Retrain Your Brain to Eliminate Pain
Pain.
As it clawed its way into my head and tears streamed down my cheeks, I crawled under the covers to hide.
To distract myself, I started listing all the ways pain could show up…
Achy… Burning… Crushing… Dull… Electric… Fearful… Gnawing… Heavy… Itching…
I laughed half hysterically as it occurred to me that, “There are as many flavors to pain as letters in the alphabet… or Benny & Jerry’s ice cream!”
Can you relate?
One thing pain sufferers can agree on is that IT gets your attention.
IT can control your life.
Why?
Pain is a persistent alarm that alerts you to danger while keeping you safe and alive.
Whether it’s a headache or a broken leg, it definitely gets your attention!
Having broken ten bones in a near-fatal car accident — including my neck, back, pelvis, and ribs — I’m no stranger to pain.
All kinds of pain.
The 10 out of 10 intensity that stops you dead in your tracks.
That wears you out.
Have you ever suffered from that kind of pain?
If so, you’re not alone.
For years after my crushing brush with death, pain’s tentacles strangled my life and limited my actions until, one by one, I cut them off.
How?
By cutting pain off at its source.
Let me say first and foremost, as an MD, that conventional medicine manages pain very poorly.
Case in point…
How many of the following narcotics have you been prescribed?
- Codeine
- Fentanyl
- Hydrocodone
- Hydromorphone
- Meperidine
- Morphine
- Oxycodone
- Tramadol
Addictive narcotics block the feeling of pain in your brain — without getting to the root cause.
Then there are other prescription pain medications, like Ketamine (a psychotropic central nervous system anesthetic), antidepressants, muscle relaxants, anti-seizure meds, steroids, and more.
All only treat the symptom of pain, with potentially severe side effects like addiction.
While I experienced severe pain daily, I was very concerned about taking medications that could barely help and could actually cause great harm in the long term.
So, I went looking for other answers.
What I found was that pain has many faces and causes.
And to get to the heart of the problem, pain — like Davy Jones’ heart in the Pirates of the Caribbean — must be cut down at the center… in this case, the brain and central nervous system.
Here, my other comprehensive training in whole body medicine better prepared me for helping others and myself.
And yet, there were still critical gaps.
So much I didn’t understand.
It was only after experiencing pain firsthand and, frankly, experimenting on myself, that I truly understood the pain and how to effectively eliminate it.
Here are my realizations, after almost 30 years in practice and having experienced the various nuances of pain:
- Distraction lessens your pain perception.
I remember when I was in the hospital on SARS quarantine with ten broken bones.
Even while lying in the hospital, I kept busy all day long with calls… essentially running my practice from my hospital bed.
I even commandeered the phone of the empty bed next to mine so that I could make outgoing calls on one and have the other free for incoming calls.
Once, I was on the phone with a colleague, when a nurse entered my hospital room.
Without thought, I said, “I have to go. I have someone in my office.”
The nights, however.
Those were a different kettle of fish altogether.
No incoming calls were allowed after 8 pm.
Everything was quiet, and… my pain levels ramped up to almost unbearable heights.
Have you experienced this, where you’ve perhaps sustained an injury?
During the day, you may distract yourself from the pain.
Then, as you get tired or maybe stressed about something, the pain can become unbearable!
2. Your perception of pain is tightly bound to your emotions.
I put on a brave face, blustering that I would be the Bionic Woman when the top orthopedic surgeons said I would need both hips replaced by age 50 and they would fuse my ankle when the pain got too bad.
… Until the pain ramped up and fear kept pace. Fear that… “What if they were right, and this is all I have to look forward to?”
After all, I’d already spent months on total bed rest and in a wheelchair because of the injuries.
3. Your pain perception is also very tightly woven with your memories, especially trauma-related ones.
Having endured an abusive childhood, along with many accidents at an early age, I always prided myself on having a high pain threshold.
However, I didn’t realize that the very things that made me tough were continuously draining my energy. They were my kryptonite.
Is it the same for you?
For instance, trauma (physical, mental, or emotional) may make you hypervigilant and fearful.
Anything that even vaguely reminds you of your previous trauma can magnify your perception of pain.
Any traumatic component to the pain’s cause amplifies the pain signal even more.
Your hard-wired response to pull away from the pain source will activate long before you’re even consciously aware of the threat.
It causes an avoidance pattern that can manifest physically, mentally, or emotionally.
Any possible re-injury or other trauma that fits with the old trauma memories and the associated emotions will cause an exaggerated response because your unconscious mind is saying, “Oh no, here we go again!”
A very painful example (bad pun intended) is that, if you accidentally burn your hand on a hot stove once, you’ll instantly withdraw your hand the next time you feel the heat of the stove — before you’re even consciously aware of it.
It can lead to hypervigilance that causes you to focus on the possibility of more pain.
The Observer Effect of quantum mechanics says that “What you focus on, you find.”
Neurophysiology takes that observation and amplifies it through the Reticular Activating System so that what you’re focusing on becomes your perceived reality… and finally becomes part of your identity.
With chronic pain, that pain becomes part of who you are unconsciously.
Since your unconscious mind wants to keep everything status quo (and therefore “safe”), it will literally sabotage any efforts you have to change. That includes feeling better and living pain-free.
4. Fear, beliefs, and other programming you hold will also augment any pain signal.
I grew up hearing phrases like, “My arthritis is acting up.”
Everyone took it for granted that arthritis ran in our family.
They took it as a matter of fact when my mother needed to retire early because the arthritis in her hands hurt too much.
How about yours?
Were you taught that “arthritis runs in your family?”
If so, and it almost crippled if one of your parents, your fear and belief that you’ll suffer from arthritis too might compound what you’re already feeling because unconsciously you’ll be afraid of ending up like your parent.
5. Psychological principles like Learned Helplessness also play a huge role in this.
While no one likes to believe they’re running a victim pattern, it simply means any time you believe you have no control over a situation.
So, whether it’s a throwback to a childhood event where you felt helpless and vulnerable or a more recent experience where a doctor or some other authority figure told you that you were stuck with this diagnosis for the rest of your life, you might believe it’s impossible to heal.
6. In my clinical experience (and corroborated by others like Dr. John Sarno), the experience of pain is at least 95% emotional because of these close associations mentioned above.
Therefore, by helping my clients release the emotional content of their pain, they can massively decrease or even eliminate their pain completely.
7. To take this further, your unconscious mind will do far more to avoid emotional ‘pain’, like emotional trauma, guilt, or even anger, than to avoid even physical pain.
In fact, it will cause chronic physical pain or some other chronic condition to distract you from your emotional pain.
Dr. Sarno called this phenomenon Tension Myositis Syndrome. He found that the simple awareness of what was at the root of the condition was enough to relieve the pain most times. Others needed years of psychotherapy.
I experienced this firsthand.
For years, I suffered from a constant and debilitating pain over my sacrum (that flat bone at the bottom of my spine) to the point where I couldn’t walk.
Then one day, as I was working on releasing my pain, it dawned on me, “This pain is to punish me for almost killing my sons in that car accident (another long story) — and because I’m afraid they won’t love me if I don’t continue to suffer.”
I realized I had been feeling guilty for years of the most heinous of crimes of a parent… not protecting my children when they needed me most.
After intensively working through this massive emotional pain and guilt, a day later, that sacral pain left and hasn’t returned even after 5 years.
Have you ever experienced a similar scenario?
8. These factors together can form Limbically Augmented Pain Syndrome, an ever-expanding cycle of pain because the more these factors are intertwined, the stronger the connection. This is likely based on the neuroplasticity principle that “Nerves that fire together wire together.”
The pain becomes augmented with the smallest (and seemingly unrelated) triggers.
The result of this nasty cycle?
It may leave you with a vague diagnosis like Fibromyalgia, Chronic Pain Syndrome, or — worse — being told that it’s all in your head.
And they’re right in a way… the answer is all in your head.
Because conscious perception of pain doesn’t occur until the signal hits the brain, you can decrease and even eliminate it there.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to take years.
What I’ve found is that the physical pain can be released much more quickly and easily through the techniques we teach our clients because our tools work at the unconscious level to:
a) put yourself back in the driver’s seat of your health so you no longer feel helpless
b) use the principle of neuroplasticity to prune away the emotional component of pain and replace it with healthy, resilient wiring so that you’re no longer suffering from an exaggerated pain response
c) break the cycle of pain amplification because of trauma by getting to the root of personal, intergenerational, and epigenetic trauma**
d) rewire your brain to eliminate fears, limiting beliefs, and glitchy programming that are making you focus on the pain and attract more of the same in
e) release any emotional “pain” that your unconscious mind might be distracting you with by causing physical pain
All of our tools are fast, easy, and proven to be powerful so that you can stop suffering and start living.
They’re taught as part of a mentoring program that provides step-by-step support and guidance to help you through those times when you might have setbacks.
If you:
- Are suffering from severe pain that is at least a 6/10 and interfering with your life
- Haven’t been helped by other methods
- Are committed and coachable
We invite you to set up a call to see if you’re a good fit for our upcoming Retrain Your Brain to Eliminate Pain 8-Week experience at https://drirene.life/strategycall
- *Epigenetic Trauma Definition: the modification of your DNA expression so that fears can be passed down without any social contact. Epigenetic trauma can also change DNA expression to increase disease and mortality rates in offspring.
If I can heal from severe debilitating pain, so can you.
