How to Internalize a Sense of Safety & Be Chronic Pain-Free w/ Christie Uipi (an episode from Thought by Thought Healing w/ Jennifer Johnson)

00:00:00 Christie: I literally had pain from head to toe. Had no idea what was causing it, had no central point person or practitioner that was able to help me understand the connection. So in my mind, I just had like a dozen desperate injuries.

00:00:17 Jenny: Yeah, you were Humpty Dumpty. I have never heard that reference and it's perfect.

00:00:22 Christie: Christie: Yeah, because every time you try to solve one thing, another one takes on.

00:00:28 Jenny: Yeah. when you're not treating the right thing, for sure. Yeah.

00:00:39 Chazmith: Welcome to our Power is Within podcast.  I'm your host Chazmith and my mission for this podcast is to inspire you to take your power back and to realize that you are the healer that you've been looking for all along. I believe that we are all capable of healing in mind and body and in soul. If you are new to this podcast, welcome. Thank you for being here. And if you've been tuned in for a while now, welcome. Thank you for being here too. If you've been finding value in this podcast for quite some time, there are a few ways that you can support this podcast.

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00:01:43 Chazmith: So this week I am actually doing something totally different and fun. Actually, if I'm being honest, we're going to stick with this theme for about a month. Maybe, we'll see. I might surprise you to be determined, but on any account, I have decided that since there are so many wonderful resources out there for everybody in the healing community and other wonderful podcasts and podcast hosts, I want to take some time to celebrate them and share them with you. That way, you have even more options for inspiration and education on all things self-healing.

00:02:33 Chazmith: So this week, in honor of this, we are celebrating Jennifer Johnson's video podcast, Thought by Thought Healing. Jennifer is a chronic pain coach who hosts a weekly podcast and YouTube channel where she interviews experts in mind-body medicine, shares other healing stories, and talks about her own story through a Christian lens after healing from years of chronic pain that stole her life away. Please enjoy and don't forget to go click subscribe on Jennifer's Thought by Thought YouTube channel today.

00:03:15 Chazmith: In this episode, we are going to talk about things like pressure and how that can turn into chronic pain and how to work with the pressures of culture and our inner pressures. We talk about what pain reprocessing therapy entails. We talk about the Boulder back pain study that she was a part of, a big part of, and three tools to remain pain free. So I'm going to read you a short bio on her and then we'll get to the interview.

00:03:43 Chazmith: Christie Wepe is a psychotherapist specializing in the treatment of chronic pain, anxiety, and depression and the founder of the Better Mind Center. Christie has been a key collaborator on the development and the research of the pain reprocessing therapy treatment modality. She lectures nationally on psychotherapeutic interventions to treat chronic pain and is committed to cross-disciplinary collaboration between mental health and physical medicine. Christie is also a recovered chronic pain patient herself. The healing process was so profoundly transformational for the quality of life for her that she has dedicated her career to supporting others through their recoveries. So I hope you enjoy, like it, share it, subscribe if it's helpful. Thanks guys, bye.

04:33 Jenny: Christie, thank you so much for being here today. I have been very much so looking forward to just talking with you in this and having this conversation. So thanks so much for showing up.

00:04:45 Christie: Oh my goodness, thank you for inviting me. I've been looking forward to it as well.

00:04:49 Jenny: Awesome. Okay, so let's just start by you telling us a little bit about who you are and your story of healing and where you find yourself today.

00:05:03 Christie: Love to. So I'll start with the present and then back up.

00:05:07 Jenny: Okay.

00:05:09 Christie: My name is Christie. I'm a psychotherapist specializing in chronic pain anxiety and depression. I have a team of other fantastic clinicians who do the same. But I started off as a chronic pain person. I mean, I still identify as a chronic pain person in many ways as a mind body person. I had tons of pain. I usually say it was like head, shoulders, knees and toes. It just started feeling like Humpty Dumpty. I think a lot of people, when they look back on their pain story can relate to this. Like there might be one incident and I can share mine that really sparked the throws of my pain journey.

00:05:46 Christie: But when I look back, like I was kind of always a thick-ish kid. Like I can't remember all kinds of symptoms that would come and go that I didn't necessarily seek treatment for when I was much younger. And through high school, I was super anxious, but I would not have used that word. That language was not French to me. So, I looking back, I think it was building for a really long time.

00:06:13 Jenny: Yeah. Yep. I can resonate with that.

00:06:16 Christie: Right. And it's interesting the way that it presents in childhood compared to adulthood, but there are some nuances there. It's not always strict pain but you can tell your nervous system and your immune system are working a little bit too hard.

00:06:30 Jenny: Yeah, absolutely.

00:06:33 Christie: But there was one incident that really set it off for me. So in undergraduate, I went to USC twice. So I went there for my undergraduate studies and my graduate studies. And when I was an undergrad, I did have knee pain, but when you have one symptom and it was only triggered by movement, I wasn't doing a ton of treatment for it. I would rest. I thought it was exercise induced. It's just tracking. Like there's something wrong with my knees. But there was a gap year that I had in between undergrad and grad school. And I took a gap year because I couldn't quite figure out what I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted to do grad school of some sort. Wasn't sure what I wanted to start. I was really stressed out coming out of undergrad because I ran very stressed out with the person. And I went to the gym to just get a workout in and I was trying to do, I don't know, I don't know who I thought I was this day because I was not particularly flexible and I tried to stretch into a split, like slowly.

00:07:27 Jenny: Okay.

00:07:28 Christie: And I just, I fell into it. Like it was not slowly at all. And I just kind of forced my legs into a, I did get to a split technically, but I literally tore my, what's the word? I tore my hamstring. There was a more specific spot. I always say broke my butt. It felt like I broke my butt. It's like ripped the hamstring muscle off my butt bone.

07:52 Jenny: Okay.

00:07:53 Christie: Which was an extremely painful acute injury.

00:07:57 Jenny: Yeah.

00:07:59 Christie: Definitely needed medical treatment. I did a lot.

00:08:02 Jenny: Did you say that you did get into the split position or you did?

00:08:06 Christie: Oh, yes, I did.

00:08:08 Jenny: You did.

00:08:08 Christie: And there was a moment where I was in excruciating pain, but I was also so impressed that I got down there. I was like, well, I am here. I have accomplished something. It just took me ripping my butt muscle off of its bone to get there.

00:08:20 Jenny: Ripping your body apart to make your goals come true. Got it. Okay.

00:08:26 Christie: That would be the title of my memoir from this period.

00:08:30 Jenny: Yeah.

00:08:32 Christie: So I really hurt myself but because I was in such an accumulation of anxiety and stress both over my lifetime and in this period where I was literally in a gap between what I want to do with my life and do I want to stay in Los Angeles and from the East Coast. What's my next move? So, I injured myself during a time of such intense fear and stress that the injury technically healed after about three to six months. And my pain was worse on my day of treatment graduation or what have you than it was the day that I injured myself. So once that began and you never really know how much you need your butt until you can't really use it.

00:09:15 Christie: It's like, I couldn't sit. I couldn't drive, I had to rearrange my entire life to be horizontal, essentially, I had to lie down a lot. So it's attempting to keep my little job that I had in my gap year. I was attempting to stay as engaged in my life as I could, but I really couldn't sit, walk or stand unless I was lying down, I was in a lot of pain. And I didn't know what was going on because all of my doctors were telling me your injury has healed. And then that's when this kind of strange messaging started in, like, maybe you're just really prone to injury or maybe your muscles are weaker than most people's or maybe your body is older internally than your age.

00:10:02 Christie: They had one doctor tell me you are, your body is twice as old as you are. And I was like, okay, so I'm 22. So my body's 44, so when I'm 44, it's gonna be like I'm 88. I was like, this is not a good trajectory. And so, the stress was mounting there. And then that's when Humpty Dumpty syndrome set in. It was like my neck started hurting the next year. My head started hurting a few weeks after that. That turned into vertigo and bilateral wrist pain. My knee pain had never gone away. That original thing that I had kind of kept an eye on through undergraduate.

00:10:37 Jenny: Oh, right.

00:10:38 Christie: And then it was just full blown. I had, I literally had pain from head to toe. I had no idea what was causing it. Had no central point person or practitioner that was able to help me understand the connection. So in my mind, I just had like a dozen desperate injuries.

00:10:57 Jenny: Yeah, you were Humpty Dumpty. I have never heard that reference and it's perfect.

00:11:03 Christie: It just, yeah. Cause every time you try to solve one thing, another one's hacks on.

00:11:10 Jenny: Yeah. Yeah, when you're not treating the right thing for sure. Yeah. Okay. So here you are, you're in this, you're just living your life. What you think is normal life, except for that you've been told your body is just a disaster, which is outside of your control. So you're just, I assume you're just coping at this point in time.

00:11:33 Christie: Just coping. The best I could, but it took a huge hit on my relationship to myself, to my relationships with friends. It was difficult to explain what I was going through because there was, I looked the same. And this was all during this period of what was meant to be a pause year for me, a chance to bring my stress level down, to get my bearings to know what to do. But I ran out the clock on that year and I had decided somewhere in this, I had, I'm going to go to grad school.

00:12:07 Christie: I'm going to go back to USC to get my masters in social work. And I began that journey with all of those pains symptoms. I started day one with all these different. I look like a bionic woman. I had braces on my knees, brace both my knees, both my wrist. I had a little heating pad that I wear on my neck. I had a little pillow that I'd carry around to put on my first of all, the desks in college campuses are designed for seven year olds, so even a...And someone without pain is not comfortable in those desks.

00:12:36 Christie: But it was miserable to me. So I started off in that much pain. And again, the stress level was just going up and up and up. So that program is a two year program. That first year was spent in horrific pain. Trying lots of different types of treatments. None of them were really making sense, but going into my second year of grad school and I had put enough together to recognize that there has to be something about my stress level that's at least making the pain worse. I wasn't understanding it as causal, but I was seeing it as a correlate.

00:13:12 Jenny: Yeah, it's a big difference.

00:13:14 Christie: Big difference. It opened my mind to it, but I still was not confident that there was a way to be out of pain, but I was curious about a way to lower my pain.

00:13:23 Jenny: Yes.

00:13:25 Christie: And that second year of grad school just threw luck and serendipity. I'm so grateful for this. I met Alan Gordon who works at USC and Alan Gordon is the director of the pain psychology center. He spearheaded pain repressing therapy, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. And when he saw I mean, he met me he was like, what's happening? He can see physically all of these like braces that I had on or what have you and he introduced me to the world of mind-body healing, opened the door for me, gave me my first Sarno book, and it was just off to the races from that point. It clicked really, really, really fast. I felt super warm and receptive to the idea. I had a ton of support in terms of getting the resources. Once that door was finally opened, it was like kind of a deluge of positive information, and things started coming back together really quickly for me.

00:14:20 Jenny: And we just go back one second. I just, what you talked about with the importance of recognizing that the emotions or the stress is causal. I think that's so important to recognize that it's the cause of it and therefore what we're targeting because I remember in my own journey and I've forgotten about this until you said it, that at one point in time I recognized, uh-oh, this is related to how I respond to stress or this is related to stress.

00:14:50 Jenny: And I remember just sobbing and telling a friend, I broke myself because of my inability to handle emotions in my life. I broke my emotional system. And so, I mean, that's such a judgmental thing to do to yourself to think I caused all this and I've ruined myself, but to realize that it's not being influenced by my stress level. It is caused by it and therefore I can adapt and I can reverse this and change this. It just takes, it gives you the power back to realize it's not just the cause, it's the cure too.

00:15:31 Christie: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think a lot of people relate to that initial resistance and difficulty with accepting that, exploring that, exploring the idea of stress as causal because of this overwhelming recognition did. Did I do this? What was I missing this whole time? Why didn't, how did I get to this point? Like it's so severe and debilitating. And it's tough when our brain takes us down that path. It's just an unbelievable lack of information in the medical field. A lot of us are open to it once the information is given to us, but we're not presented with the information coupled with likely an emotional toolkit that was missing some pretty important pieces. None of, neither of those things are our. We can eventually take responsibility for them, but they're not our doing.

00:16:19 Jenny: Yeah. Okay. So we were, you're creating a connection with Allan. He's opening your eyes to all this stuff. And what was that journey like for you?

00:16:37 Christie: So the summer before I started the clinical internship, I did clinical internship with him. My second year, my final year at that grad program. I was reading the books. I was reading all the books we read, right? So the Sarno book, the Schubiner book, all of it was clicking really fast. So by the time I started my clinical internship, just the knowledge, and I feel really lucky. I know this isn't the case for everyone. Just the knowledge of what was going in my body probably reduced my symptoms by about 70%.

00:17:06 Jenny: Yeah. Okay.

00:17:06 Christie: And which, and for anyone listening, I cannot emphasize this enough. That is not the case for most people in the self-recovery space. I had a lot of resources on my side. I had a lot of luck and privilege and support and things that allowed me to work through my relationship with fear in a way that I think was smoother than, I don't wanna draw comparisons. It felt somewhat, I felt lucky. And for anyone listening, I cannot emphasize enough that is not always the case. And if having the knowledge of what's going on in your body does not create symptom reduction.

00:17:41 Christie: You are in the vast majority of cases. That's okay. It's workable. It's just a starting place.

000:17:46 Jenny: Right.

00:17:47 Christie: For me, it was really powerful. And again, I literally was working at the pain psychology center with a pioneer in this field. So could I be more lucky? No. That's another reason why some of that was really smooth, but the remaining 30% of symptom reduction that I was working through, I was actually doing while I was actively learning to treat patients from the same perspective. So it's just wild year of a lot of growth curves, a little bit of imposter syndrome, but it was a neat space for me because everything that I was using with my clients, I was using for myself. So it felt like double the exposure, double the practice. And it was through that final 30% of symptom reduction where I did a lot of my self-compassion work, let's say like understanding the connection.

00:18:35 Christie: Not just back to that knee pain that I had in undergraduate or that injury that I had when I was going into grad school, but all the way back to, oh, I have been relating to my nervous system in an incredibly intense and harsh way for as long as I can remember. And until that stiff, there is always going to be another symptom. It will just iterate and iterate and iterate. And that's a yeah.

00:19:01 Jenny: Can you unpack that? For the listeners, like this idea you've been relating to your nervous system in this harsh way for so long. For most people, what does that mean?

00:19:18 Christie: I was mean to myself. I was harsh with myself. I treated myself with a level of intensity that I don't think anyone deserves. Is this, I never said no. I said, yes to everything, anything. I did not know what a boundary was. I had no upper limit to my productivity threshold. So I would push myself at the pace. They're like, this is crazy to think back on, but if I, and this is true, like if I were at the grocery store or if I were even in my home and I was, had the opportunity to run instead of walk, like if no one was watching at the grocery store and I was like, well, I need to get to the end of the aisle. I'm not kidding. I would literally just start running because I could, it's like, well, I could move faster. So why don't I?

00:20:15 Christie: And that was the same thing that was happening to me internally. This idea of move faster, do more, keep going. And yes, yes, yes. There's just, I had no connection to what my nervous system felt like. So I had no upper limit. Like there was no, when I would say no, when? When my body broke? When I was crying on the floor in pain? No, I'd still say yes to things. I was still saying, sure, I'll take on more clients. Or still, sure, I'll, whatever it was.

00:20:46 Christie: So recognizing that the pressure I was putting on myself, the expectations that I had of myself, the way that my entire compass was built around doing, performing and completing that all had to get dismantled for me to start building my compass, my internal compass, the compass of my nervous system and back around prioritizing my wellbeing, being in touch with what my body was feeling. Like on a moment to moment basis, being in touch with what it felt like to speak to myself in those intense ways, being in touch with what it felt like to have those standards of myself. That was where the bulk of my work was.

00:21:27 Jenny: Yeah. That self pressure that we put on ourselves, we get that from so many places, right? But where do you see it primarily? Do you see it in like an external source of the family or do you see it in culture and just this driven culture that we live in, the more we do, the more we're seen, the more we perform, the more valuable we are. Let's just ask this, in your patients, do you find that mostly from that sort of external source or from family pressure?

00:22:04 Christie:I love that question and that you're identifying both places. I would say the culture piece, the toxicity of our culture and the productivity focus that we have at least in a lot of parts of the states and a lot of places worldwide. That's so strong that I would say it takes an active force in your family or within your community system working against that, but not be negatively impacted because it's just, it's the current, that's where the stream is going. So I would say it can be worsened if within your family unit, you also have people who kind of trend towards intensity. But in the absence of someone really buffering you from that, which is not like, that's not nothing like that, that's someone in your life who's kind of already taken the step to have intentionality around slowing down.

00:23:02 Jenny: Yep.

00:23:03 Christie: In the absence of that, I think by and large, people are going to be impacted by the going by the doing.

00:23:09 Jenny: Yeah. I'm just wanting to ask you all sorts of questions. How has that been for you in the Better Mind Clinic? Is it Clinic? Better Mind Clinic?

00:23:23 Christie: Better Mind Center.

00:23:24 Jenny: Center. Okay. Yeah. How has that been for you balancing that pressure? Because you're something amazing and so good and we need it. I think I'm in part asking because I've had this struggle too of like, okay, I'm starting something and then, and then keeping that perfection. I'm a little bit at bay and this. How's that been for you?

00:23:52 Christie: I would say it's been ongoing. It's something I continue to work on and my body hasn't stopped talking to me. So we, as a group, do, the other clinicians on my team, we work to have specific meetings where we are checking in on each other's nervous systems, just having a pause and saying, what's coming up, what's coming up for you in terms of your caseload, what's coming up for you with just sitting with other people who are in intensity or in pain. So we work to have a conversation around the impact of this work in general on our, on our systems by and large, people who are in this field are prone to the same types of sensitivities that lead to the development of chronic pains. We need to be careful healing space. And then also apart from just the impact of sitting with people who are walking through this themselves, there's also the impact.

00:24:50 Christie: There's no end to the work. Like there's millions of people suffering from chronic pain. So we could both think we could talk for hours and we would never run out of ideas in terms of where else can we go with this? Who else can we help? How else can we help? How else can we iterate? And it's a balance for me and it's an ongoing practice of letting that feel exciting, letting that feel even buzzy in my system in some ways. Like I am drawn to that. I enjoy the rev and the pull.

00:25:23 Jenny: Yeah.

00:25:25 Christie: And then making that commitment over and over again, not to abandon my connection with myself and my body and to listen, if I don't listen, my body will get louder every single time. And I'm grateful for that. It is a sharp, it's a sharp system. If I start having some tension in my shoulder and I ignore it, it will grow, it will grow, it will grow, it will grow into my neck, it will grow into my head, it will grow into vertical, like it's my body, my body won't abandon me.

00:25:51 Jenny: Yeah, sure won't. Yeah, it's got your back for sure.

00:25:56 Christie: It's got my back. And it's like, it's just a matter of listening. It's better for me to listen when the murmurs are quiet because my body knows how to get loud and it will.

00:26:06 Jenny: Yeah, yeah, love it. Thank you, thank you for answering that question.

00:26:10 Christie: Yeah, yeah, it's tough.

00:26:15 Jenny: It is tough and I think part of the reason I just asked that is because both your listeners and my listeners are on this journey. And it can be so, I think it can become disheartening when your body keeps talking to you and you feel like, oh, well, if my body's talking to me, that means that I failed and I'm doing this journey wrong. And in reality, it's not, it's talking to you and helping us to do this in a healthy way that's really fulfilling for me, which ends up being fulfilling for the other people around me also. And we're having to battle that message we're getting from culture. I think even from people who love us, who are part of that stream like you're talking about, we're getting very personal messages in our own lives. So I guess to take heart and know that this is the journey we're on. We're in it. We're all experiencing it, you, me, and everybody listening.

00:27:23 Christie: Absolutely, absolutely. And people may have different opinions on this. This might feel disempowering to some and empowering to others, but I, for me, I've accepted a long time ago, my nervous system is always going to be sensitive. I'm always gonna be the person if something startles me, like if someone pops in this room and I wasn't expecting, my response is going to be 10 times bigger than anyone sitting next to me. It's just how I am. I'm wired that way, I was trained into that in certain ways, and I believe I have drastically lowered my baseline, like my stress level and my anxiety level has come down at baseline, and my baseline is always sensitive.

00:28:05 Christie: And that just it is what it is. Like it doesn't work for me to constantly be battling against that. I'm being frustrated with, Oh my gosh, one day of moving too quickly through my meetings and already my body is talking to me, like having that kind of resistance just doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel, I can go in a downward spiral pretty quickly around that, just so much frustration. So it helps me to just accept like that. My body has my back. Quickly, profoundly, and sensitively. And that's how I am. I just need to listen.

00:28:49 Jenny: Yeah, and I think you're right. For people listening, for some people, that's incredibly empowering to know, yeah, I can just thank my nervous system for sending me a message that this was startling or life is a little bit hard right now. And instead of responding with self judgment of like, I cannot believe I am in a flare up right now. Like, how dare I've done years of work. And so yeah, I can see how it would be empowering to say, yeah, I'm human and I live in a broken world. And of course I'm going to have. Reactions in my nervous system to things that are happening. Well, also I just want to take note of the hope that you're talking about though, which is that threshold.

00:29:38 Jenny: We're not talking about staying in a place of hypervigilance and constantly protecting ourselves because we are in danger. We are safe. And we can lower that to our standard is that we're safe. And sometimes our nervous system says, Oh, am I? You know? Yeah. Let's confirm that.

00:30:06 Christie: That's a hugely important qualifier. I think there's a, there is a massive difference between being in chronic pain, when you can't make much of your symptoms, they're not rising and falling in a way that helps you develop insight, you can't listen to a bunch of noise, it's just too much when your pain is all the time. All you can gain from that is my anxiety is through the roof, my stress is through the roof, I need to work on reappraising all of this. When you're out of that chronic loop, for me, I'm out of the chronic loop. If I have rises and falls, if my body starts talking to me, I can make something of that because my baseline is now quiet. So when the murmur starts, I go, oh, there has been a change. My attention is now being directed to whatever that hack needs my focus or attention or maybe me, I'll just be my focus or attention. And I think those things are really, really different.

00:31:02 Jenny: I don't know why, but the picture is coming up for me if you're out to a group dinner and like everybody starts talking to you at the same time. And and you're like, I didn't hear anybody because you're all talking. Whereas when you're sitting down with a friend and they have something to say, you can hear when they start talking. And I think that's how I picture what you're what you're talking about is being able to get the message. Yeah.

00:31:28 Christie: I love that.

00:31:20 Jenny: Yeah. okay, so at what point in time did you start working with Alan Gordon, Howard Schubiner around pain reprocessing therapy, the boulder back pain study? Let's dive into that. I was, I have had a lot of people on this show, including like Howard Schubiner and I don't know, not Alan, but I actually don't think we've talked about the boulder back pain study on this show. So I would love to hear your,.. I don't know. What you would want listeners to walk away with understanding about that study.

00:32:10 Christie: Awesome. Okay. So when I joined along with Alan, the makings of pain reprocessing therapy had been in the works for years, both due to his contributions and many others, Howard's. I mean, [inaudible] we could draw this all the way back to start on and even before that. But the idea of naming it and packaging it as a set of techniques that we call pain reprocessing therapy that started in about 2017. So in 2017, 2018, we ran this study out of UC Boulder out of tour Wager lab, tour Wagers lab there under the direction of Yoni Ashar, and we had a chance to take this treatment process that we knew worked because we had been doing it with our patients for in clinical practice for years.

00:33:05 Christie: And we sharpened it up and said, this is now a set of techniques that looks like this and progresses like this. We call it pain reprocessing therapy. Let's test it against an open label placebo. It was just essentially saltwater injections into the back and treatment as usual, meaning people did not get any new treatments. They were just doing whatever else they had been doing previous to joining the study.

00:33:32 Jenny: Specific to their back pain.

00:33:35 Christie: Specific to their back pain. Pain reprocessing therapy can be used for any sensation in any part of the body that you are considering to be neural circuit in nature. For the purpose of a randomized controlled trial, we're going to limit it to back pain. So there are 150 people in the study at large, about 50 people went into each group, treatment as usual placebo and the pain reprocessing therapy group. For the 50 people who ended up in pain reprocessing therapy, they got nine session, one on one sessions the first session was with Howard Schubiner. So Dr. Schubiner's role was making sure that the people enrolling in our study had the type of back pain that we were going to treat.

00:34:17 Christie: So we're ruling out anything that's massively wrong with the back, a structural problem, a pathological problem, something that should have been treated medically long ago. I think out of the fifth, I think there were like 53, 55 max people that attempted to come into that were randomized to pain reprocessing therapy group. Only a couple of them met qualifications for structural disorders, which speaks to the prevalence, right? Like if you're just taking 55 people at random. 50 of them were neural circuit in nature. So just speaks and just how many people are dealing with this.

00:34:53 Jenny: So it's interesting because when this study came out I took it to My mentor actually and asked her to help me understand it some of the language some of the more complex language and and we got an argument because the way that she interpreted it was that because of that filtering process, that that meant that there were no structural abnormalities that were part of the study. Does my clarification make sense? So, for her that meant nobody with herniated discs was allowed into the study. Could you just talk about that a little bit?

00:35:37 Christie: Oh yeah, we have people with all kinds of findings on their MRIs, for sure. We had one client and Alan and his book that had literally an S curve scoliosis. Like the spine was literally contorted. So what Dr. Schubiner was doing was not saying if anything shows up on your MRI, you have structural pain and you don't qualify for pain reprocessing therapy, the vast majority of take the study aside, the vast majority of adults walking through space have normal abnormalities in their spine by the time people are 30 over 50% of asymptomatic 30 year olds have disc degeneration. Disc degeneration just means your body is getting older.

00:36:22 Christie: Like from the, that's true of a hundred percent of people and we all have disc degeneration. And same as two pro-lacta things, right? Like disc protrusions, disc bulges. So there's all kinds of things that came up on the MRI, but what we're looking for is, are those normal abnormalities causal to your pain? Or are they incidental findings? Like we have wrinkles on our skin. You can see them, they're abnormalities. We didn't start off with wrinkles, but they don't hurt. They have absolutely nothing to do with what our body is feeling physically.

00:36:55 Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. I'm gonna segue a little bit here, but it just seems like the right time. What kind of language have you heard doctors use, specifically back doctors, that if it scare patients into, well, scare them into fear that causes pain. Do you have any examples of language that's unhelpful?

00:37:22 Christie: Sure. Fragile, your spine is fragile. Your spine is a spine, or we could talk about it. We'll use it as an example of back pain, the scab in any part of the body. Fragile, prone to injury. We hear that all the time. You're just prone to injury, radiating pain is used very frequently and accurately. The idea of I found a disc bulge up here, two millimeter disc bulge, you have pain way over here. It's just radiating pain from the disc bulge. It's just radiating down there. What no, it has literally nothing to do with the disc bulge. But if you find something in the MRI, and then other things just like big language around what are actually small.

00:38:08 Christie: Incidents like a tiny disc bulge doesn't need to be...You don't you don't need to say you don't need to say that like you can note it in the report. But you don't need to make a big deal of oh my God. This something is bulging out of your spine or you have a your bone is great. Your bones are graining on each other. There's a bone-on-bone problem here. But like It's not coming from malice, but there's so many medical providers that are trained to just find again, it's essentially like a wrinkle on the inside of your body. Like imagine if someone saw a wrinkle on the corner of my eyes and they're like, oh my God, that's huge. It's like a crater. That must hurt so badly. What are you talking about? Like it's just enormous.

00:38:50 Jenny: I love you, yes. Yeah, there's so much fear mongering around the language and you're right, it's not, if you don't understand pain neuroscience, then it doesn't hurt to say those things. But when you understand the role of this, I mean, they're basically just scaring you right into pain. Bless their hearts. I want to add to the end of that. Yeah, yep. Okay, thank you.

00:39:16 Christie: And that degenerative, I think of all of the words I've heard, the one that's most common and I think scares people. One of the ones that scares people the most is that idea of my spine is degenerating. I'm degenerative this idea that I'm in this much pain now and it's just crumbling before my eyes as I age, that word freaks people out and I think it's wholly unhelpful.

00:39:43 Jenny: Yeah, yep, absolutely. Okay, okay, so you've got 50.

00:39:48 Christie: Yes, we've got 50 people who randomized in. Yes, they get one, it's a screening call with Dr. Schubiner, it's also an educational call with Dr. Schubiner. So he's helping people understand, hey, there's, the brain plays a role in all pain experiences. Here's what I'm seeing in your medical records. Here's what I'm, here's the model with that, with which we work. The brain is responsible for creating sense. They can't, the brain has the potential to create any sensation at any part of the body. Your medical record is clear. This is where we're going here. You're going to be linked up with either Alan or Christie– me. So Alan and I were the treating psychotherapists. He did sort of a warm hand off to us.

00:40:31 Christie: And for those 50 people, we met that the clients met with either Alan or myself eight times over the course of four weeks. So we met with them twice a week for 50 minute sessions doing psychotherapy, doing a very targeted form of psychotherapy where we are educating them about the brain based nature of pain, helping them gather evidence to understand this model as it specifically applies to their case. Helping them cognitively understand and conceptualize their pain differently from there's something wrong to my body, eight to my body is adaptive and resilient. There are sensations that I'm feeling that are non-dangerous and safe. 

00:41:16 Christie: Helping them to physically, physiologically respond to their sensations differently through the use of meditative techniques like somatic tracking, where we're bringing their attention to the fear-inducing stimuli of their pain and working to down regulate their nervous system at the same time. Doing a little bit of work around helping them address any other sort of emotional threats in their periphery that might be leading to the up regulation of their nervous system, which contributes to higher pain levels. 

00:41:45 Jenny: Oh, so you did touch on the emotional components of that. So I assume you're talking about protective personality traits and self pressure and that type of thing. 

00:41:59 Christie: Yes, we were limited in that we had eight sessions.

00:42:00 Jenny: Yeah. 

00:42:01 Christie:  But the bridge is pretty clear when you get someone's focus like that twice a week for four weeks and we're having so many conversations around threat and perceived threat. The way that the brain has no ability to distinguish the difference between real threat and perceived threat. And we have a really strong reaction to both of them. And we don't have any ability to gauge in the moment, like our body responds quickly. 

00:42:27 Christie: We don't have the ability to distinguish between psychological, emotional threat and physical threat. Like pain is the output, but no matter what sort of threat is input, there's a pretty clear bridge over to, well, what else in your surroundings, in your environment, in your environment might be offsetting these danger signals. So we did get to touch on it. 

00:42:48 Jenny: Okay. Yeah. 

00:42:50 Christie:  And interestingly, and kind of hopefully I think when we think about needing to get this treatment, to literally millions of people and not, and not everyone in the world has resources for years of psychotherapy. It was not something we camped out on for very long. I mean, we only had eight sessions with them and we had to start square one. So yes, we talked about emotions, but a lot of it is teaching people the model, teaching them to understand when you're perceiving information in this way, it threw a threatening lens when whatever it is again in your periphery, if it's a mother-in-law that you is you're scaring you or you have difficulty drawing a boundary with, or if it is your work environment that's incredibly stressful or fill in the blank, if you can teach them the framework of when threat is being input, pain is the output, the hope is that they're able to also take that framework and use it on their own. 

00:43:45 Jenny: Yes. Yeah, I love it. Okay. That lends to a question that I wanted to ask and you're kind of answering, but let's just get more pinpointed. What is the difference? How do you see yourself different than a psychotherapist that is helping somebody work through emotional parts of their lives? So somebody comes to you or they come to, they go to just a psychotherapist. What's the difference between those two things? And part of the reason I'm asking this question is for people who are listening, what should they be looking for? If they're looking for some therapy, one-on-one, what are they looking for if they also have symptoms, chronic symptoms? 

00:44:29 Christie:  Great question. So I want to know how things work. I think a lot of people are comforted by understanding why are we working on this right now in treatment. As I think I had this experience as a chronic pain patient, I went to some therapist who said they specialize in chronic pain. She never brought it up. She was like, "Oh, your neck hurts. What was your childhood like?" But there was no connection. 

00:44:55 Christie:  I would tell her a story about what happened when I was eight years old, and then I'd leave the room being like, "Is that just supposed to kind of buy us? Oh sister, impacting my pain levels?" There is absolutely something to be said about getting an emotional shape. There is a way of reducing your anxiety levels that can have a positive effect on your pain levels. So it's not for nothing when people do more general emotional processing work in therapy. I like to know how things work. So pain reprocessing therapy is a clear framework for understanding how we perceive threat and essentially the world around us, in addition to how we perceive sensation. 

00:45:35 Christie:  So the backbone of this treatment says there are sensations in your body that you had previously been proceeding as dangerous pain means something's wrong. I need to get treatment. I need to rest. I need to ice. And you're shifting to pain is a sensation that feels dangerous, but it's actually safe. I can think about it in comforting terms. I can conceptualize my body as strong and I can respond to the sensation in a down regulating way. I don't need to avoid that sensation. I can explore it all I want. And that same framework is used to process any other fear inducing stimuli. 

00:46:09 Christie:  So if you are afraid of the emotion of sadness, then we're gonna talk about an example of a situation that may make you sad or we're going to understand the context for which you developed your fear of sadness, we're going to notice how your body responds when sadness starts to come on. Does it lock up? Does your pain kick up? Do you start feeling fluttery? Do you start just kind of numbing out? And then we're going to help you attend to that sense that whatever sensation is coming up for you in the experience of that emotion, we're going to help you experience that is safe. 

00:46:41 Christie:  We're going to move you towards it. We're going to explore it the same way that we explored your pain sensation. No more avoidance, no more fear. We're gonna help you reappraise all of these things, the sensations inside your body, as safe and non-threatening, and as many things as we can help you appraise outside of your body, as safer, safer, or non-threatening or less threatening. 

00:47:03 Jenny: Love it. So if you're going to a traditional therapist, you're gonna talk through each one of those detailed scenarios, and it's dragged out, and becomes a long process. When we can learn the framework, basically it empowers us to do a lot of this work with a broad stroke, right? Like we get to understand it in a big picture way that just really empowers us to move forward in those detailed ways without having to do all these sessions. Is that fair?

00:47:47 Christie: Broad, the way that you just describe that is perfect and I love what you're saying around it's a broad stroke. It might not be easy but it simplifies it considerably. 

00:47:52 Jenny: Yeah it is not easy. You are you are and I want to just come on record agreeing with you. It is so empowering to have those tools and to understand how it works but just because you have the tools doesn't mean that you don't have to use them and do the work. 

00:48:08 Christie: Absolutely. And just because you have massively for so many reasons, not the least of which is there are times in your life where the situation around you is frightening. There are times where you're in a pinch or there are identities of you to walk through the world feeling more unsafe than other identities of humans, right? Like I'm a white person. I'm a white woman. There's some stuff that comes with that there's some privilege or some safety. And there's also some threats.

00:48:40 Christie: And that can iterate in a million different ways in terms of how we walk through space. So the way that we're perceiving the world around us, we have some ownership of it and that can feel really empowering. The way I'm taking in information, I want to learn no matter what's coming at me to have a sense of safety in my body. It's like really internalize that sense of empowerment. Not everyone is up against the same threat level. 

00:49:02 Christie:  So either situationally, circumstantially, who you thought might be shifting or could have to do with who you are and how the world perceives you and your identity. So I just want to mention that as well as a legitimate and sometimes difficult barrier that a lot of this treatment is about internalizing your sense of safety. There's a lot that happens when you leave the therapy room. 

00:49:25 Jenny: Yeah, there's just this balance of strength and empowerment of realizing this is perceived that threat and not actually in danger and has also this gentleness that of which we treat ourselves of but yes. Wow, there is some things in life that is really difficult and maybe things that I'm perceiving are real. And doesn't mean I have to react in danger, but I can be gentle with myself and recognize this is difficult and that treating ourselves with grace and in those moments kind of that you're talking about specifically an example, so.. yeah. Okay. Where are we? 

00:50:10 Christie: I can kind of wrap up where the study landed us. What we found out.

00:50:13 Jenny: Great. Let's do that. 

00:50:16 Christie: So by the end of those eight weeks, excuse me, eight sessions, it was only four weeks. It's crazy. 98% of the participants randomized into pain reprocessing therapy improved their pain scores, reduced their pain scores and 66% of them were pain free or virtually pain free. So people who started with all different, all different bodies, all different things quote unquote wrong with those bodies, all different lengths of time that they were in pain. I believe the average length for the person with the pain was 11 years. 

00:50:47 Christie: By the end of those four weeks, 66% of them were just out of pain and those results held after a year. And that was compared to 20% of people who 66% were pain-free in the PRT group, those 20% in the placebo injection group, and 10% in the treatment as usual group. 

00:51:11 Jenny: Okay. Interesting. Which the treatment as usual group may have a little bit of placebo effect, right, in that one too. 

00:51:19 Christie: Yeah, right. Right, and there was really no regulation on what they were doing. Some of those people might have been getting some form of something useful. It was just they could do whatever they were doing. 

00:51:27 Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, great. Okay, so hopefully that's hope for a lot of people listening who, well, it's not, the thing is that study is not just for people with back pain, but it is, like you were saying, but it is encouraging for people with back pain. Cause we always want to hear about our own symptoms, you know? 

00:51:50 Christie: Yeah, they can be generalized for sure. 

00:51:54 Jenny: Okay, so I forgot to mention this to you before we started, but I did ask my listeners if they had any questions for you. 

00:52:03 Christie: So fun. 

00:52:06 Jenny: I asked last night, so they didn't have very much time, but I got two questions and a comment, and I do want to prioritize those. I know I had another question that we talked about talking about, but I want to put a pin in that if that's all right. 

00:52:19 Christie: Of course. 

00:52:19 Jenny: And we'll go to the question first. Well, the first one was just a comment. And the person wrote in all caps, " I LOVE HER."

00:52:29 Christie: Wow, I love that person right back. I love that person. That's the kind of hype I need on a Friday. 

00:52:35 Jenny: It's funny because I loved her back too. Like I was like, yes. It just was really sweet. Okay, and here's the other two questions. So first one is what are the three best practices to incorporate on a regular basis for pain-free maintenance? And is it necessarily to do them daily? I had a mild flare up and started asking myself if there's anything to trouble me. There was a couple minor irritations. How can we affect what's happening at the subconscious level? There's a lot of questions in there, but...

00:53:10 Christie: Those are great questions. And I'm happy, those are great questions. And I'm happy to think of my kind of top three top maintenance tips that I still use. This is overstated and overshared for a reason. If you don't have some sort of meditative practice, I highly encourage you that you find one. And that does not need to look the same for all people. If you like mindfulness meditation where you're focusing on your breath for 10 minutes, amazing. If you like taking a walk in a mindful way where you keep bringing yourself back over and over to sights and sounds and smells of your walk, that's a meditative practice.

00:53:48 Christie: If you love somatic tracking, you just can't get enough of it. And you want to keep using that even after you're out of paint. 

00:53:55 Jenny: Wonderful. 

00:53:55 Christie: But the body, in my opinion, needs to be brought in, in some way that helps you build connection and create a safe pocket within you. And if we, in the absence of that, I think all of this is much more difficult to maintain. 

00:54:14 Jenny: Yeah. 

00:54:14 Christie: So that would be my first suggestion. Secondly, and this can also be done in a lot of different ways. We don't want you to lose the thread in terms of where your mind is going throughout the day. So once you're out of the throes of chronic pain, you've done a lot of work to help bring your brain away from pain specific fear thoughts. So we're getting you out of that rumination around what's happening in my body and how is this going to interrupt my day and what do I need to do to make it through that meeting or that date or whatever. But your brain is still gonna have a tendency to go certain directions. 

00:54:47 Christie: If you have a tendency to go towards worry or if you have a tendency to go towards intensity or pressure or criticism, like we don't want to lose our awareness of that in a really simple way of maintaining your awareness is a couple of times a day. You can just build this into your morning or your evening. You can do it at lunchtime. It doesn't matter. It's stopping and literally asking yourself where has my mind gone? And just noticing like in moments of stillness and notice moments of quiet, where has my mind's been? Where have I been? Where have I been living today? 

00:55:24 Christie: Because whatever we're telling ourselves all day is impacting how we're feeling all the time. So when you get out of treatment, it's easy to just let the chatter resume and to lose that sort of analysis and awareness of where your brain is going. But we don't want you to lose that. So check in with yourself. And a couple times a day is great. If you can do this at the top of every hour, or just start working in an awareness, it's even better. Just checking and where is my mind? Where is my mind going? Where have I been the past hour, mentally? 

00:55:56 Jenny: I like that question. I tend to ask myself, how are you doing? 

00:56:01 Christie: It's a great one. 

00:56:04 Jenny: But I think that's more like, I think that gets at a heart level, and your question gets at a thought level too, which those things are definitely linked. I'm going to seal that one. I like it. 

00:56:17 Christie: And then this is... I make a personal push for prioritizing the start of your day and having slowness at the start of your day. If your nervous system resets in some ways overnight, we have a chance to input some data within that first 30 minutes or so. So I suggest not using... We make a push for not using your phone in the first 30 minutes or your computer or whatever tablet sort of rushing you with information and helping set up your nervous system for the day by creating a slow and comfortable pace for the first 30 minutes. I think one of the worst things that we can do for our nervous system is start our day from a place of rush, like immediately offsetting your anxiety. When we feel like we're behind our nervous system is going to start rushing internally because it feels like you're running from threat and you're not winning. The threat's coming from behind you. So I make a big push for comfortable warnings. 

00:57:18 Jenny: Yeah. I cannot agree with you more. People think I'm crazy, but in the middle of my healing journey, I decided to write down 10 things I didn't like, that other people like and thought, I'm going to work toward three of them. One of them was mornings. I didn't like mornings. And so because I didn't like mornings that, and I didn't like getting up for many reasons, I left myself 12 minutes to get out of the house. And that included making my coffee. And I did it. And I was good at it. And I was on time to work, you know. But I was dysregulated and stressed. 

00:58:00 Jenny: And so in learning to like my mornings included getting up earlier and having quiet time for me that's with God and enjoying my coffee, like sitting at my kitchen counter, you know? And so I just agree with Christy. Yes. 

00:58:21 Christie: That's so cool. You set up an actual established practice towards the goal. And how neat to hear that your preference actually changed, that you became in some ways like a morning person. 

00:58:34 Jenny: Well, I was like, oh, well, if neuroplasticity is a thing, and my brain can perceive danger, it can also perceive to like things and I have way more power over making my life enjoyable than I've ever been taught. 

00:58:53 Christie: So cool. 

00:58:54 Jenny: Yeah, so it definitely, I don't know, it just changed. There's so many things in our lives that we have to do on a daily basis. And if we can choose to be present in them and enjoy them, like it's just helpful for our bodies. 

00:59:07 Christie: Everything. 

00:59:09 Jenny: Okay, so those are your three, did you have any other comments about the questions that were part of that first question? 

00:59:17 Christie: Can you remind me of some of the other pieces if I didn't address them? 

00:59:20 Jenny: Yeah, let's see. What are the three best practices to incorporate on a regular basis? We did that. Is it necessary to do them daily? I had a mild flare up. I started asking myself if there's anything troubling me. There were a couple minor irritations. How can we affect what's happening at the unconscious or the subconscious level? 

00:59:24 Christie: Okay. It is not necessary to do these things daily as a rigid rule, but the more you're in practice with yourself, the more you're gonna want to do them because you're gonna notice the absence of them makes you feel badly. So there's kind of a running start that you need in the beginning, anytime you're developing any new habit, like if you're out of shape physically and you're like, I want to start speed walking or what have you those first few attempts during the, I didn't like that. That's not feel good. I do not want to do it again tomorrow, but once you're in the practice of it, then you're getting the benefits of it. So you're drawn to do it more. 

01:00:18 Christie: Anytime we're being rigid with ourselves, we're trending back towards that intensity. So listen, listen to your body. If for whatever reason. You can't or don't want to or don't feel well enough to, of course, absolutely skip the day. That's how you're meeting your safety needs is by the ref. And then maybe you'll be feeling better enough tomorrow. In terms of the keeping track of stuff in your unconscious, you're in good company. None of us know what's going on in our unconscious. That's perfectly normal, but the more that you would stay in touch with how your body is semantically feeling and the more that you develop an awareness of where your brain is going throughout the day.

01:00:55 Christie: Somewhere in between those things where your mind is going, what your body is doing, is the impact of everything that's in our unconscious. So take a little bit of the pressure off of knowing what you were blind to and put the focus on committing to the impacts of that in where your mind is going and how your body is feeling. 

01:01:16 Jenny: That's fantastic. Yeah. Pay attention to what we can be aware of instead of digging for the thing that we have no Ability to find. Okay next question yeah since learning about mind-body syndrome and the impacts of fear and emotions I feel like I'm... I think this is supposed to say, I feel like I'm afraid of fear, stress and worry and it's prolonging my symptoms. How can I better balance understanding the psychological contributors to my symptoms without getting quote in my head about them and worrying about whether the stressful situations coming up will cause a flare, whether I'm fearing too much, etc. So fear of fear. 

01:02:02 Christie: Fear of fear. Well, yeah, that's the spiral. Yeah, relate to it well. There's a short answer. I want to get through my long answer. It's not too long. I think humans in general have a preference for a known threat as opposed to an unknown threat. So if I were to tell you right now, there's something in your space, which by the way, it's beautiful. I have been very calm the whole time looking at your little physical space that you're in. I would tell you, there's something in there that could really severely harm you. Then I zip my web, I tell you, it's a totally unknown threat. 

01:02:46 Christie: What would you do? Where would you start? Is it something in the air? Is it something on the ground? Is someone, is someone going to rush in and harm me? Is it expired food in my lunchbox? That's good. How can I make a plan? How can I army up if I have no idea what the threat is versus there's a very tiny poisonous spider on the upper right quadrant of your back window. I wouldn't be super jazzed about the spider, but I would be able to make a plan to keep myself safe. Yeah. I think zero people would choose the unknown threat. What would you do? How do you prepare yourself? 

01:03:24 Christie: It's extremely unsettling to not know where the threat is. Anytime our danger system goes off, the first thing our brain wants to do is understand what the problem is so that you can move towards safety. Why do I bring this up? Wanna be very clear. No one wants to be in pain. Pain sucks. You and I both know this. It takes over your life and your brain. We do not create it. We are not at fault for it. Most of the time we are extremely motivated to get out of it. And there is something biologically attractive to the known threat of neural circuit pain. You can draw a box around all of the thoughts that come up as it relates to pain and your recovery, like this person is saying, it's a never ending pool of worry thoughts. 

01:04:13 Christie: You not only are afraid of the sense of the, you're only afraid, you're afraid of the fear. And then you're afraid of the fact that you can't get rid of your fear of the fear and you're critical of that. And then you bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce of all day long, you can spend balancing your brain around this problem of neural circuit pain. And I'm not saying that's comfortable. In fact, it's incredibly uncomfortable, both physically and mentally. But on a biological level, we are going to be drawn to that over allowing our brains to leave that contained box and start bouncing around to all the other uncertainties of our lives, our environment, and the world around us. 

01:04:49 Christie: Things we both know about and we don't know about. Again, our unconscious has tons of uncertainties. We literally don't know what's back there. And then life, living life on earth comes with tons of uncertainties. So there is something that we prefer threat. What we can do about that on a day to day basis is helping ourselves better understand the mechanism with which our brain pulls us into that box. And then practicing this idea of it is possible for me to tolerate the unknown, it is possible for me to stay in this moment of uncertainty, it's possible for me to redirect my brain back towards again, away from that box of pain related thoughts and see what comes up for me next. 

01:05:36 Christie: I can tolerate that. I can tolerate the broader fear. I can tolerate the broader uncertainty. I can tolerate the broader emotions or emotional conflict. So yes, there's a lot of work we can do within the box. You can practice somatic tracking. You can breathe. You can notice your fear thoughts as they pop up and redirect. You can lean into positive sensations. You can lean into positive relationships in your life. And you shouldn't stop doing those things or those are important techniques. But that question to me speaks to the spiral is so strong and I can't stop the spiral. I wanna encourage that person to think about maybe there's a reason the spiral is so strong. And maybe some of the work that I need to do is practicing tolerating my fear outside of the pain-related block.

01:06:22 Jenny: Mm-hmm. So is it fair to say that we're moving from that space of being stuck in that fear cycle to saying, okay, I'm gonna take the leap of faith that I am empowered enough to start the process of looking at the source of what is really sending my brain into that first cycle of fear?  And I'm going to put on this bravery and this courage and weather this storm for a minute and see what it's like. 

01:07:22  Christie: Yes. That's described quite beautifully. It's scary to do, of course, but it's possible in a lot of ways it's necessary. The way that we're showing up towards our symptoms is generally the way that we're showing up towards life and all of its uncertainties. And again, it's not to minimize the importance of pain specific tools. They are important, but just something to think about that as awful as it is, the box, the containment, that not only pain, but pain's recovery can provide for a person going through it in some way, like we appreciate being contained, even if we're stuck in an uncomfortable space.

01:07:42 Jenny: We appreciate it. Mm-hmm. Cause it's comfortable. But you know. 

01:07:49  Christie: No, it's very familiar.  But it's not the way out. The way it says. 

01:07:53  Christie: Yeah, absolutely. It's quite literally the way to be in. 

01:07:57 Jenny: Yeah, okay. Yeah, we were gonna talk a little bit about that very subject outside of PRT, but our time is getting close to up. So, just kind of in, I feel like ending in that arena though, can we talk, one question that I get a lot or I hear a lot is people saying, I'm just not very emotionally aware. And so they've come to realize, okay, yeah, this is probably TMS, this is mind body syndrome, neural circuit pain, but I just... I'm unaware, I don't know, I see the symptom here. And maybe their threshold is still up here, right? Like when it's down here, it's so much easier to hear that one message. 

01:08:49 Jenny: But when we're up here, it can be, if we're not emotionally aware, it can be difficult. So do you have any, I don't know, tips or ways that you help people to start that process of identifying some of those voices that we're hearing at that really loud dinner? 

01:09:05 Christie: Yes. Yes, so this is where one-on-one or group recovery work, but particularly one-on-one work can be really useful, but I wanna give a technique that can be done at home because I want people from all, no matter what is going on, this is something that you can access. So emotions start out as something that we feel quite naturally. If you think about a baby, they're not clamping down on their emotional state. So you think, I have a three-year-old, crazy. She feels everything. The idea of her hiding her feelings would be crazy to her. She feels them very loudly. They're really big. I love her for that and many other reasons. 

01:09:46 Christie: So we come into this world with an innate sense of connection to our feelings. We learn to send them away. We're taught to send them away. So we don't want to lose sight of that. That our body wants to be in touch with our feelings and that something has come and interrupted that innate connection and a lot of the times that this presents in session with my clients and in the pain recovery world is the blanket on top of our feelings is nervous system activation. Where our anxiety is so loud, first of all, it's blocking our access to feeling feelings physically. 

01:10:25 Christie: My friend Daniel, why am I noise those feelings are called feelings, not thinking. We can feel them. But if our anxiety is really strong and we have a ton of tension or a ton of pain or it's like that awful fluttering anxiety feeling coursing through our veins, the anxiety is blocking our access to feeling the emotion underneath it. And then anxious thoughts are so loud that there's no room for emotional, there's no room for emotions. There's no room for that to come up because the anxiety is so loud. 

01:10:53 Christie: So the best way to allow yourself to get back in touch with what you're feeling naturally is bringing your anxiety level down. Because when your anxiety level drops, you don't have to think about emotions coming up. I've had this happen in sessions a million times that we can down regulate someone, tears just start falling. And this is someone who would tell me, I haven't cried in a decade. Their sadness is totally scared. I don't feel sad, I don't know. It just, when the anxiety comes down, the tears start flowing naturally. You're not trying.

01:01:26 Christie: So you can literally practice. You can find a safe place in your environment, on your couch, in your bed. You can stay, you can lie down, close your eyes and practice calming your body for 10 minutes. And again, this can look a lot of different ways. If you don't know where to start. YouTube, a mindfulness meditation that's do something to bring your awareness to your body, to your breath for about 10 minutes. Once your anxiety has come down a little bit, then call to mind something that either you know is upsetting you upset and upset any type of emotional charge, it can be anger, it can be sadness, it can be disappointment. 

01:01:06 Christie: Or if you don't even know that if you're like, I don't know, I feel totally unaffected, we call to mind something that you think one might be affected by like you maybe should have been affected by. And you don't need to start with your 10 out of 10s. You don't need to start with the worst impact. I encourage you not to do that. You can start with something way like more of a murmur of an emotional experience. And just call that situation to mind. And then once you've called it into your mind, bring your awareness back into your body. Feelings are meant to be felt. 

01:02:38 Christie: Start at the top of your head, slow body scan of awareness all the way down to your feet to just ask yourself, am I feeling anything right now? And you do not need to say, yes, it's sadness. There are tears or yes, it's anger. I'm labeling it anger and it makes me want to do something with anger. No, just actually notice, do I have a felt physical sensation right now? We can worry about the labeling later. Sadness is often felt as a heaviness behind the eyes or heaviness in your chest. Anger is often felt as like a heat that's rising or coming down your arms. You don't even need to worry about that yet. Just see if you can have a connection, a physical connection to whatever the emotional experience was that you drew to mind. 

01:03:24 Christie: You can run through that you can go, you can start back at the top and run through this three times you don't need to meditate again for a full 10 minutes if you don't have that much time to spare. But do another wash, go back and say okay, I'm going to come back to my breath for two minutes. All my systems back down. Bring the emotional experience to the top of your mind. Body scans your way through and checks for the feeling. Again, don't worry about labeling just I always say the ask is the task. So if you are asking yourself, what am I noticing? Is this affecting me in any way? You're already winning. Don't worry about the labeling. Don't worry if you don't even feel anything. The first time you might not. You can practice again tomorrow. So the ask is the task. Asking yourself, how am I affected by this experience? What's going on for me right now? 

01:14:13 Jenny: Yeah. People often get confused between paying attention to how they feel emotions show up in their body and they just gravitate towards the pain. So all of a sudden you're trying to find an emotional, you know, where's, let's say sorrow. You're trying to find if you have an emotional reaction to something and all you can see is that symptom. If I'm understanding you correctly, that's, you use the example of anxiety as a symptom and we're moving past it. So we're doing the deregulation in order to move past that anxiety so that we're not blocked by it. 

01:04:56 Jenny: But that, I guess what I am saying is this is true of pain too, right? Like we're looking at the symptom of pain and we've got to calm down a little bit, try to get our nervous system regulated a little bit. So would you say if somebody is in, let's say an eight or a nine and they're hit up their symptom level and they're wanting to figure out what's happening emotionally. Is that a good time at that high of a number to do this type of a process? Or do you feel like it's better to do it at a point where you can move that needle a little bit on your symptoms? 

01:05:31 Christie: That's a great question, a great question. I think it is significantly better to do it at a time when the intensity of your pain is lower activation around the intensity of your pain is lower. I don't even think it's, I don't even ask my clients to have an inward focus very much when they're in that much pain. Even if they are a hundred percent confident, my pain is neural circuit. I'm not technically afraid of the source of the symptom when your pain level is that high. It's nearly biological, biologically impossible to have an intentional focus on it without your nervous system up regulating. 

01:06:10 Christie: So the first first task for that person and again there's lots of people in this situation this does not mean it's hopeless by any means or again you're in sort of the bulk of the people that I see anyway if you fit in that category of I'm not ready for that my pain is so high we're not there quite yet that our first step again is that down regulation. Getting your fear and your fear level down around the pain which will eventually bring the pain level itself down then we can take a look at the emotional stuff. And there's no rush you can't... we have to do these things in the order that makes sense with our bodies. And that's not wrong or bad, there's a patience there.

01:06:49 Christie: Yeah. Okay. We've talked about a lot of things. We've talked about just pressure and how much pressure we get from culture and how that internalizes into our system. We've talked about education, PRT and how that's so important, especially when we're looking at normal abnormalities. Beyond that, down regulating and emotionally feeling, like not thinking your feelings like you were saying feelings. Anything else, two questions for you. One, anything else you want to see, say, and then where can people find you? I'm going to put all your info in the show notes, stuff like that.

01:17:29 Christie: Only other thing I want to say is for anyone who's listening to this, I'm assuming that they're committed to their recovery and if at any part, anything we said felt frustrating. Like I can't access that yet, or I tried that and it hasn't worked for me yet. We often in the recovery world speak to the ideal situation. Even PRT at large is kind of packaged in a way that we can make it make sense to the masses. It is very normal to have individualized barriers and speed bumps and to spend a month on a step that another person spent two seconds on. I just can't say that enough that there's a lot of people put a lot of pressure on themselves to self recover from chronic pain. 

01:18:16 Christie: It's amazing that we have resources out there to help us do that. And it's very difficult to be your own teacher and be the student at the same time. So yeah, just keep at it. Just keep at it and know there is no, there's no one walk of recovery. There's no one pace of recovery. And if you're listening to this, you're probably one of the people who needs a little bit of extra care in terms of your relationship to fear. And that's, you can have feelings around that. You can be like, and you have feelings on that. You don't have to be completely at peace with it, but I want you to know that it's normal and your hopefulness should not be impacted by the pace at which you're recovering. 

01:18:59 Jenny: That's so good. Thank you for saying that. Yeah. We need to be seen in that space. Big time. 

01:19:07 Christie:  And then people can find me that loves to connect people questions about what we talked about. If you want to reach out, my team is called Better Mind Center. You can find us at bettermindcenter.com. And then I'm on Instagram @better.with.christie... better with Christie. 

01:19:22 Jenny: Okay. And do you, if people schedule with you, are they, do they do one-on-one sessions? Are you taking clients right now? 

01:19:33 Christie: Okay. Currently, I am transitioning away from taking on new clients myself. I'm doing more research and training. The big reason why I have so much trust in the team. So everyone works from the same model. I can... I would spend another hour and a half just talking about how obsessed I am with. The people on my team are so great. So there are ways to access, there's plenty of ways to access one-on-one help through this model, even if I'm not taking new clients for myself. 

01:20:02 Jenny: Okay, yeah. And you have a beautiful website by the way. 

01:20:05 Christie:  Oh, thank you. Thanks.

01:20:10 Chazmith: All right, y'all, that's it for today. As always, I hope that with every episode, you felt inspired in some way or learned something new and insightful or practical to implement into your healing journey. Now that you are done listening, go outside, do something fun for yourself today, and until next time, make this whole week so great.