I'm sharing with you some of my favorite researchers, educators, and pain helpers quotes about neuroplastic pain or mind-body symptoms. I know that when we understand what's happening with pain we can experience our bodies differently and then feel differently. I hope there's something that really hits that aha button for you.
Here's all the locations of the quotes --
1- Dr. Zoffness - https://twitter.com/DrZoffness/status/1620101003789082624
2. - Tor Wager - https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2021/10/chronic-pain-changing-your-attitude-may-give-relief
3. Christie Uipi - https://www.lin.health/insights/christie-uipi-pain-self-compassion
4. Dr. Sarno - https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/75116.John_E_Sarno
5. Some dude who read Sarno - https://www.juiceboxpodcast.com/blog/2011/12/12/stress-back-pain-howard-stern-and-my-friend-mike.html
6. Alan Gordon - https://charmaustin.com/healing-and-managing-chronic-pain/
7. Lorimer Moseley - https://trustmephysiotherapy.com/50-shades-of-pain-with-lorimer-moseley/
8 - Dr. Howard Schubiner - https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/2626302.Howard_Schubiner
9 - Dani Fagan - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-11784163/I-went-bedbound-three-years-yoga-guru.html
10 - Lisa Feldman Barrett - https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1332670.Lisa_Feldman_Barrett?
11 - Dr. Yoni Ashar - https://www.oneyoufeed.net/neuroplastic-pain/
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the curiosity cure podcast. I'm your host, Deb Malkin, master certified life coach, body worker, hypnotist trained in pain reprocessing by the pain psychology center, queer elder fat human on planet earth here to help you evoke the power of simple neuroplasticity techniques rooted in shame free curiosity so you can feel more better.
[00:00:31] more of the time in the body you have today and build the rich, full life that you want to live. A quick disclaimer, this podcast is not a replacement for medical care. I am here to provide insights and techniques that can compliment your healthcare journey, but always consult with your healthcare provider for personalized advice.
[00:00:58] Hello, and welcome to the Curiosity Cure. I am your host, Deb Malkin, pain recovery coach. And sometimes I love to get in the weeds and talk about this in a very complex way or bring in a lot of different ideas. And sometimes I just like to be, how simple can we be? And one of my main that's, you know, I've seen evidence of, and it's a foundational piece of the study of pain reprocessing is that when we understand things differently, we can experience them differently.
[00:01:38] So I just thought it would be fun today to do top 10 quotes about pain from some of my favorite pain neuroscientists or pain educators or chronic pain people who study it, all those people. So it's not just about like pain in general, in the whole world. This is specifically geared towards neuroplastic pain and a mind body approach. They're just talking about pain in general and the role of the brain in pain. So I feel like we can't learn this enough because we have a big paradigm shift that we're still needing to change.
[00:02:19] Sometimes I, I got really struck by the image of the that container ship that got stuck in the Panama canal. And I just think like, yeah, that thing is, is really stuck. And what does it take to change direction? It is not always as simple as just like, Be booping things into your GPS and just like going in a different direction, or you're on, you know, you're on a GPS and it's like, uh, we found a better route.
[00:02:50] So medicine and science and even people who aren't in medicine and science, people who have bodies, what we believe is not as simple as just the GPS saying, Hey, we found a better route. Would you like to take that one? So I think for me, part of my job is to help people contextualize, metabolize, and then practice these concepts of pain science, um, to help you feel more, better, more of the time.
[00:03:20] Also, not just because it's like a weird thing that I enjoy. I think then I would have a podcast about Doctor who, which is, not weird, but it is a thing that I enjoy. But I do this because I really believe that understanding the role of the brain in creating particularly chronic pain and chronic symptoms is a part of the healing process.
[00:03:45] So that said, there will be links to all of where I pulled the quotes from. All the links will be in my show notes or in the transcript and you can go fall down as many rabbit holes as you want. And I also invite you to fall down no rabbit holes. We actually don't have to know everything to be able to start to apply it.
[00:04:09] We don't have to know everything. We don't have to read everything. We don't have to go back to school and become a neuroscientist. And like every six months that pops up for me. And I just, I have a good laugh because I studied theater in undergrad and I don't like sitting in classrooms. So I don't think that me going back to school like that, is in the cards for me, although I point out and other people point out, I am a lifelong learner. So again, this is what I have learned and what I am excited to share with you.
[00:04:45] So my number one is from Dr. Zoffness, and she is a pain psychologist and she's got a great workbook out, I think called the pain management workbook, which I kind of love her wording because it's not pain management.
[00:05:01] I mean, it is pain management. Like we don't always know that pain can be cured, but she still holds that conceptualization when she talks about patient results. Those are the results that we are going for. So I really love though that it's like, it's not a bait and switch, but it kind of just says pain management and you know, people are looking for pain management.
[00:05:24] So it's a great workbook. And then I think she also has one for teens.
[00:05:29] " Her quote is there is no pain center in the brain, rather pain is a diffuse neurological process involving many brain sites, including PFC, which is prefrontal cortex. And in parentheses, it says attention, and then cerebral cortex in parentheses, it says Thoughts and limbic system, the brain's emotion center. Pain is both physical and emotional always."
[00:06:01] And in some of my podcasts, I go in a little bit deeper about how the brain uses emotions to help tell us like what's important. So that's Dr. Zoffness' quote, but the, my favorite part is there is no pain center in the brain. There is no pain center in the brain, which is super cool.
[00:06:22] Now there's Tor Wager and he is a professor of neuroscience and a pain science researcher. And so his quote is that "fear and avoidance of pain and the hyper vigilance that goes along with it actually ends up being a root cause of persistent pain."
[00:06:45] So that really touches upon the learned aspect of persistent pain. And sometimes I love the phrase persistent pain rather than chronic pain because I think it evokes a little bit more of the quality of it and chronic just sounds awful. It just, it sounds as awful as it is. So I love this word persistent because it's kind of, yeah, it's kind of what it is. It's like, yeah, it's a little persistent sticking around and he's like, yeah, the fear and the avoidance and the hypervigilance actually becomes a root cause of that persistent pain. So love that quote.
[00:07:30] Then we have Christie Uipi and actually, let me see if I can get this right because this is the part I didn't do beforehand. Okay. So Christie started out the pain psychology center and now she has her own place called the better mind center and she is a pain psychologist, working with Alan Gordon worked on the boulder back pain study.
[00:07:56] So she's talking about self compassion and her own pain recovery experience. So she says, "I can trace my various mind body symptoms back to childhood, but I experienced the majority of my chronic pain symptoms in graduate school while pursuing my master's in social work. If you were to catch me on any given day of my first year of graduate school. You'd find me with a heating pad on my back, wrist braces on both my wrists, knee supports on both my legs, and a whole host of medications in my backpack. I was hurting all over."
[00:08:34] And then there was a part in the middle that I skipped. And then she starts to talk about self compassion. "Self compassion feels directly linked to chronic pain treatment because the ways in which we relate to our pain symptoms are often the ways in which we relate to ourselves and the world around us.
[00:08:52] If we respond to our symptoms with frustration, pressure, or intensity, it is often because we respond to everyday lives that way too. Recovering from pain requires an exploration of the ways in which we treat ourselves and a willingness to soften to ourselves in the same way that we must soften to our pain symptoms."
[00:09:14] And the end of this story is that she is pain free, right? She's pain free. And she also now helps other people be pain free.
[00:09:24] Dr. Sarno, you've heard me talk about Dr. Sarno. Dr. Sarno was a leader of this kind of mind body recovery work. He wrote a bunch of books. One is called Healing Back Pain. One is called Mind Body Prescription.
[00:09:39] Then he has another book called The Divided Mind. And he was really the one to start to propose this idea that emotions play a role in our pain and starting to actually treat pain using talking, listening, and thinking about pain differently. So I've got a few quotes from him.
[00:10:01] Most of the structural changes in your spine are natural occurrences. The brain doesn't want to face up to the repressed anger so it is running away from it. By laughing at or ignoring the pain. You are teaching the brain to send new messages to the muscles. We're going to help you take the sword of Damocles into your hands instead of having it hang over your head." And that was a quote from healing back pain, the mind body connection.
[00:10:33] And here's another quote, which I also really liked. This came from his patient. "So I discussed this with a patient of mine who made a cogent observation. She said, if you ask people to ease up on you because you're emotionally overloaded, don't look for a sympathetic response, but tell them you've got pain or some other physical symptom and they immediately become responsive and solicitous.
[00:11:00] How right she is. It is perfectly acceptable to have a physical problem in our culture, but people tend to shy away from anything that has to do with the emotions."
[00:11:11] And whether or not it's perfectly acceptable to have a physical problem, you know, that's an opinion. But what he's saying is. It is more acceptable to have a physical problem than it is to have an emotional problem. And the brain is using all the strategies to try to access help. One of my big pain triggers is actually feeling helpless. That is something that I've observed when I have a moment of feeling unwell. If I think that I can't access any help, I feel worse and I will have, a flare of symptoms.
[00:11:50] And now I'm really aware of that. And now that I'm aware of it, I actually can intercede. Right. I can find ways in which I'm receiving care, even if it's maybe not medical care, but I can receive emotional care and support from other people. I have my mind body tools. So I've been able to kind of unearth that trigger and untrigger it essentially.
[00:12:15] And here is a quote. Oh, I wrote this as some dude who read Sarno, which is not, it's not nice. He has a, he has a name. What is his name? His name is, oh, I don't know. I'm on his website. Maybe I don't know his name. Maybe that's why I wrote it. I think his name is Leonard.
[00:12:35] Well, I'm going to be sharing his URL anyway, um, so I'm sorry if I'm calling you some dude. So he writes, "back to yesterday, I was in bad shape and getting worse, but instead of calling a doctor, I forced myself to reflect on the last two months and figure out what was bothering me. Not the stuff I know about. The things that concern you, but you're dealing with, those don't affect your stress level in the same way as an unexamined issue. Now just in case this all doesn't sound mystical enough, here's what happened to me yesterday morning. I figured out that I had been worried about a loved one.
[00:13:18] I don't want to give details, but this person means the world to me. And I am concerned about an aspect of their life. I know that I can't solve this issue. And since I can have no real effect on it, I tried to ignore how worried I was. I guess that was eating me up inside because my back tightened up and when I tried to ignore the pain without finding its source, it worsened and persisted for weeks.
[00:13:45] I tried telling myself that I wasn't injured, a trick that often made the pain dissipate if the underlying cause isn't too serious, to no avail. I decided that I couldn't carry the burden of this concern without pain. So I told that person I was worried for them, that I knew it wasn't my place to worry and that I loved them and I would do anything to help. My back stopped hurting by the time I got the words out and it has not hurt since. Six weeks of pain and tightness disappeared in moments.
[00:14:20] And I love that story because it shows this real understanding for himself of these unexamined stresses, these unexamined worries. And so much of us don't even deal with the examined ones. Like we just push it all aside. And always part of this work is to stop that pattern, stop pushing things aside, start dealing with the uncomfortable emotions and at least create some curiosity and a place for them to just be. And there's a lot of different strategies in this work that we could use to help that, but the 1st part is awareness and that's what he displayed.
[00:15:02] So the next quote is from Alan Gordon and Alan Gordon is the founder of the pain psychology center. He is also the author of the way out and ironically, I think his is the shortest. You could go read his whole entire book. So what I liked about this one, maybe it'll be clear.
[00:15:21] "Pain is like a conversation between your body and your brain. But as in any conversation, sometimes there are misunderstandings."
[00:15:31] And I just, I like the way that he describes that there's this inner conversation happening.
[00:15:38] Then we have Lorimer Mosley from the NOI group, a researcher, and I think he's a physical therapist from Australia. And he talks about one of my favorite topics, which is nociception.
[00:15:53] So he says, "pain is the output. Nociception is one of the inputs. All of the inputs are evaluated when we are talking about pain. I think according to this question, how dangerous is this? Based on everything I know, which is all of the information available to me right now, how dangerous is this really?"
[00:16:15] That's the internal conversation he's talking about, which is what the brain is doing before it decides. You know, is this painful or is this dangerous? So here's another one from him.
[00:16:28] " There is no such thing as a pain stimulus. Nothing has the property of pain. It is an emergent property of the human. Pain receptor. There is no such thing. Pain pathway, there is no such thing. Descending pain control, there is no such thing as that. There are, however, noxious stimuli nociceptors, nociceptive pathways, and descending nociceptive control. Anti nociception turns the nociception down. Pro nociception Turns the nociception up. So it's very tempting to use these words and most of the time it doesn't matter. It's just semantics, but I bet you'll have a patient this week for whom it's more than semantics when you make that mistake."
[00:17:18] Right? So we want to help people understand that there's kind of this modulation control, like that there's this decision that nociceptors are just parts of our bodies that can sense changes in temperature, pressure, and chemical. Then there's a whole subconscious evaluation process. So I just think it's really useful.
[00:17:41] So then we've got Dr. Howard Schubiner, author of Unlearn Your Pain and a researcher. He's written, I think over a hundred research papers on pain. He teaches doctors about nociceptive pain. He is one of my teachers. And he's very good at helping people contextualize this and he also has a great animated video series. So here's his quote.
[00:18:11] " now that I am fully aware of the incredible connection between the mind and the body, I am almost always able to get rid of the aches and pains that arise by recognizing them for what they are. Physical symptoms as a manifestation of stress, worry, anxiety, fears, anger, and the other emotions that come with being human." And that was a quote from unlearn your pain.
[00:18:39] And then another favorite pain human of mine is Dani Fagan. And she has a website called my TMS journey where she shares, yoga classes and also meditations and also education from a mind body perspective. And I will tell you, when you do yoga from this point of view, it's very different experience in your body. So Dani explained. "The main idea to understand about is, it's not saying it's all in your head, the pain is 100 percent real. But the crucial difference is that the pain is being caused by the brain by chronic dysregulation and the nervous system being stuck in a Fight, flight, freeze state, rather than a structural abnormality of the body. On her recovery, I'd sit up for a minute, then I'd have to lie back down again.
[00:19:34] She says, I was still in pain, but I was less scared of my symptoms, which allowed me to start to very slowly get my life back. Removing the fear of pain was a huge step for me because fear fuels the fight flight response and the nervous system, which is the fire that keeps chronic conditions alive." and she had been bed bound for three years before her recovery experience.
[00:19:57] The kind of 10th quote, I mean, I'm sometimes reading more than one quote, so just don't hold me to being numerically accurate, is from Lisa Feldman Barrett, who wrote the book, How Emotions Are Made. She is a neuroscientist and she also wrote the book, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.
[00:20:17] Also one of my favorite neuroscientists educators. Here's the quote, "we already have intriguing evidence that some types of chronic pain work by prediction, animals who have stress or injury early in life become more likely to develop persistent pain. Human infants who have surgery are more likely to have heightened pain in later childhood....
[00:20:42] your body budgeting regions can therefore trick your brain into believing that there is tissue damage regardless of what is happening in your body. So when you're feeling unpleasant, your joints and muscles might hurt more, or you can develop a stomach ache. When your body budget is not in shape, meaning your interoceptive predictions are miscalibrated, Your back might hurt more, or your head might pound harder. Not because you have tissue damage, but because your nerves are talking back and forth. This is not imaginary pain, it is real." And that was a quote from How Emotions Are Made, The Secret Life of the Brain.
[00:21:21] And then 11, because I love you. And I found another one that I wanted to keep and I'm still calling it 10 quotes, but there's 11. It's my extra special present to you. And this is from Dr. Yoni Ashar, who is the lead researcher on the Boulder Back Pain Study. It's going to be like two quotes, but it's really the same quote, but he said it twice like two different ways. And I love that. So it's like, Oh yeah, that really reinforces learning for me when I hear the same thing said in different ways.
[00:21:56] So he says ,"the role of pain is to guide behavior away from threats. Pain is trying to protect us and it's predictive." Right? So the role of pain is to guide behavior. away from threats. And this is why we can see emotional pain show up as physical pain. It also can explain, chronic pain or reoccurring pain that's like an old injury if the brain thinks that the same thing that happened in the past will happen again, the brain is going to try to guide your behavior away from that threat.
[00:22:36] Here's the rest of it, which is "the old view of pain was that pain was a direct readout of problems in the body. So this is like, you know, you stub your toe and your toe hurts because that's letting me know that something happened in your toe.
[00:22:50] That's true. Pain can be that. And now we know that pain is much much more complex. And one of my favorite ways about thinking about pain is as a learning signal for guiding behavior. So the job of pain is to keep us safe and healthy, keep our bodies intact. And that now, in order to do that job well, the pain system has to be predictive. It has to always be thinking ahead about how damaging some action or activity might be. That way, can keep us safe. If the pain systems are always reactive. We'd all be dead."
[00:23:30] And I think that's very succinct. I think that helps you understand this kind of unconscious or subconscious, like all the things that are happening under the hood without our conscious awareness.
[00:23:42] Dr. Feldman Barrett had a whole thing about like, if you're thirsty, your thirst goes away when your water is in your mouth long before the water gets through all the places because thirst is a cue for action and so it turns off once you've taken the action, the signal turns off, which is so neat. Our bodies are so smart.
[00:24:07] I hope that this little journey through some of my favorite quotes and ways of thinking about neuroplastic pain gives you something to kind of hang your hat on because then the next parts are being willing to experience your sensations through a lens of safety.
[00:24:27] And then getting back to some of the activities that you may have been avoiding or think are not good for you. And as I continue this podcast, I will go into all of that more deeply, but one of the things that we know to be true is that understanding our physiological experiences and understanding the role of the brain and pain and the predictive code is a part of it the treatment protocol. It is not all of it. We need all the rest of it. So if we're dealing with stress, we can just start to notice what are our sensations in our body? Are we subconsciously tightening and avoiding like moving away from something? So we want to start to bring our interoceptive awareness to more of our life. And it's hard to do that when you're in the middle of things, but once you get the hang of it just starts to be kind of something that rides along with you as you're going through life. I hope that these concepts have helped you understand pain in a new way, and in understanding pain in a new way, you feel a sense of possibility and hope for you.
[00:25:45] And if you are at all interested in working with somebody who's a guide to help people get out of pain, I've helped people with migraines and back pain and gastrointestinal pain, fibromyalgia, vulvar pain, a lot of the pains. And I have openings for new one on one clients.
[00:26:06] You can book a free curiosity call with me and I would love to talk to you. So thank you very much. Bye.