MEET YOUR COACH
Amanda Hanson
My name is Amanda Hanson. I am 44 years old, a devoted wife and stepmother, a friend and neighbor. I’ve been a certified Integrative Nutrition Health Coach for fifteen years, and a certified Pilates instructor and Personal Trainer for two decades.
I’ve treated chronic pain through functional movement in a clinical setting – as an elite Pilates Instructor – for my entire adult life. However, despite applying the highest standards in physical therapy, my ability to reduce clients’ pain was unreliable, and their pain reduction didn’t last. I wanted a better future for my clients, and for my profession, than sometimes managing clients’ pain, for some amount of time.
When I developed my own, multiple chronic pain syndromes in my mid 30’s, my quest for a true and lasting solution to the problem of pain became a very personal crusade. I came to this work through my own protracted pain journey, so I KNOW how devastating – physically and emotionally – the long road of chronic pain/symptoms can be.
Desperate for more options – after being told by numerous doctors and therapists there was nothing more they could do for me (except endless pain medication) – I spent years diving deep into the neuroscience behind chronic pain. I discovered a newly emergent brain and behavioral therapy with a truckload of research supporting it. I fully recovered, using this scientifically proven, brain changing program, called Pain Reprocessing Therapy.
After finding my own recovery, my life’s mission clicked into place. In service of helping others realize the same life-saving results, I got trained by top scientists and therapists to become a Certified Pain Reprocessing Therapy Coach.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy – developed to harness the new neuroscience of chronic pain/symptoms – allows you to communicate with your brain in a revolutionary way; The program teaches you to turn off the signals in your brain that are causing chronic pain in your body. Chronic pain persists when we focus on the physical and structural, but can be fully resolved when we target our brain behaviors and central nervous system. A fearful, stressed out brain – not physical degeneration – is the most common driver of chronic pain. Through Pain Reprocessing Therapy, I found freedom from pain for myself. Now – armed with extensive training in this proven program – I can help you do the same!
How I treat chronic pain
Pain Reprocessing Therapy
Pain Reprocessing Therapy – also known as PRT – is a completely non-invasive, brain and behavioral therapy for ending chronic pain and other unpleasant chronic symptoms. If you are familiar with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), there are many similarities between the tow (although PRT is proven to be vastly more effective for treating chronic pain). PRT was developed by neuroscientists and therapists in response to contemporary research proving that chronic pain happens, not because of structural damage, but because brains have the ability to learn pain. Previously, it was taken as fact that pain only happens as a result of tissue damage or degenerative disease. Now, we realize that the majority of chronic pain happens in a complete absence of any damage to the body. Instead chronic pain is being generated and learned by the brain and central nervous system as a reaction to perceived threat (more on this later). As neuroscience has advanced, we also realize that findings on an MRI do not explain chronic pain – one reason why spine surgeries are so notoriously unsuccessful! MRIs of asymptomatic people show most of them have findings like serious disc degeneration and arthritis. Far from causing chronic pain, these “normal abnormalities” are like gray hairs on the inside – totally harmless changes associated with normal aging.
So, why does the brain learn pain? That’s simple, once you think about why we even have a nervous system: to keep us on guard for threats and danger, and ready to fight, flee, or freeze to stay alive. Pain is always a warning sign and a request for change – either because of tissue damage (in a small percentage of chronic pain cases) or because of stress and threats in our direct environment. This ability to amplify normal sensations when our brain decides we are in danger, and to make the resulting pain chronic, evolved as a way for our brain to communicate warnings about stressful and threatening situations to us – to force us to get down and stay down, until the dangerous situation had passed. Fast forward to modern day, where the stressful, threatening situations come at us all day long, and most people reach a point where their nervous system cries UNCLE and are begging for change 24/7. Voila: Chronic Pain! Contemporary research has proven again and again that chronic stress, chronic emotional threat, and chronic fear are all recipes for chronic pain.
Let me tell you, this is wonderful news! Neurologically driven pain – the majority of chronic pain – is much easier to resolve than serious tissue damage! The brain remains changeable throughout our lives, so, through the proven techniques of Pain Reprocessing Therapy (detailed below) we can train our brains out of chronic pain. Your threat focused brain got you into pain, and it can be trained to be a happier, calmer, better adjusted brain that has no need to send you painful, continuous danger alarms. Brain scans of people before and after PRT show many differences in how their brains activate; PRT literally changes brains. If you want to hear more, sign up for a complimentary consultation.
What kind of pain does this work for? Any pain. Any system in our bodies can be co-opted by the brain and central nervous system to give us chronic pain as a request for change; so, it follows that any symptom could be sent from your scared brain. I’ll say that again: The kind of pain/symptoms PRT successfully treats can occur anywhere, and in any way, in your body. Before starting this program, I’ll go through a checklist meant to rule in the use of PRT with your particular symptoms and history. But, if you’re reading this, I want you to know there is a vastly larger chance PRT will work for you, and that your pain can be significantly alleviated or fully relieved with this program!
I’ve worked with people who have autoimmune diseases, arthritis, stomach and digestive issues, migraines, muscle pain, fibromyalgia, and on and on and on. I have yet to treat a client that did not experience relief through Pain Reprocessing Therapy.
PRT has 5 main components:
1
Education
Educating my clients about the proven neuroscience of chronic pain helps their brains get with the program: Literally! I’ll connect you to whatever resources – podcasts, books, research papers, videos, etc – are best for you. Learning some key facts will eventually change the way you regard your pain: 1) brain activity (not tissue damage) accounts for the vast majority of chronic pain; 2) the majority of pain occurs in the complete absence of ongoing tissue damage/degeneration; and 3) the faulty brain patterns that cause chronic pain are fully reversible. Learn more about the Science behind these concepts.
2
Gathering and Reinforcing Evidence
As a PRT practitioner, I’m trained to be a pain detective. Pain that originates in the brain acts differently from structural pain in some subtle, yet observable, ways. I’ll help you pay attention to and collect those personally relevant bits of evidence that your pain is neurological, not structural (whatever your MRI shows). Gathering and referring to a list of evidence from your own life helps you fully believe that brain function – not something horribly wrong in your body – is causing your pain. As you let go of your fear, you can begin shifting your brain out of a danger state, and out of pain.
3
Attending to and Appraising Pain Sensations Through a Lens of Safety
Contemporary neuroscience proves that our brains learn pain – create chronic pain – when we are in fearful, threatened, stressed out emotional states. Often the biggest fear becomes the pain itself, leading to a long term “Pain/Fear Cycle”. So, teaching clients to have a less fearful relationship with their pain, to view painful sensations through a lens of safety, is crucial to unlearning pain forever. During PRT, we break the Pain/Fear Cycle through education in pain science, gathering personal evidence, slowly reintegrating avoided positions and movements, and using exposure techniques like Somatic Tracking.
4
Addressing Other Emotional Threats
Pain is always a warning sign, but only rarely is it a warning of tissue damage. Most chronic pain is a warning about stress/danger in your environment and a request for you to make changes; When your nervous system makes a determination that you aren’t safe, your brain continuously amplifies sensations to make them painful. Your emotional state around certain people, places, and situations is the intel your brain uses to decide you are in danger. As part of PRT, we identify the emotional threats keeping clients’ brains in danger mode. When we lower a person’s overall threat level, and calm their central nervous system, we break the Pain/Fear Cycle that drives chronic pain.
5
Gravitating to Positive Feelings and Sensations
Chronic pain is your nervous system’s – incredibly overbearing – way of protecting you from danger in your environment. But, the brains of chronic pain sufferers tend to view *everything* through a lens of danger, which locks in pain. Re-orienting clients’ brains towards positive feelings and pleasant sensations – and away from endless rumination and chronic fear – allows them to crowd out the negative feelings and self-talk driving chronic pain. Through PRT, clients experience a global shift from danger to safety – a global shift towards feeling good instead of feeling horrible – so their brains no longer need chronic pain.
* Exceptions are an obvious and recent injury, a tumor, infection, or fracture.
Get ready
You will benefit from PRT if:
You had an injury which continues to hurt you long after normal healing time (for more than a few months), “flares up” regularly, or went way but then came back and now is chronic,
You never had a known/obvious injury, but pain came on and never went away, and/or spread to other areas of your body,
You have one or more diagnoses of syndrome/s and/or degeneration – which may or may not have been confirmed by MRI – that continue to cause you pain, and/or have spread to other areas of your body,
You have pain that is “medically unexplained” – you’ve been told by a doctor that they do not understand why you are in pain and don’t know how to help you.
