The Pain Reprocessing Therapy Workbook – by Vanessa Blackstone

The author, a clinical consultant who trains practitioners in pain reprocessing therapy (PRT), lays out for us the basics of what we need to know to, as the subtitle promises, use the brain’s neuroplasticity to break the cycle of chronic pain.

She explains how when pain works correctly, it is a useful messenger saying “hey, something is wrong here”. It’s the body’s “check engine” light. However, in the case of chronic pain, it’s no longer helpful, which can be for one or more of several reasons, such as:

1. The message is just plain wrong (nerves misfiring).
2. There is an underlying problem, but it can’t be fixed, so further pain is not helpful.
3. The pain is actually doing its job just fine, indicating a real, fixable problem, but the bad news is that your automatic response to that pain is an overcompensation that will now cause a different pain somewhere else, and so on.

PRT is a way to gently interrupt that process by changing how your brain, and thus your body, responds to pain signals. This means that for those three scenarios we just mentioned:

1. We can now suffer less than previously.
2. We can now note “ok, message received”, and dial down the continued pain signals.
3. We can now note “ok, message received”, and tend to the thing without letting the pain cause our body to create a different problem somewhere else.

While all three are helpful, the latter item is the one that really lives up to the “break the cycle of chronic pain” promise, since referred pain (as it is called) is perhaps the most common source of enduring misery for people with many types of chronic pain, who started off with one source of pain, and then ended up with several more.

The style of the book is, as per the title, a workbook. It gives us explanations, and then exercises (mostly psychological exercises), giving us a roadmap to either a pain-free life or, at least, a life in which whatever pain remains is much more manageable, allowing us to go about our lives without everything being ten times as exhausting.

Bottom line: if you or a loved one has chronic pain, this book can help avoid a lot of needless suffering.

Click here to check out The Pain Reprocessing Therapy Workbook, and end the cycle of chronic pain!