Three Worlds of Healing, and the Missing Piece: What I’ve Learned About Chronic Pain
The case for EMDR + PRT as an integrated approach to neuroplastic pain
If you've been living with chronic pain for any length of time, you've probably moved through at least three distinct worlds trying to find relief.
The first is the medical world — imaging, referrals, diagnoses, prescriptions, procedures. Sometimes these help. Sometimes you find a medication whose side effects are manageable and call that a win. Often, though, what you leave with is a name for your pain without a real path through it — having been seen and simultaneously unseen, because the tests say one thing and your body says another. At worst, you're told to exercise more, sleep better, reduce stress, which may be true and is also not an answer. At best, you're told that what you have isn't inherently dangerous or causing ongoing damage, and that brings some relief — but if you're not in crisis, the medical world often doesn't hold what you're looking for. (In an actual emergency, they are extraordinary. That's not nothing.)
The second is the alternative healing world — acupuncture, massage, chiropractic, herbs, supplements, energy work. And I want to say this clearly: this world is getting at something real. These practitioners understand what the medical model often misses — that the body is not a machine, that pain lives in relationship to the whole person, that energy and tissue and history are not separate things. The relief many people find here is genuine. But it can also be maintenance-dependent: the acupuncture clears the energy field, and then the field clouds over again. The bodywork releases the muscles, and then the bracing returns. Not because these approaches are failing — but because something upstream of them hasn't been addressed. The nervous system generating the distress hasn't changed. The brain's alarm hasn't been updated.
The third world is the psychological world — therapy, stress reduction, mindfulness. Perhaps someone has suggested your pain has an emotional component. Depending on how that was offered, it may have felt dismissive or may have opened a door. The limitation of most psychological approaches isn't their premise — the body-mind connection is real — it's that they tend to work at the level of coping, managing, and understanding, because that's often all there's room for in a standard session when you arrive already dysregulated from a body that won't stop hurting. What gets crowded out, by time constraints and insurance systems and the sheer volume of what chronic pain brings into a room, is the deeper processing work: reaching the memories, fears, and formative experiences stored in the nervous system and actually moving them. Instead, the session becomes a place to cope with the reality of living in pain within broken systems — and that matters, genuinely. It's just not the same as getting to the root.
What fewer people have found is something that operates underneath all three worlds at once — an approach that works directly with the brain's learned pain pathways and with the emotional and somatic material keeping those pathways active. That approach exists. I know it from the inside. And in an intensive format, it can move things that years of individual treatment have not.
First: What Neuroplastic Pain Actually Is
Neuroplastic pain is real pain. It is not imagined, not exaggerated, not a sign of weakness or dysfunction. It is pain that originates in a sensitized nervous system rather than in ongoing tissue damage — pain that the brain has learned to produce as a protective response, sometimes long after the original injury or illness has resolved, and sometimes in the absence of any structural cause at all.
The conditions that fall into this category are more common than most people realize: fibromyalgia, chronic back and neck pain, tension headaches and migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, pelvic pain, complex regional pain syndrome, and post-injury pain that outlasted the healing process, among others. If you've been told your tests are normal while your pain is very much not, this may be what you're living with.
Understanding this matters because it changes what treatment can look like. Pain rooted in a sensitized nervous system responds to different interventions than pain from active tissue damage. It responds to the nervous system being taught — gradually, compassionately, experientially — that the body is safe.
What Pain Reprocessing Therapy Does
Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) is a relatively new, evidence-based treatment developed specifically for neuroplastic pain. It's grounded in modern pain neuroscience and works by helping the brain relearn its relationship to pain signals — approaching pain sensations with curiosity and safety rather than fear, gradually retraining the neural pathways that sustain the pain response.
A landmark study published in JAMA Psychiatry found that 66% of participants who received PRT were pain-free or nearly pain-free after treatment, compared to 10% who received usual care. Most of those gains held at one-year follow-up. For a population that is often told there is nothing more to be done, these are remarkable numbers.
PRT works at the level of the brain's current relationship to pain. It's direct, skillful, and often produces noticeable shifts relatively quickly. But it has a natural limit: it works best when the nervous system is accessible. And for many people living with chronic pain — especially pain rooted in trauma, adverse childhood experiences, or years of fear and hypervigilance — the nervous system is anything but accessible. The alarm is always on. The body doesn't feel safe even in moments of relative physical ease.
What EMDR Does That PRT Can't Reach Alone
EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — is an evidence-based therapy most commonly associated with trauma and PTSD, endorsed by the APA, WHO, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. It works by activating stuck material — a memory, a fear, a core belief — while engaging bilateral stimulation, typically alternating eye movements or handheld tappers. This process mimics what the brain does naturally during REM sleep, allowing frozen or unprocessed material to move through the nervous system and integrate.
What EMDR reaches that PRT cannot: the memory of the original injury, and the terror that accompanied it. The accumulated weight of years spent in a body that hurt. The fear of the next flare, which often becomes its own pain-generating loop. The belief that the body is dangerous, or broken, or betraying you. Childhood experiences that may have set the nervous system's baseline threat level long before the pain ever began.
These are not peripheral to neuroplastic pain. In many cases, they are its root. The nervous system learned to produce pain — or to amplify it dramatically — because the world felt unsafe, the body felt unsafe, and pain was the alarm system's response. You cannot fully retrain an alarm system while the thing it learned to fear is still unprocessed.
This is where EMDR goes when PRT alone isn't enough.
Why the Combination Is Different From Either Alone
When PRT and EMDR are brought together in an integrated way, they address neuroplastic pain from two directions simultaneously.
PRT works at the surface of the nervous system's current response — teaching the brain to interpret pain signals differently, building a new relationship to sensation in the present moment. EMDR works at the root — processing the memories, fears, and formative experiences that taught the nervous system to be in protection mode in the first place.
Neither is a shortcut. But together, they create a feedback loop that neither can generate alone. As EMDR processes the emotional material underneath, PRT's retraining work becomes more accessible because the nervous system is less defended. And as PRT shifts the brain's relationship to pain, the body becomes a safer container for the EMDR work — which can often feel quite activating on its own.
The two modalities hold each other up.
In an intensive format — a concentrated container of dedicated sessions, culminating in a four-hour processing session — this integrated work can happen in a way that weekly therapy rarely allows. Neuroplastic pain didn't develop in a single afternoon, but the nervous system's capacity to shift is often faster than people expect when the conditions are right.
A Personal Note on Why This Work Matters to Me
I've been living with fibromyalgia since I was thirteen. For years, I did what you're probably doing: I cycled through doctors, diagnoses, and treatment plans. I was told my pain was something I'd need to learn to live with after trying medications with side effects that made me feel worse. I was told to exercise more. I was told, in the indirect way medical providers sometimes tell you things, that the absence of a clear structural cause meant the pain was somehow less real, less urgent, less worth pursuing.
I didn't accept that — and so I turned to the alternative healing world, which held me in ways the medical world couldn't. Acupuncture, massage, herbal support, energy work: these things helped. They still do. I'm currently completing a community herbalism certificate because I believe in this medicine and bring it into my practice. The acupuncturists and massage therapists and herbalists I worked with understood something the medical model often misses — that the body is not a machine, that pain lives in relationship to the whole person, that energy and tissue and history are not separate things.
But here's what I also noticed, after years of relying on these modalities almost exclusively: I was always maintaining. The acupuncture cleared my energy field and then, within weeks, the field fogged over again. The bodywork released my muscles and then they braced back up. The supplements helped me manage the edge of things, but I needed more and more of them to hold the same ground. I was in treatment constantly just to keep my baseline livable. The relief was real. But the root hadn't moved.
What changed everything wasn't a different medication or a better supplement protocol. It was discovering — through my own training in somatic psychotherapy, and then later in PRT — that my nervous system had learned to produce pain. That the alarm was stuck open. And that no amount of clearing the field downstream would keep it clear if the source of the distress hadn't been processed.
I didn't arrive at this by going to see a PRT therapist. I came to it as a clinician — learning these modalities, sitting with the research, and then quietly experimenting on myself. Applying what I was studying to my own nervous system. Noticing what shifted. Trusting the process I was learning to offer others enough to offer it to myself first.
Then life handed me the highest-stakes test of everything I'd been studying. A rappelling accident left me with serious burns requiring 22 full-thickness skin grafts on both hands. The surgery was significant. The recovery was long. My doctors had their own projections about what that recovery would look like.
As I healed, I kept working with myself — using the PRT and EMDR frameworks I'd been training in, applying them to the fear, the pain signals, the trauma of what my body had been through.
My recovery surprised my doctors.
Today I am completely pain-free in my hands. My fibromyalgia, which once sent me into month-long flares every few months, now surfaces once or twice a year for about five days. I still use herbal support. I still get bodywork. But I need far less of it to maintain far more — because the underlying pattern has shifted in a way that those modalities alone couldn't reach.
I tell you this not as a guarantee — every nervous system is different, and I'd be cautious of anyone who promises specific outcomes — but because I think it matters that the person guiding this work has been there. I know what it is to be dismissed by doctors. I know what it is to piece together a healing path from multiple traditions, to feel grateful for what helps and still sense that something deeper is waiting. I know what it feels like when that something finally moves.
What This Looks Like as a Structured Intensive
The chronic pain intensive I offer is built on the same foundational structure as my trauma intensive, with one addition: a dedicated two-hour PRT preparation session before the resourcing and mapping work. This gives us a real foundation in pain neuroscience education and begins shifting your relationship to pain before we bring EMDR into the picture.
By the time we arrive at the four-hour intensive, we've done the intake work, the PRT education and early practice, the EMDR resourcing, and the memory mapping. We come in ready to move. The intensive itself — held at my downtown Boulder office, or outdoors in nature from May through October — is where the integrated processing happens, with both modalities available and woven together as the work calls for.
Afterward, we check in by phone within four days while the processing is still settling, and meet again about ten days later for integration. A complimentary ten-minute grounding call is available any time in between.
The structure is designed so that you feel held.
Who This Work Is For — And Who It Works Alongside
This intensive tends to be a strong fit for people who have been told their tests are normal while their pain continues. People who have tried physical approaches and alternative modalities and found real but inconsistent or maintenance-dependent relief. People who suspect there's a nervous system or emotional dimension to what they're experiencing but haven't found a clinical container for that work. People who are ready to explore the connection between their history and their body.
It is not a substitute for medical care, and it is not a replacement for the alternative healing practices that are genuinely helping you. I work alongside your existing providers — conventional and otherwise. If acupuncture or massage or herbal support is part of your ecosystem, keep it. This work doesn't compete with any of that. It goes to a layer underneath it, so that what your other practitioners do for you holds longer and goes further.
I'd also say directly to any acupuncturists, massage therapists, herbalists, or energy workers who might be reading this: if you have chronic pain clients who are plateauing — who you're holding beautifully but who keep returning to the same baseline — this work may be what's missing. The nervous system piece, and particularly the unprocessed trauma piece, is often the reason your work doesn't hold the way it should. I welcome referral relationships and collaboration. The people in your treatment room deserve access to the whole map.
If you have uninvestigated symptoms or are in an acute medical situation, that evaluation comes first. The medical model has its place, and is amazing at preventing serious illness and death. This work is for people who've done that investigation, have been told they are not in current medical danger and are ready to go somewhere new.
The nervous system that learned to produce pain can learn something different. That's not wishful thinking. It's neuroscience. And it's my life.
Curious whether this work might be the right fit? I offer a free consultation call — about twenty minutes, no obligation.
Details on the full session structure, investment, and FAQs are on the Healing Chronic Pain at the Root page.
