this is building resilience podcast episode 219 unlearn your pain with special guest Dr Howard schuer welcome to building resilience a podcast where Theory practical strategies and inspiring stories show you how to unlock your best life I'm your host Leah Davidson as a certified life coach speech language pathologist and nervous system resilience expert it is my mission to teach you how to be more resilient to life adversities I will show you how to manage your mind befriend your nervous system process your emotions and even eliminate stress it's time to do more than just survive it's time to thrive let's get [Music] started Hello everybody welcome back to the building resilience podcast you are in for a treat today I have a very special guest but before before I tell you all about my guests I just want to remind you that my guided Journal resilience is out and available for sale on both amazon.com and amazon.ca it is a mental health journal for emotional well-being and nervous system care there are links for it in the show notes if you search my name on Amazon you will not find it because it's under my brand resilient Brilliance so you can search it like that too or use the link today I have Dr Howard chuber are here to talk with me all about pain he is one of the world's leading experts and Pioneers in the area of chronic pain I've had the opportunity to take some of his trainings I took freedom from chronic pain just completed his training this past December and emotional awareness and expression therapy which he talks a little bit about in today's episode if you suffer from any chronic pain or symptoms or anxiety or depression or if you have a loved one who does or pretty much if you're human then you're going to want to listen and even take some notes because Dr schuer graced us with a wealth of information let me tell you a little bit about him Dr schuer is an internist and clinical professor at the Michigan State University College of human medicine and has authored more than a hundred Publications in scientific journals and books he lectures regionally nationally and internationally and is the author of three books unlearn your pain unlearn your anxiety and depression and hidden from view written with Dr Alan abess Dr schuer has worked with Dr Mark Lumley to develop a novel psychological treatment for chronic pain emotion awareness and expression therapy which has been shown to be highly effective in randomized controll Trials Dr schuer sees patients virtually from anywhere in the world at cormeny health.com and lives in Detroit area with his wife of 40 years and they have two adult children without further Ado please enjoy this [Music] interview hello Dr schuer welcome to the building resilience podcast I am so excited to have you here I have been a longtime fan I have taken some of your trainings I have of course read um your book unlearn your pain and unlearn your anxiety and I know that you have another one coming up which I am so excited to that's true thank you thank you for having me I really appreciate it today I just wanted to talk a lot more about the science and the background of healing chronic pain and exploring Mind Body syndrome and I know that these are things that you really are a Pioneer and an expert in this area and I've touched on it a little bit before on my podcast I've done a couple episodes and I just am so happy to have this opportunity to bring you in the expert in all things to set the stage and teach us a little bit about pain and the difference between chronic pain and acute pain and what we can do about pain and where it's coming from and all those good things yeah it's really amazing most doctors I'm a physician internal medicine doctor I had not a lot of interest in working with people with pain for half of my career most doctors really don't like to work with people in pain especially chronic pain because we haven't had good treatment models and it's been frustrating and so doctors will tend to shunt people up go to the pain management people let them take care of your pain because I can't deal with it yeah yeah no and then I found myself being completely interested in pain and being excited to see people who have chronic pain even pain that's 5 10 20 years because lo and behold all of a sudden I had learned something that you could do about it and what a complete 180 degree turn that was in my career to be able to have the empowerment that there's something to be done about pain so let's start with the basics because I know that you give an amazing explanation to your clients of what actually is pain and it's so helpful to have that background yeah it's and this is revolutionary completely evolutionary understanding of what pain is in the first place because you would think that everyone thinks and what we were taught in medical school and what every doctor knows and what every person knows is that if there's pain there must be something wrong in the body there has to be and how else could you possibly have pain if there's not something wrong in the body that just makes perfect sense everyone knows that and it turns out that our brains don't work that way our body doesn't work that way it turns out that our brain creates what we experience and this sounds like a new age concept like woo woo oh your brain creates what you experience oh cool give me the crystals you know it's so weird but you we see with our brain you can see when you're in your sleep with your eyes closed because you're dreaming right when we see things it's because our brain has created it it light comes in our eyes and hits the rods and cones of the retina but then it gets transformed into these neural impulses and the neural impulses go to the visual cortex center of the brain and that's where images are created are generated and it turns out that a large number of fibers more fibers come into the visual cortex from within the brain than from the eyes so in order to see we need to have memory we need to know what birds look like and trees and flowers and because we have to recognize them at a very rapid rate faster than our eyes could literally process and because our brain needs to protect us and sight is a big important part of protection when you think about 60,000 years of human history of being having to have the eyesight to notice if there's something dangerous if you see the bush Russell and you take action to get out of the way you are more likely to be safe than if you don't see it right and so our brain learns to protect us so Vision occurs and people see things that aren't there all the time you know people who see a crime have to go to the police station and pick the person who did it out of a lineup and they typically pick the wrong person because what they thought they saw they actually didn't see and hearing occurs the same way we hear with our brain people hear their name being called or they right they hear lyrics of songs that are completely different everyone knows that that's right yeah right but when it comes to touch we think that our brain accurately represents what we're feeling in our body and it turns out it's not true and the simple way we know that Leah is that people can have an injury and have no pain right you think about that for a second because thousands of people have had in the story always tells a friend mind shot a nail in his hand at a construction site and had absolutely no pain how could that be and that's because a finger can't cause pain only the brain can cause the experience of pain and that means that when you get an injury your brain usually turns on pain because you need pain to protect ourselves you break an ankle you want pain right but sometimes it won't and if it won't that means it has control over pain so so first thing is not all injuries cause pain right the second thing is not all pain is due to an injury now this is completely mindblowing that is that is mindblowing yeah how can you have pain in the absence of an injury well everybody knows you can have a headache after a stressful day at work everybody knows your stomach can turn into knots when you have to give a public lecture you know everyone knows that everyone knows your face blushes you know you get redness when you they get embarrassed right and so we know that people can have pain real pain in the absence of an injury and the story we always tells the guy who had a nail in his boot he had a nail go all the way through his boot at a construction site he screamed in pain they rushed to the hospital took his boot off there was no injury at all which mean his brain had turned on pain real pain because all pain is real all pain is created by the brain either in the presence of injury or the absence of injury and it turns out the brain has a danger signal like a smoke alarm and that danger signal will go off when our brain thinks we're in danger when there's some danger whether it's a predator coming across the field whether it's a car swerving toward us or research shows that emotional issues activate the same parts of the brain as does a physical injury and this is the third thing that's mind-blowing and revolutionary and it's 100% true that if you feel objected if you feel betrayed if you feel threatened if you feel micromanaged if you feel that you have way too much pressure on yourself your brain at some point is going to send a signal like a smoke alarm and the brain doesn't speak English has its own language it has its own language yeah and it may cause tens anxiety yeah it may cause headache back pain stomach pain it may cause nausea may cause tingling in the hands and feet or burning pain it may cause stuttering yeah you know and speech issues y it may cause diarrhea which I've had in my life yeah when too yeah and we think if you're having diarrhea the first thing you think about is of course I have an infection I have food poisoning maybe that's true yeah yeah and certainly that can certainly be true yeah and the same thing with pain if you have pain you want to say did I hurt myself and people certainly get injuries and hurt themselves right but now the fourth thing that's amazing and revolutionary is very simple is that the body heals so this is like okay yeah we know that right Dr schuer yeah but do we really know that yeah because the body heals yeah and millions of people have had a car accident and hurt their neck or their back or they twisted their back or neck or they twisted their shoulder or something or they hit their head right or something that caused an injury and they had pain or other symptoms but then the pain and the other symptoms persist Ed for right not just a few days but a few weeks a few months a few years and sometimes Leah a few decades yeah yeah and we kind of think like well the injury didn't heal somehow or the injury is still there yeah but that's usually not the case and that is a revolutionary way of understanding how the body works because we learn our brain learns and you we were just talking before and use the term neuroplasticity neurons that fire together wire together so our brain learns all the time it learns what's dangerous and what's not dangerous and sometimes your brain will learn that bending over is dangerous because it's had pain with bending over and it Associates pain with bending over and becomes a vicious cycle right or it Associates pain or eye strain with the computer screen and then the computer screen is seen as is dangerous and the more we avoid the computer screen the worse we get right where the brain can cause fatigue with a small amount of exercise and so we're kind of teaching the brain exactly yeah and then it becomes a vicious cycle the more symptom the more worry about the symptom the worse that people get and then it leads to a chronic situation where people feel so so broken right you know so hopeless and they're told that they can never recover that they're just going to have to live with this exactly and that gets back to the beginning that's why most doctors don't want to see people that's right with chronic pain fatigue eye strain chronic dizziness chronic anxiety you know they send them off to other people but what if we could accurately diagnose people as having either a neural plastic condition versus a structural condition and some people may have some of each granted certainly that can be the case but what if we try to sort it out and that was the genius that I first learned 22 years ago that was taught to me by Dr SAR The Genius of saying you know what if you accurately take the time to listen to people you can sort out situ situations where chronic pain anxiety depression fatigue insomnia Etc chronic symptoms are actually neuroplastic because if they're neuroplastic what does that mean if you've learned it you can unlearn it is the name of your book right exactly and it's just yeah so that's you know I've been talking just on and on I know I love it I love it everything every question I have you're answering in the next one now my question it leads into okay so how do you tell the difference because I know that especially if somebody has had an injury in the past or they've had something structural then there's this assumption like you said must keep going like I'll have people well Scar Tissue there or this is something that's never healed and I'm living with this and I'll live with this for the rest of my life how do we differentiate between something that I guess is structural and maybe permanent versus something that is neuroplastic and we have the potential of moving towards healing right yeah critical question and that's what I spend a lot of time doing and I take the time to listen to people and the first step of course is a medical evaluations to make sure that there's no ongoing disorder as opposed to a old disorder that has become Static so an ongoing disorder cancer tumor that's growing and spreading is an ongoing disorder um right certain inflammatory conditions can be ongoing but we've got good medications for treating inflammatory conditions now and just because someone has been diagnosed with an inflammatory condition doesn't mean that all their symptoms or their current symptoms are due to that because they've been treated medically right people can have a fracture but fractures will heal people can have a brain injury brain injuries become Static they don't when if you have a brain injury and you have some loss of function the brain rewires the brain will learn to take over functions and that starts within an hour or two of having an injury yeah and there's some really amazing research shows for example when you blindfold somebody for an hour and then you give them tests of of what's called two-point discrimination on their body where you have them distinguish where they're feeling touch and where they're not feeling touch within an hour the parts of the brain that have that have been used for vision start getting used for touch right that is incredible the brain can take over yeah it can take over and so if the injury is static yeah then it's more likely that the symptoms are neuroplastic number one number two if the medical testing shows a disorder that is seen in normal people and this happens with neck and back pain all the time where we see MRI shows bulging disc degenerative disc smost stenosis spal listhesis and if you look at the data on that people who are normal have those things so to assume that someone has degenerative dis disease as the cause of their pain because they have degenerative dis disease on their MRI it's probably not accurate and we did a because healthy normal people have the same thing and we did a study with 222 people that we published last year who had chronic neck and back pain we evaluated using the method I'm going to finish telling you about if I can get there because I keep talking but I'm getting there I promise no worries I love it we use that method and we found that 88% of them had neuroplastic back pain or mindbody back pain 88% now 98% of them had abnormal MRIs they all had abnormal MRIs right but the abnormal MRIS we're not a fraction we're not a tumor we're not an abscess we're not something that was clearly structural and then we use what I call the fit criteria and the fit criteria are disorders that are fit functional inconsistent and Trigger so if the pain is in a wide area of the body it starts for no reason you woke up with it if it um is symmetric on both sides of the body these are things that make it more likely to be plant that's functional if it's inconsistent it moves around sometimes it's on the left side of the back or the right side or the top of the back or the bottom or it's in the head but it's in this part of the head but now it's in that part of the head that's inconsistency and that inconsistency tells us that it's not structural because structural disorders don't jump around that's common sense right right and then finally is it triggered is it triggered by innocuous stimulant and so if the pain is triggered by the wind or triggered by the weather or triggered by stress or triggered by innocuous things like sound or light right and so that's where we get into computer screens where people say well the computer is was causing the pain because the puke but is it really causing on a structural level or is it triggering and that is a huge difference and the story always tells about the guy who had a shrapnel wound in a war many years ago got injured had a lot of leg pain because of the wound he got metaed out of the field and a helicopter and his injury healed because all injury heal his brain turned off the dangerous signal he was fine pain free 20 years later he walking down the street gets startled by the sound of a helicopter in the sky he gets the same pain his leg he had 20 years ear the helicopter had been learned by the brain to be associated with the pain right and this is called a condition response like Papa yeah the dog and so when someone has pain with the wind or the weather and tons of Studies have shown the weather does not actually cause our joints to be in pain everyone thinks it does because that's what we know yeah yeah computer screens sound Foods so many people have sensitivities to foods that we've able to reverse because these are conditioned responses so when we look very carefully at people and look closely at the data my job isn't to convince people that all their pain is neuroplastic right because not all pain is neuroplastic but I will tell you after spending 23 years doing this work the vast majority of people with headaches neck and back pain stomach pain widespread pain pelvic pain P abdominal pain the vast majority of them are neuroplastic and we're talking about roughly 90% or more wow wow now when you share that with people I know one of the criticisms people hear that you're saying all pain is in your head and then they you know even after they learn I find that when I provide education for some of my clients they will make the okay I believe it I buy it but this is actually real like this is actually real like I I see how do you answer to that yeah it's so important and it's every person we talk about this with every single person because as I said all pain is real yeah and all pain is generated by the brain if you start with that premise which is true this is science it's not yeah wishful thinking or woo woo all pain is real all pain is generated by the brain this the same with nausea same with headaches same with tingling numbness stuttering eye strain Etc now if it's generated by the brain then the question is what's being what's triggering it to be generated by the brain a physical injury or learned neural circuits in the brain and that's what we can sort out but what I tell people is people may have told you what's all in your head people may have told you that you're faking or it's not real or that you're imagining it or that you want the pain or that it's your fault or that you're crazy or messed up and none of that is true none of that is true you know that and I know that we have to start with that yeah yeah because our this work is so revolutionary and so counterintuitive as you said people tend to fall back into that idea and you know they buy my book and then they send it back they say it's not for me or they first they throw it across the wall and discust really angry and I understand that because nobody wants to be invalidated MH nobody wants to be told that what they're experiencing isn't real that's horrible it shows lack of anyone who says that which shows lack of um compassion lack of caring lack of knowledge lack of understanding um and sometimes it's just cruel you know yeah because it is real their experience is real I always say we we want to validate that but what we're looking at is what is fueling the pain and it's all being fueled through the brain the brain is the place where everything is happening which leads to Hope right absolutely which leads to hope for reversal because as you said before people are told we just have to live with it and cope with it better and that's where that's where modern science was at several years ago because they didn't have the methods that we now have they didn't have the understanding that we now have but now if we can offer hope for people hope for reversal not just you know nipping at the margins yeah wow that can make a huge difference and that that leads to how we treat people which I know is the next thing I was gonna ask because people may be like okay I get it now what do I do how do I unlearn this pain unlearn these symptoms yeah so the five steps first as we said make it do the assessment make sure that the that the pain or the other symptoms are neuroplastic and the more more pain the the more different parts of the body the more different places the more different symptoms throughout people's lives the more likely it is and then we're also linking stressful life events with the onset or the exacerbation of these different pain or other symptoms like anxiety depression fatigue migraine Etc and so people can begin to see oh there's a reason for it it's not just bad luck right I didn't start getting migraine when I was a kid because of something wrong with me there was something wrong with how I was being treated yeah there was something my brain was upset about and that leads to compassion right it leads to compassion for that person not blaming them and so we do that history throughout people's lives so that we can really make this full assessment and understand it and then we there's three three main methods for helping people one we call pain reprocessing therapy which is how to rewire the neural circuits in the brain the second is emotional awareness and expression therapy which is to deal with any underlying emotional or situational conflicts that have occurred in people's life in the past or present and not everybody needs that right um and then the third is how do people treat themselves it turns out that the way you treat yourself is important it matters it matters yeah and most people think they have relationships with other people which we do but we also have a relationship with ourselves and you know Dr Saron learned this 50 years ago that people with chronic painful conditions and other these kinds of associated conditions are more likely to be hard on themselves to be so critical more likely to not take time and care for themselves more likely to feel overly guilty or responsible for things worry about what other people think so much and those are things that have to do with your relationship with yourself right A lot of times people are they if you ask them they say yeah I'm really good at being kind and caring to other people but not so much to myself yeah and it turns out when you think about the brain as a d signal those things matter they do how you treat yourself if you're putting yourself last all the time never speaking up for your needs your brain may go hey wait a minute that's right time out this is not working this is not fair this is not right yeah you're in situations where you're being treated unfairly by a Boss by a spouse by a cousin by a kid your brain May react to that so those are the three kind of general areas where the treatment the pain reprocessing the emotional awareness part and the um self-care part selfcare I want to touch on two of them the first one the emotional piece how do emotions play into pain and how is there a link because I know that sometimes if people and like you said not everybody we have have to go down that that route I just took your training in this program so I'm so fascinated by it and I see it's not everybody that you have to go down that that route of emotions but how are emotions linked to chronic pain and illness right well when you think about it from the point of view of evolution to go way back yeah um people human beings around the earth at the same time as Neanderthal people neanderthals were bigger stronger faster and they even had bigger brains but the Ender thals died out and the reason is that humans banded together in groups and the group was their survival mechanism because they hunted together raised children together ate together gathered together etc etc so it turns out that being in the group is a Lifeline is survival getting kicked therefore getting kicked out of the group is a death sentence so how would you get kicked out of a group by emotional stuff beating up somebody sleeping with somebody's wife you know sinning doing bad things yeah all the bad things bad things and getting kicked out being shamed feeling guilty and so these emotions uh are completely linked to survival and the brain are brain as I said before the brain doesn't speak English so the brain can turn on pain or other symptoms when you're in danger and being in danger of getting kicked out of a group is when girls are mean to other girls yeah being in danger of being kicked out of your family when your parents divorce or when somebody's using drugs or somebody's abusive in danger of getting kicked out of your work environment when you're when your colleague is mean to you or your boss is demanding too much those are all emotional things that are directly linked to the danger signal in the brain and what happens is that people tend to want to shove down the emotions and just not worry about them just move on just yeah keep going which makes sense and that works much of the time but if you're holding on to lowlevel anger about something that's like a thorn in your side that's not going to go away if you're hanging on to guilt about something that you think you've done that you've hurt somebody or something that's a thorn in your side that's not going to go away if you're hanging on to um fear of the situation if you're hanging on to sadness and grief and so the emotional awareness and expression therapy is to become aware of these emotions and to express them in safe and healthy ways as opposed to ignoring them and just trying to shove them down right and expressing emotions in safe and healthy ways is actually not that hard because you can do it in the privacy of your own home yeah as opposed to walk into your office and take your boss's chair and throw it up and throw the papers off the desk and scream at them you're going to get fired that's not going to solve any problems that's right yeah so this anger that you have if you're in your house you can scream and imagine doing all that to your boss and then let it go yeah on to other emotions you have a way of resolving these emotions if you're who hasn't been angry at their child yeah yeah for sure for sure people you love the most who hasn't been angry at them but what do you do you just keep getting angry and angrier but no you want to express it you want to be able to imagine yelling at them or mean you have to go to that person and have that expression I think that was a big aha for me when I your training yeah because I know it'd be like is it healthy to express that anger is it good to have all that anger but the differentiation of I'm not going after that person in real life and throwing all that anger on them I am having a healthy container like you said either imagined or within the safety of somebody else or at home where I can allow that anger to happen so then you can release it right and then you can allow the hurt allow the sadness right and turn that sadness into compassion right because otherwise those emotions will show up in the body right exactly so two years ago my hospital let me go I was I don't make a lot of money for the hospital because I talk to people I've been there 20 years that's right and they were in budget crisis so they just terminated my contract or didn't renew my contract and I was really hurt and my back started to hurt and a couple weeks later I realized that I hadn't dealt with any of those emotions right and so I was in my car and I started just screaming yelling at the hospital swearing my head off screaming about all the ills of medicine and I imagine blowing up the hospital with TNT like in a cartoon which is something you would go to jail for if you do it in real life right but as soon as I imagined blowing up the hospital all of a sudden all that anger subsided and I could process it and I could eventually forgive the hospital because they were just doing their job and that's just the way it goes yeah but hanging on to the anger and then I went to the hurt and the sadness of getting kicked out and being abandoned basically and I turned that hurt into compassion for myself I forgave them and the back pain completely disappeared that's amazing that's amazing that's incredible and who would think of that what pain doctor would think of that what regular doctor would think of that yeah but it turns out emotions are highly linked to pain and other SS right and that when you express these emotions in different forms um I know Sno talked a lot about journaling and I talk a lot about journaling and like art and doodling and things like that to express the emotions you're sending that message back to your brain that it's safe it's okay to do that like you can express these emotions and instead of it flipping the danger signal we're now rewiring to flip the safety safety yeah if you were brought up in a where there was a rageaholic parent you learn that anger is not safe and you learn to be angry is a horrible way to be so you grow up always trying to suppress your anger right or you start to mirror that and you let the anger out in public which gets you in trouble all the time yeah so it's fascinating I love how and the emotional pain very similar to physical pain in the brain is that it's exactly the same it's identical right it's identical and so the pain that comes from an emotion is as real as the pain that comes from breaking a leg right yeah which that as well yeah it's very validating when people have really struggled with a lot of emotional pain that it's very real it's not something it's also not something necessarily that you can just talk your way out of like there's a release there there's from the body is storing it right and the other treatment the pain re processing therapy arm of of the treatment in addition to the emotional awareness part is about literally changing the neural circuits in the brain that are causing pain and rewiring the brain to to turn off those pain or other fatigue anxiety depression Etc all those other signals and the way we do that is by understanding that the symptoms are real but not structural teaching the brain to calm giving feed back to the brain and this has to do with our relationship to ourself because if you're in pain all the time the constant feedback you're giving to your brain is danger danger danger I'm in pain it's not getting better it's not going away what's wrong I can't take it I can't tolerate it and all those are the normal reactions people have but they actually fuel the danger signal in the brain Yeah the more you pay attention to something the more you worry about it the worse it gets and so we're teaching people which is hard sometimes admittedly teaching people to be calmer in the face of the sensations in the body teaching people to lower the danger signal by reassuring themselves givings themselves the messages that I'm okay I'm safe there's nothing wrong with my back or my head that I'm going to get better yeah yeah and it's amazing how powerful those me yeah right and we have research studies on both of these methods we have randomized control trials using pain reprocessing therapy two different trials and there's three more in the works we've got four different randomized controlled trials on the emotional awareness and expression therapy showing that these treatments are actually superior to the standard psychological treatments that have been used for the last 40 years cognitive behavioral therapy mindfulness therapy acceptance and commitment therapy so we're very excited about these prospects because it's just amazing when I started doing this work 22 years ago and I'm just a regular doctor internal medicine doctor no special training in pain no procedures no techniques other than talking to people and using these models and when you see somebody go from 5 10 20 30 years of chronic pain depression anxiety fatigue and get better not just a little better but get completely better yeah it's just mindblowing yeah and it's amazing and people are so happy so happy yeah the last thing before we close I love hearing the stories about when people get better and then there are people who don't get better as quickly or have challenges and I want to speak to that for a minute because I know that in your I believe it's in your book you talk about the five fs and also looking at sometimes in pain reprocessing therapy we talk about personality traits and things like worry and pressure and that inner critic and the intensity and the fear and all those things that do impact your ability to quote get better yeah there's no one can claim that their treatment for anything is going to be 100% effective if you think your treatment is 100% effective you're either lying or delusional I think and you see that are both yeah you can see that on certain websites people say 100% fact we can't say that either right but what are the things what you're asking is what are the things that kind of get in the way what are the obstacles and sometimes the obstacles have to do with childhood trauma that needs to be addressed sometimes the obstacles has to do with how people treat themselves that has to be addressed in terms of that caring self-compassion in terms of doing things for themselves sometimes there's a situation in people's lives that they actually need need to change yeah I had a patient whose migraine disappeared when she left her husband I mean it's not that we recommend everyone get a divorce it's not no joke that my 20s it was my IBS was very debilitating and it seemed to get better post children in my early 30s which was the exact time I also got divorced and so I see that sometimes the stressors the changes the different triggering things and then it just allowed me to work more on myself that self-compassion that kindness having all those things taking a look at the intensity the pressure the critic that I I put on myself as well yeah uh sometimes people need to change their job or their neighborhood or or have marriage counseling or set boundaries with certain family members and then sometimes it's a lot sometimes it's the fact that the symptoms are so severe that it's very difficult to step back from them know that it's very difficult to observe them it's very difficult to keep going keep moving when you're in so much pain and so sometimes people need to really take baby steps yeah and sometimes it takes there's a lady I write about in my new book that it took her two years and she was in so much pain she was bed bound and she couldn't move anything but she could move her hand her fingers and she started moving her fingers and she started dancing with her fingers to music wow and she just started to change literally change the neural circuits in her brain little by little day by day it took her two years wow that's incredible though how much is your belief that it's mind body that it's neuroplastic how much is your belief in the possibility of being able to heal that hope how much does that play into it a lot yeah a lot it turns out it's a lot it turns out and this is what I write about in my new book that people often have a click moment where it clicks in all of a sudden it's clicks that oh my God my foot is not really damaged or my back's not really damaged or my brain's not really damaged it's actually the neural circuits I can get better and that hope often propels people and it may take time to get to that click yeah yeah you know it may take time by watching and observing why did those a sudden the pain go up why did it go up on Tuesday and go down on Thursday yeah yeah what structural problem does that you know probably not yeah and then you think about what happened on Tuesday what happened on Thursday yeah and then you can start to be start to see I had a guy who has this horrible back pain he's a doctor and he he was he would he could walk up the stairs without pain but if he walked up the stairs was carrying a cup of tea he got pain and he was like what's the tea how heavy is this teacup right and then he said this because of the tension of carrying the teacup not spilling and he said where's that tension coming from and he said oh that tension is coming from my brain and then he goes oh my God I got it that's right that was his click moment yeah and then he started getting better took him another couple months but he was fine in a couple months yeah I find I spend a lot of time with my clients helping them try to identify the moments where they don't have pain like being that I think you say that detective for the opposite most of the time and this is a challenge that I'm sure we encourage people and I felt like this as a speech pathologist every week tell me how you're doing I encourage people almost to give me a list of your symptoms like I want to hear about all the bad things and then I started realizing is that really helpful like I know that they want to share these with me sometimes I'm the only person that is you know not tired of hearing about all the symptoms but then also encouraging okay let's have equal air time for the positive so now tell me about the times when you didn't have the pain or this didn't happen or which is hard for some people because right away there's a I find that there's a they may identify a couple of times but then be very careful to yeah but I still have pain most of the time like just like yes I understand but can we start to have start to notice be a detective and find the moments of Hope and go from there right and if there's a time when you don't have pain maybe there could be more times of that that's right if there's time when you don't have pain what's going on is that because your body suddenly changed in that moment or right because the neural circuits change and if it's the neural circuits that changed that opens up a whole range of possibility and that's what we're talking about yeah oh I love that because that is such a hopeful message that there is possibility you're not destined like this is it for a life you just have to learn how to deal with it how to live with it it opens up the door of the possibility that the brain can unlearn what it has learned yeah exactly exactly awesome um as you mentioned I'm writing a new book it's going to be out in 2026 but I'm collecting the the names of people in the book who have been benefited from this work and we're going to have a list at the end so if you know if anybody if any your listeners want to uh add their name and stand up and you don't have to use your real name it could be a fictional name but if you want to stand up and say I had X or Y or Z for x amount of years and I live in I live in Canada or I live in Netherlands or I live in Petoria let us know I can I'll send you that I love that yes please and I'll put all the information um in the show notes for where people can learn more about your work I know know you have an amazing website with lots of different resources about learning about pain and meditations and learning about videos there's some fascinating ones I know right right yeah and we belong to a nonprofit Professional Organization called The Association for the treatment of neuroplastic symptoms and I'll send you that as well and it's a nonprofit and we have an annual conference and we've got a lot of educational materials that are all free and there's a lot of resource out there I have a course on Corsair that's completely free a whole whole course I am doing that course with one of my clients who's had a traumatic brain injury It's a Wonderful It's a Wonderful way for me to work on things like memory and listening and writing skills and all those cognitive communication as well as the education piece about the brain yeah it's amazing for for people to have and there's some interviews there with people who recovered which is really some amazing incredible interviews of people telling their stories that you would think like you said it doesn't matter how long and the severity there are all sorts of stories about people who are able to to he exactly yeah one key thing that you would love for people to take away from the conversation if they're feeling hopeless about their pain what would you say to them the two keys I would try to leave people with is one is don't give up don't give up hope it's easy to be discouraged it's easy to feel defeated and of course everyone feels that way sometimes but if you haven't looked at this model just take a look see if it resonates be open and be Discerning maybe it doesn't fit for you it doesn't fit for everyone that's fine but please don't give up hope be open take a look and just be kind be kind to yourself catch times when you beat yourself up it's it's not good for you yeah I always say self-compassion is like the most important ingredient in every meal everything that you have dose it with self compassion because to have it everywhere thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today and to share with my listeners I'm so excited for people to learn more and for the hope that your work has provided I'm so grateful to you for in this field to be pioneering and being the example and I know that you get a lot of push back from all directions but I know that you also have made such a difference in thousands and thousands of lives so thank you oh thank you Le it's such a pleasure thank you for what you do as well I appreciate it thank you for listening to the building resilience podcast if you're interested in learning a little bit more about managing stress building resilience and leading a more purposeful life then make sure we're connected on Instagram and Facebook at lead Davidson life coaching you can also subscribe to My Weekly Newsletter at www. lead Davidson lifeco coaching.com newsletter looking forward to connecting [Music]