Schedule a free 45 minute call here.

Schedule a single session or package of sessions here.

Chronic pain can render you powerless over your own body and your life. 

It is a frustrating and despairing experience to have your sense of agency taken away from you day after day for months, years, or decades.  It can leave you in a perpetual state of fear, frustration, and hopelessness. 

When you are in pain, unhealthy patterns of avoidance may begin to dominate many different aspects of your life. 

Maybe you stay at home, avoid social gatherings, perhaps even have to quit working or doing the activities you love.  It can render a lot of financial insecurity, and wreak havoc on relationships and self-esteem.

Chronic pain can be a quick downward spiral into depression. 

You may also find yourself cycling between feelings of complacency (this is just something I am always going to have to deal with) and preoccupation (planning your whole day around dealing with pain or constantly researching your symptoms and possible treatments). 

It can cut you off from the fullness of life, and before you know it, your entire life is centered around managing pain.

If you struggle with chronic pain or symptoms of chronic illness, you probably have desperately tried finding answers, cycling through many doctors and health care practitioners, paying thousands of dollars on different treatments.  Perhaps you have even been given a diagnosis for your pain, and followed through with medication or a surgical procedure, only to find that the pain still persists. 

Maybe you have had multiple medical tests only to find that there is no evidence that there is anything physically wrong with you.  Maybe you have found something that temporarily gives you some relief such as chiropractic care or getting a massage, but the pain always comes back. 

Meanwhile, the world around you keeps going, and almost nobody understands the invisible struggle of your exhaustive cycle of trying to manage the way you feel. 

If this has been your experience, it is not your fault, and it is not all in your head.  Your pain is REAL, and your experience is 100% valid.

The exhaustive and expensive cycle of trying to find answers and going through many different treatments can be one facet that is keeping you stuck.

Neuroscience research is showing that chronic pain often is not directly correlated with structural tissue damage in the body, but has more to do with miscommunications occurring in the brain.

Neuroplastic pain is when the brain misinterprets safe sensory signals from the body as dangerous, and sends out pain signals when you are not actually in danger. 

It’s a safety mechanism administered from a sensitized and hypervigilant brain, letting us know that there’s something dangerous, and to act accordingly, even when there is no danger.  

It’s like your brain is on high alert, misinterpreting normal sensory information in the body the same way you would mistake a hose in the grass for a poisonous snake. The brain mistakenly sends out danger signals (pain) to alert you that there is a threat when there isn’t one. Pain is meant to evoke a behavior change.

In the analogy of the hose in the grass, the behavior change would be to automatically jump back to avoid the (falsely assumed) poisonous snake, in the same way that pain symptoms can evoke fear-based behaviors of either avoidance of certain activities or hyper-fixation on management of symptoms.

Fear-based management of your pain or repeated avoidance of certain activities are danger signals to the brain, fueling the pain cycle and keeping you stuck in a cycle of fear, preoccupation and/or avoidance, and pain. 

This is good news, because it means that you have the power to break this cycle and to retrain your nervous system and brain.  With evidenced based mind-body tools, it is possible to change your relationship with your symptoms, and therefore reduce your experience of pain.

Pain Reprocessing Therapy is an evidence-based, mind/body approach to recovering from chronic pain. It is a process of retraining the brain to respond to signals from the body properly, breaking the chronic pain cycle.

You will be supported in establishing a sense of safety in your body instead of sensing it as a threat. This shift is essential for reducing pain. Often what’s underneath the physical experience of chronic pain are unprocessed emotions, and you will be gently invited to explore this territory in our sessions.

When the brain is in a state of chronic hyper-vigilance, acute stressors can trigger emotions that our brain and nervous system perceive as too threatening for you to feel. This process often turns on the pain signals, and the fear evoked from the pain feeds into a reinforcing loop of pain and fear. All of this happens beneath our conscious awareness.

* Click the "learn" tab and scroll down to read more about the neuroscience of chronic pain.

I see the complexity in three tiers when it comes to creating the ripe conditions to developing a chronic pain condition.

1. Stress in adulthood such as stressful/traumatic events or ongoing stress such as a high-stress job or raising a family that can sensitize the brain and nervous system.

2. Stressful events in childhood, adolescence, and/or young adulthood that led to a trauma response that the body held onto with a previous reference point of safety before the traumatic or stressful event(s).

3. Preverbal and attachment trauma in which the brain and nervous system learned how to orient/function/exist in a trauma state without a previous reference point of safety.

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The first tier is likely the easiest to heal. Getting injured while in a stressful relationship, job, or other situation could be enough to put the brain on high alert and use the neural pathway of pain as an outlet for the unprocessed stress.

Tier two requires deeper digging. You will likely have to go beyond simply cultivating a sense of safety around the experience of your symptoms alone, and start digging into some repressed emotional territory that is leaving the nervous system in a state of high alert.

Tier three is the most challenging because it requires you to start to see the water you are swimming in. Healing developmental trauma is not for the faint of heart. And while in many cases you don't have to necessarily heal your trauma to get out pain, when it comes to preverbal and attachment trauma, your survival mechanisms are often the only way you know how to function.

Unlearning these survival patterns can be incredibly challenging and confusing because there was no "before" experience of safety prior to the trauma.

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This is why I combine Pain Reprocessing Therapy and Hakomi Somatic Therapy together into a trauma-informed coaching session.

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Pain Reprocessing Therapy is excellent for desensitizing your brain to your pain symptoms and retraining your brain to perceive the sensations as safe.

Hakomi Somatic Therapy is excellent for entering the deeper waters of your emotional territory, unconscious barriers to nourishment, and deeply embedded survival patterns.

Hakomi is excellent when you don't know the what, why, or how of your suffering. You just know you are riddled with anxiety, depression, or dysfunctional habits. Slowly, session by session, we can start to build a map to see and understand how your unconscious has organized itself to function in the world without getting certain essential developmental needs met, keeping the brain in a state of hypervigilance.

With a trauma-informed approach, we will use the innate somatic intelligence of the body to support resourcing for the nervous system when symptoms of hyperarousal or hypoarousal connected to a trauma response arise.

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Introducing…

The River Beneath the Pain

Reduce your symptoms and reconnect to the inherent wholeness within you utilizing a mind/body approach. 

Sessions will take place on Zoom.

A blend of Pain Reprocessing Therapy and Hakomi-Informed Somatic Coaching will support you to process deeper layers of your mind/body connection, including your emotions, to understand how your brain is perpetuating chronic pain with a trauma-informed approach. 

A session will consist of bringing attention to your present internal experience, and directly feeling and reprocessing how you are relating to your symptoms in session with support and guidance.

We will also look at daily patterns, habits, and routines that may be contributing to your pain cycle, and find small, attainable changes you can make to break the cycle that may be keeping you stuck.

Our time together will not guarantee that you will be pain free, but my intention is that you will gain more clarity as to what is keeping you stuck, and have some tangible tools to work with outside of our sessions so that you can continue to make progress on your own.

With this approach you will get…

• A blend of Pain Reprocessing Therapy and Hakomi-informed Somatic Coaching.

• Clients who engage in at least three sessions will receive a resource list full of books, podcasts, and videos for you to have extra support outside of our time together.

• Clients who engage in at least three sessions will receive a six week free trial for the Curable app which is an interactive resource for you that includes pain science education, journal prompts, guided meditation, and brain training exercises specific to chronic pain.

• Ongoing resources tailored to your specific needs.

*It is highly recommended that you carve out at least 30 minutes every day for an intentional practice for this to be effective in symptom reduction. Please consider whether or not you can commit to active participation in your process of healing outside of our sessions prior to investing in a package of sessions.

You will be supported to gain insight into your internal landscape, with your body’s wisdom as our compass.  This work can gently and organically unravel deeply held unconscious emotion and thought patterns that may be keeping your nervous system stuck in a pain cycle. 

You can learn to trust your body instead of experiencing it as a source of suffering.  

You will have the keys in your hands to inhabit your body in a newly empowered way with a foundation of trust and safety in the wisdom of your body. 

The autonomic nervous system which responds to our emotional state and stress responses affect the muscles, blood flow, nervous system, heart, gastrointestinal tract, and genitourinary tract and therefore can produce a wide variety of symptoms.

This approach is beneficial for a multitude of chronic symptoms including musculoskeletal pain, tingling, numbness, burning sensations, dizziness, tinnitus, anxiety, abdominal pain, bloating, heartburn, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, urinary pain/itching/burning, urinary frequency, palpitations, rapid heart rate, migraine headaches, fatigue, and depression.

What would it be like to experience pain but to not react to it? 

What if instead you could learn how to inhabit your body with curiosity, and listen to the inherent wisdom of your body, even when it’s hurting? 

One of the keys to healing is learning how to change our relationship to pain, and to understand that ultimately the brain is sending pain signals in an attempt to keep us safe. 

Your experience of symptoms is your brain and body trying to protect you. 

The tools you gain from our time together will help you establish a sense of trust with your body and your experience of pain instead of seeing it as a threat.  This shift is essential for reducing pain. 

Schedule a free 45 minute call here.

Schedule a single session or package of sessions here.

I know it’s challenging to consider that a mind/body connection may be the root of your pain. 

“Pain isn’t in your head, but it is in your brain.”  Meaning that it is not a moral failure or conscious choice you are making to be in pain.  Nor should you be falsely led by healthcare practitioners into believing that it’s all in your head. 

It is an automatic and unconscious physiological mechanism involving communication pathways between the brain and the body that are not functioning properly, and you have zero ability to control it when it’s actually happening. 

With somatic awareness and evidence based tools, you can retrain these misfiring neurological mechanisms with persistent practice. 

It will require engagement of your conscious awareness of your body, emotions, and nervous system, as well as your capacity to re-approach the way you are relating with your pain symptoms.  

This is for people who are experiencing chronic pain (more than three months) who are interested in a somatic approach to working with chronic pain. 

If you are willing to attempt to put in the self inquiry needed to re-pattern your relationship with pain, this is for you.  

If you are willing to look at and work with the ways that your emotions and nervous system play a role in your pain experience, this is for you. 

Even if you have a diagnosed structural issue or autoimmune dysfunction that confirms that your pain is not 100% neuroplastic, these tools can still support you with working with fear around these diagnoses which can potentially reduce any unnecessary additional chronic pain.

This is not for people who want to be “fixed.”  I am not here to fix you. 

I am here to support the facilitation of your own internal knowing, helping you to find your own path to inhabiting your body more fully. 

This will require your full participation.  I will hand you the keys, and it’s up to you to use them. 

This is also not for people who require in-depth mental health counseling, as I am not a licensed mental health professional.  If I see that what you are needing is outside of my scope of practice, I have list of competent somatic therapists to refer you to. 

This is NOT a program that supports you in crisis.

Please seek support from a licensed mental health professional or call a crisis hotline if you experience suicidal ideation.

Chronic pain does not have to be life-sentence.  I truly believe it’s possible for you to experience less pain and inhabit your body with more ease, and live a happy, fulfilling life.  I personally have struggled with chronic pain and fatigue for over a decade, and these tools have reduced my experience of pain to an immense degree.  I am committed to supporting other people on this challenging path. 

You deserve support, and I am glad you are here.