Greetings, Reader!
Many years ago, my beloved cat, Simon, developed a brain tumor that changed his whole personality. He transformed from a sweet, cuddly, social butterfly to a vicious attack tiger who was not safe to be around. It was heartbreaking to witness his pain, and to experience the profound transformation of our relationship from trust to fear.
Shortly after he passed, my wife and I were touring an apartment in our quest to find a place to live in Burlington that was both affordable and inhabitable, which was no small feat. We lingered in the kitchen to test the appliances while the rest of the group moved into another room, and we found ourselves cornered by a vocal and territorial cat.
We were both terrified. We'd recently been attacked by a cat who was a beloved member of our family, and our nervous systems assessed the level of threat from this unfamiliar cat through the lens of that past experience. The low rumble of the cat's vocal stylings activated a fear response that none of the other people on that tour could understand. To everyone else, it was just a cat, but to us, it was a predator. We were stuck in the kitchen for a long time, too afraid to move, and the property manager had to help us escape. Needless to say, we did not get the apartment.
The nervous system doesn't simply respond to things as they are; it makes a prediction based on what it expects will happen, and that depends on past experiences, memories, mood, and context.
For example, a jump scare feels a lot different when you are in a haunted house than when you are alone in the woods at night, especially if your generative model of the world believes that it is dangerous to be alone in the woods at night.
Much of our reality is actually an inference based on what we expect to happen.
Take a look at this picture and tell me what you see.
Anything out of the ordinary? Now, turn the picture upside down and look again.
Chances are the first time you looked, your brain arranged the information coming into your eyes to meet the expectation of how the faces should look. When you looked a second time with the picture right-side up, new information updated your predictive model.
There are so many examples of this, but one of my favorites is this video in which three people experience very real pain when there is 0% chance that they are being injured.
Do me a favor and take 4 minutes to watch this video:
I do want to clarify one thing: This video isn't showing a magic trick, it's showing real science. The participants weren't faking it. Their pain was 100% real, and they felt it acutely because their nervous systems believed that what was happening should be painful.
Pain is a prediction.
If you have a history of feeling hip pain when you stand up from a chair, the next time you go to stand up, your nervous system will bias you to interpret the sensations in your hip as painful, not because standing up is a harmful activity, but because that is what your nervous system expects will happen.
But, it doesn't have to be that way. The predictive model your nervous system uses is generative, which means it can be updated with new, more accurate information.
With enough exposure to friendly cats, my nervous system eventually updated its model, and I stopped being afraid every time I saw a cat in my neighborhood.
This also how I trained my nervous system to regain function in my right hand after my nerve injury many years ago. I used a combination of craniosacral therapy to snap my nervous system out of survival mode, somatic therapy to expand my capacity to experience sensation without fear, and the Graded Motor Imagery (GMI) protocol to update my predictive model so my nervous system could stop generating pain.
The first step in the GMI process is laterality training. I used an app called Recognise that showed me pictures of hands in various random positions and asked me to categorize them as right or left hands. This is harder than it sounds, especially if you have chronic pain, but the more I practiced, the better I got at left/right discrimination, and the more accurate my nervous system became at interpreting the sensory information I was receiving.
Once I was able to accurately discern right and left, I started imagining moving my own hand without pain into various positions. I worked my way up to visualizing myself doing functional tasks that I wasn't able to do physically, such as write my name with a pen, or cut veggies with a knife.
The final step in the GMI process is mirror therapy. Just like the video in the rubber hand experiment above, I hid my right hand behind a mirror so that when I looked at my left hand in the mirror, the reflection made it look like my right hand was moving freely and without pain.
This combination of implicit and explicit motor imagery updated my nervous system's generative model with new information, and trained it to predict that moving my right hand would not be painful.
And you know what? It worked. I can write with a pen, cook, get dressed by myself, dry my hair, and paint bad watercolor paintings again without any problems, all because I rewired my nervous system and updated its predictive model.
My approach to treatment for chronic pain is rooted in the most advanced pain neuroscience, and the latest somatic and embodied therapies to reduce threat detection, reestablish safety, and retrain your nervous system to stop predicting pain.
This method works when other treatments fail because it transforms the way your nervous system sees the world.
The biomechanical model of pain is incredibly disempowering. It makes you believe you are broken, and that you will suffer with pain until you have surgery to repair or replace your damaged parts. But you are not a machine, and you don't have to suffer. You can rewire your nervous system and teach it to stop producing pain, even if you have structural changes like herniated discs or osteoarthritis.
Ready for your nervous system to tell a different story? Let's connect. Schedule a free consultation here.
In love and solidarity,
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Rachel
Doctor of Physical Therapy & Integrative Pain Specialist
Rewire your nervous system and break the cycles of chronic pain, depletion, burnout, and overwhelm so you can be fully present for what matters most in your life.
Click here to book a free consultation with me.
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