Individual Pain Care

an empathic, compassionate, professional encounter, one of mutual trust and respect

with careful listening and a thorough assessment of your specific problems, we will come to understand the root cause of your pain condition and distinguish between nociceptive (structural) and nociplastic (learned) drivers.

together, we will discover and address the factors that are keeping you stuck and forming barriers to your progress

together we will create a tailored plan for recovery that grows from the vision of your future and your values

a positive, strengths-based approach that comes from a deep clinical knowledge of both pain and the minbody system, and reflects current scientific evidence

when our work is finished you will have a greater understanding of how your body and mind can work together to sustain a healthy, pain-free life

Making sense of pain - the first part of moving forward from pain is understanding what pain is and is not. Pain education is important because your current understanding of pain might be stopping you from doing the things necessary for recovery. Pain affects everything, but the upside of this is that everything affects pain! Understanding pain and aspects of your life that maintain the protection system, offers great hope, as it opens up a whole pathway of new treatment approaches, allowing you to regain control of your life

Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) - is an evidence-based system of techniques that retrains the brain to interpret and respond to signals from the body properly, subsequently breaking the pain/threat cycle. This Mindbody approach is neuroplasticity in action and if assessed to be appropriate for you, can offer complete resolution of your symptoms

Somatic tracking - is a combined educative and mindfulness approach to rewire the software (nervous system and brain, immune and endocrine system) out of fear and pain. It is a part of PRT mentioned above

Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET) - developed by Dr. Howard Schubiner and Mark Lumley and drawn from the work of Dr. Habib Davanloo’s Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), EAET is a way to guide individuals toward dealing with emotional hurts that can be linked to physical symptoms in the body including anxiety, pain, and fatigue, by using memory reconsolidating techniques

Nervous system regulation skills - through somatic movement practices, breathwork, and orienting, grounding, centering, and resourcing practices,  you will develop the foundational skills of recalibrating out of hyper or hypo arousal and learn how to come back to yourself in moments of stress, anxiety or pain

Neuroplasticity (brain training) strategies - modern neuroscience has provided us with new ways of approaching pain through our understanding of the brain when we are in pain. We can target the adaptations and changes that occur in ongoing pain states by using particular types of training. For example, visualisation and imagery, desensitisation, proprioceptive and tactile discrimination training and memory reconsolidation techniques

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) - NLP looks at how our thoughts, language and behaviour are connected, especially the patterns running beneath conscious awareness. From this view, many of the beliefs shaping pain, stress or old habits sit at a subconscious level, and NLP offers tools to shift those beliefs and reframe experience toward the change someone wants

Mindfulness and compassion training - the practice of mindfulness meditation offers a way of relating differently to your body and your pain by reducing the emotional aspects or the distress of pain

Cognitive Functional Therapy (CFT) - involves the assessment and subsequent unpicking of over-adaptive, protective movement patterns that can develop over the months and years of living with pain. Through a series of graded exercises using the principle of exposure, this approach targets fear of movement and cultivates the foundation for feeling safe in your body

Somatic or embodied movement – is a specific type of nervous system and brain training strategy. The body is used to provide updated feedback and information to to the brain and nervous system, to more accurately listen to the painful body part. This reduces uncertainty and helps reorganise smudged brain-map regions. It involves specific practices which often include mindfulness

Movement for pain, body, and mind - current exercise guidelines fail to include the new research on exercise for mental health. Exercise is proven to be helpful (often to a greater degree than anti-depressant medications) for chronic pain, depression, and anxiety as well as other chronic conditions including diabetes and heart disease. You may be pleased to learn that the dosage and approach to exercise to improve pain and mental health are less demanding than the recommendations in our national guidelines for physical health alone. If you fear exercise due to the risk of experiencing increased pain or increased symptoms of anxiety, you are in good hands here! Let’s establish an achievable and graded exposure approach to progressively build up your tolerance and confidence for movement-based approaches that you enjoy and can sustain in your life