubiner, to explore suppressed emotions that may be contributing to chronic pain.

A Trauma Informed Approach To Chronic Pain

Many of our clients not only have chronic pain, they also have trauma histories. Generally, this means they grew up in a household where they didn’t feel safe physically or emotionally. Maybe you had a parent with substance abuse problems, or a narcissistic parent, or just a parent that wasn’t around much. Or maybe you had great parents but you grew up in an unsafe neigborhood or had school bullying. Trauma shows up in many ways. Stress and trauma histories keep a brain in a activated threat state. When you are stuck in threat physiology your nervous system becomes sensitized, you might have a high startle response, you don’t sleep well, you get overwhelemd by people and places. All of this contributes to chronic pain. At Centerwise, we teach you to calm an over active nervous system using trauma therapy and body based skills from Somatic Experincing. 

How Does Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) Help Chronic Pain?

Pain Reprocessing Therapy was created by Alan Gordon, author of the popular book The Way Out. PRT is an evidence-based therapy that helps retrain the brain and nervous system to interpret physical sensations as safe. When someone experiences neuroplastic pain, the brain has learned to interpret pain sensations as dangerous, even when there is no ongoing tissue damage.

Pain Reprocessing Therapy includes cognitive and somatic techniques such as “somatic tracking” which help the brain stop interpretting the pain signals as dangerous. In turn, this helps reduce the brain’s threat response, allowing the nervous system to become less sensitized and the pain to decrease or even resolve completely.

The goal isn’t to convince yourself that the pain isn’t real or to simply think positively. The pain is very real. Instead, with PRT, we’re helping the brain unlearn patterns that may be keeping the pain going.

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