Transcription
All pain is created by the brain. So, if you have a broken arm, the pain that you have is created by your brain, but it's being sent signals from the body that are influencing the brain to tell it what to do. Stress and emotions activate the brain to create pain or fatigue that's just as severe, just as real.
But when people say it's all in their head, they're implying that it's not real, and that couldn't be farther from the truth. Because all pain is real, all fatigue is real, all these symptoms are real.
Welcome to another Expert Interview Series. I'm Ben Erins from Reorigin, and in this episode, I am thrilled to bring to you an amazing conversation that I had with Dr. Howard Schuer. Howard Schuer is a trailblazer in mind-body medicine and the creator of Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy. Over the last 20 years, Dr. Schuer has helped thousands of patients break free from chronic pain, fatigue, and other debilitating conditions through groundbreaking research, compassionate care, and his numerous books that have helped so many. We will list all of the resources that he gives in this amazing conversation, as well as links to his books, in the show notes on our website, reorigin.com.
In this episode, we covered how unresolved emotional stress impacts the brain and manifests as chronic pain. Dr. Schuer's personal journey and the pivotal moment that led him to embrace the mind-body healing paradigm. The role of neuroplasticity in rewiring pain pathways and why all pain is real, even when the body isn't physically damaged. Practical techniques like pain reprocessing therapy and somatic tracking to ease symptoms. We cover why modern life, with its stressors and hypervigilance, is making us more prone to these types of conditions. And last but not least, we get into the hopeful message that chronic symptoms are reversible, and we discuss those action steps that you can start taking today.
So, whether you're new to this mind-body connection, new to neuroplasticity, or a seasoned advocate and practitioner of this approach, this conversation offers you profound insights and tools to empower you to reclaim your health by retraining your brain. So let's dive into it.
Dr. Schuer, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really excited to be having this conversation with you. I feel like this is a long time coming. Yeah, just incredibly excited for all of the work that you've done, and this conversation has been in really high demand from our members at Reorigin. So without further ado, I'm going to just kick it off.
Go ahead, Ben. I'm happy to be here. Thank you so much. First and foremost, just maybe you could share a little bit, what led you to explore this mind-body connection in treating chronic pain? And was there any specific moment or case that you remember that shifted your understanding of how this works?
Yeah, it was, uh, very clear. It was, it was, it was simply that I read a book. You know, I was at a point in my mid-career, and I had done a lot of different things in my career, had a lot, done a lot of research, a lot of clinical practice. I had become a mindfulness meditation teacher by then. I was aware of the mind-body connection, but I wasn't really actively using it in my practice. And, uh, a good buddy of mine, he had a good friend who had severe back and hip pain, and she read one of Dr. Sarno's books. John Sarno, the physiatrist in NYU. I had never heard of him. He said to me, Howard, you should read this book. And I said, okay. It's a small book, The Mind-Body Prescription. I read it, and it just crystallized so many things that I had known and thought about and kind of was aware of, but had no idea how profound and deep this work could be. And I immediately called up Dr. Sarno. I said, "Hey, Dr. Sarno, can I come work with you?" And he said, "Sure, Howard, come on, come on by." And a couple weeks later, I flew to New York, and I spent just a few days with him to see what he was doing, how he was doing it. We bonded together. He signed a book for me and sent me on my way. And then I was like, "Okay, now what?" And I just started. I literally just started seeing people who mostly had chronic pain, other disorders as well, as well. Talk about it. And I just listened to them. And I just heard their stories. And I just started applying this mind-body lens that the brain actually affects the body. It's not just reflective of the body, as most physicians tend to think and tend to have been taught. And the results were astounding, astounding. And that's, I just kept going. And then we started doing research. Just been a long journey now for 20, 30 years now of doing this work.
Yeah, so maybe you could explain a little bit for those who are, uh, not familiar with mind-body syndrome, what is the difference between pain that's generated, um, by the brain, or what, what is the brain's role in in chronic pain?
Yeah, yeah, that's, that's, you have to start there, Ben. If you don't start there, you don't understand pain. All pain, not just chronic pain. It turns out that our brain literally creates what we experience. And that's a neuroscience fact. It's not just a theory. And it's been documented by great neuroscientists with brain imaging and brain, uh, biopsies and everything, how the brain works. The brain creates what we experience. We don't see with our eyes. We see with our brain. Light comes into our eyes, but that light has to be transformed into impulses, and then the image is literally created in the brain. It's the same with hearing, and it's the same with feeling. So when you touch a hot stove, it's not your finger causing pain. And that is mind-blowing. It's not a woo-woo concept. It's not, you know, it's not like energy or chi or something. It's literally how the brain works. And we know that simply because, I'm sure this has happened to you as an athlete, people can get an injury, sometimes a severe injury, and have no pain at all. And that's simple fact. It's like, wow, what's going on there? It means that our brain literally decides whether we have pain or not. Our brain literally decides if we have fatigue or not. Our brain decides those things. And it gets input from the body, but the input from the body is not definitive. The input is just input. The brain makes that decision. Now, 99% of the time, if you get a, if you break your arm, it's going to hurt. So the brain is, is creating the pain because of the, because of the impulses that are coming up through the body as a warning signal. Pain is a warning signal. It's there to help us, alert us. If you break your arm, you want to get help. But we know that stress and emotions activate the exact same parts of the brain as does a physical injury. So there's a danger signal in the brain that reacts to danger. And the danger could be a broken arm, but the, the danger could also be a broken heart, a broken life, um, a, um, a child who's, you know, using drugs or in danger, uh, a neighbor who's encroaching on your land, a boss who's micromanaging you, a partner, you know, etcetera. All these emotional events actually cause real changes in the brain that can create a warning signal. And the warning signal can be pain. And it's real pain. It can be severe. It's not imaginary. It's not fake. It's neuroplastic pain or other symptoms. And understanding that is where you have to start. Because if you don't understand that, you can't understand pain.
It's so interesting. And especially, you know, if I think about experiences that I've had, um, when I was an athlete and, and training surfing, there would be points where, um, I remember in one instance, I slipped off my board in a funny way and, and tweaked my knee, but I didn't have any pain. And I kept surfing. It was a sort of like critical situation, right? Because the waves were very intense, it required full focus. Um, I don't recall having any pain whatsoever. But then when I got to the beach, all of a sudden, it really hit me. Yeah. And, um, when I went to the doctor and they did MRIs, they found that I had, you know, torn my meniscus and, and things like that. But for a couple of hours there, I was able to surf on on this knee, you know, without pain. And then if I think ahead to, um, um, when I was sick with Lyme, and I had a lot of stress and uncertainty in my, in my life at the time, there was all of these weird migrating aches of pain, aches and pains where one morning I might wake up with a really, you know, hard pain in my elbow, so hard that I wouldn't be able to extend my arm. But by the afternoon, it had dissolved or dissipated or gone somewhere else to my left elbow, you know. So how do you, um, for those who are, you know, unclear on, on whether their pain is something that they need to look into in the immediate sense, how do you differentiate or, or guide people to, um, to untangle that?
Yeah, it's a great question. And it turns out it's generally quite easy. And people get tangled in webs because there's a lot of misinformation. So everyone needs to start with good medical care, medical, traditional medical evaluation. If you have pain in your elbow, is it broken? You know, is there something significantly wrong with it or not? Or is, like, we can't find anything? If we, if the doctors can't find anything, if you're having stomach pain or headaches, and you say, "Why do I have it?" and they say, "We don't really know." If you press them, then chances are that it's a neuroplastic pain. If they don't know, if they can't find something. So that's one instance. The second instance is where the doctors say, "Well, it's, you have back pain, but it's a bulging disc or herniated or degenerative discs." But it turns out, if you look closely, bulging discs and degenerative discs occur in normal healthy people. So blaming it on that then becomes medical misinformation. And we know that because of the third step that I'm going to talk to you about in a minute. So the first step is a medical evaluation, clearing yourself. The second step, and then the same kind of medical misinformation can occur in alternative medicine as well. And I'm sure you've experienced that because almost everybody's had chronic symptoms that haven't been effectively treated by traditional medicine, have gone to alternative medicine models. And the alternative medicine models will say, "You've got, you know, you've got a hidden bacteria, or you've got a reactivated virus, or you've got adrenal fatigue, or you've got food sensitivities," or all these things that again are explanations for something that don't actually fit the facts. And the facts are what you just said. Does the pain shift and move from one place to another? Does it turn on and turn off? Does it go away when you're in a, a relaxing and happy situation? Is it worse with stress? Is it worse with the weather? Is it in a broad area of the body that doesn't make sense physically? So we have all these criteria that I call the FIT criteria. FIT: Is it Functional? Is it Inconsistent? And is it Triggered by an Acous stimulus? And all we've published those and we've written research papers on that. And so that's what we do. So it's a traditional exam, it's, it's, it's getting away from medical misinformation, inaccurate diagnosis, and then it's ruling in neuroplastic pain or neuroplastic symptoms because of their characteristics.
Okay, that's helpful. So if someone's kind of cleared those, those, um, hurdles of discernment, they've distinguished or or discerned that their, you know, their pain is not being caused by any, um, physical or structural, you know, issue that, that can be found, that it, in fact, does change, sometimes disappears, or shifts, or things like that. What is the sort of next, uh, step for someone?
Let me just say one more thing. Almost the vast majority of people with chronic pain have neuroplastic pain or a mind-body condition. The vast majority of people with chronic fatigue have a mind-body condition. Vast majority of people. And if you have a diagnosis of migraine or headache or, or neuralgia, or, um, you know, irritable bowel syndrome, or fibromyalgia, or pelvic floor dysfunction, there's a whole list of diagnoses that we have. The vast majority of those people have mind-body conditions. And so that's another layer to, to really understand. And we've written all about this in our books and everything.
Yeah, and I think at this point, it's, it's good to, to just bring up what I know many people in our audience will be, you know, familiar with, but always good to just state it, that when we talk about mind-body conditions or syndromes, that these are not, in their head, meaning, um, it's not isolated to thought or something like that. Um, these are real conditions that are, you know, the brain is influencing back on the body and, and vice versa. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that, you know, that it's not just a, it's not a psychological disorder, that it's a real experience, right?
Well, as all pain is created by the brain. So if you have a broken arm, the pain that you have is created by your brain, but it's being sent signals from the body that are influencing the brain to tell it what to do. And stress and emotions activate the brain to create pain or fatigue that's just as severe, just as real. So if all symptoms are created by the brain, it is a brain-centric focus. But when people say it's all in their head, they're implying that it's not real, right? And that couldn't be farther from the truth. Because all pain is real, all fatigue is real, all these symptoms are real. They're not people's fault. It's not because they're crazy. It's not because they're weak or demented. It's not because there's something wrong with them. But the fact is, is that stress and emotions do activate the brain to create these situations. So it's not psychological in the sense that there's something wrong with them, but it's a neural circuit. Neural circuits in the brain create these symptoms. And there doesn't have to be anything wrong in the body to have severe pain or fatigue or anxiety or depression or insomnia. There doesn't have to be anything wrong in the body. Phantom limb syndrome is a situation where you have real pain in a foot that's been amputated. It's been missing. And so this can be very freeing. It's not meant to be derogatory or pejorative. It's meant to be liberating. If there's nothing physically wrong that needs medical attention, that needs herbs or supplements, that needs acupuncture, that needs physical therapy, that needs something, it needs changing neural circuits in the brain. And that is a revolutionary idea because that's possible. It can happen. These symptoms are reversible.
And you've seen that, right?
It is. It is. It should give us, and I think does give us, some measure of hope that when we, even just starting to understand, you know, by listening to a conversation like this, understanding that yes, what you're experiencing is, is real. There's a, there is a cause for it. And that cause is more of a software issue, which fortunately is open to being upgraded and updated, right?
And there's something, I mean, there's something happening in the body. It's not that the body is totally passive. If you have diarrhea, it's real. I mean, your, your brain is causing your gut to have to be contracting more and more to cause diarrhea. So it's, you know, that's obviously real. Your brain can cause the muscles to get real tight and knot it up, you know, again, that's obviously real. You know, your brain can cause you to to have all these feelings of like, you can't get out of bed, you know, anxiety, panic attacks, it's tremendous feeling you have in the body. But it's actually generated by the brain. The body isn't damaged when you have a panic attack. It's responding to signals that the brain is sending.
Yeah, sure. It will change your, your heart rate and hormone secretion and level of discomfort in that case. Um, I'm curious if, if you have an understanding of fatigue and how the brain, the brain's role in fatigue? That's a question that's really come up a lot for Reorigin members because, you know, a lot of people with chronic conditions, at a certain point, start to experience this this heaviness, this weakness, but just depletion of energy. For for some people, it's clear, or a little bit more clear how the brain can can cause or contribute to pain. And less clear how it can contribute to fatigue. So maybe you could share a little bit about that.
When you get a virus infection, you're, the virus can attack the nasal mucosa, cause runny nose, can affect the throat, cause sore throat, can affect the lungs and cause bronchitis and cough, can cause pneumonia. All those are direct effects of the virus. Most people when they get a virus, they also get fatigue. Fatigue is not a direct effect of the virus. The virus is causing the symptoms, and your brain is reacting to those symptoms by saying, "Danger, this person is sick. They need rest and they need recovery." So the brain causes fatigue in order to help us protect us from a virus by telling us to rest, stay in bed. Okay? So, so it's not a direct effect of the virus when you get fatigue. It's the brain causing fatigue as a warning signal. And so symptoms can be learned. When someone gets pain, they get a broken arm, that pain is now, now the neural circuits in the brain are are very clearly activated for that pain to protect us, tell you not to move your arm, get help. But when the injury heals, those neural circuits can keep going, and the pain can become persistent. That's the same process that happens with fatigue after a viral infection. The fatigue sets in because the brain is trying to warn us and help us protect us, give us rest. The virus goes away, but the brain's neural circuits for fatigue keep going and going and going. And that is the cause of chronic fatigue. And it's very real. And it's, oh, can be obviously completely overwhelming. Millions of people have been suffering under the guise of chronic fatigue syndrome, or chronic Lyme disease, or EB virus reactivation, or Long COVID. Um, and lots of theories have been made about why the body is broken, the mitochondria are damaged, or the immune system is off, or there's other, you know, blood clotting syndromes, all sorts of things have been, you know, postulated. And those things can, can exist, but they're not actually the cause of the fatigue. They're an effect of it. And that is a really important difference for people, uh, to recognize.
Thank you for clarifying that. That's, that's something I think is really interesting and important, and not, I haven't heard that discussed before. Um, and it actually makes me, you know, reflect on and think about my experience a little bit personally, as well as, you know, seeing a lot of, um, people with these types of conditions who, like myself, uh, might have been sort of Type A at one point, you know, very driven, you know, athletes, or, or so forth, used to being able to push ourselves and even beyond that, the point of fatigue. And I'm just thinking about, you know, when I was getting sick, I sort of went through this denial phase in the beginning, where, you know, at first it was like, okay, this is like a cold or a flu. I'll give it a few days or a week or couple weeks for it to pass. And when that time passed by, and weeks turned into months, I was like, "All right, I'm just gonna get back to doing what I do." And, you know, um, I'm wondering if I, you know, might have even like trained my brain, um, by by pushing through that fatigue, by getting, trying to get back into the gym, though I remember being baffled by the fact that I could only lift like half as much weight as I could before, even though my muscle mass at that point, you know, a week or two later, hadn't diminished by 50% overnight. Yeah. Right. So, but I'm, you know, by with that propensity to push, which so many of us have, it's almost like maybe entraining the brain to get stuck in that fatigue gear, that what you described as basically a symptom.
The brain's job is to protect us and watch out for us and help us. And, you know, if your brain feels like you're pushing yourself too much, it might put on the brakes, say, "Wait a minute, I'm in charge here. I'm gonna help you not drive yourself crazy." If your brain feels like you've got so much stress in your life that you're trying to, trying to, you know, run two businesses and have all your relationships and, you know, do all your sports and do them to such a high degree that you're putting so much pressure on yourself and you're being so hard on yourself, the brain's signal goes into danger and it goes into timeout mode. And it's amazing how that can happen and be real, but not be structural damage causing it. And the same thing happens with fatigue as with pain. The fatigue may turn on and off. It might be better one day and worse the next day. There might be this variability. It might be triggered by stress, triggered by certain things that are innocuous, just like pain is. And so that's how we can diagnose it. And the other thing is that, you know, people who get this often, as you mentioned, really put a lot of pressure on themselves. We see that if you look at the rates of chronic pain in, in musicians, for example, high-level performing musicians, perfectionistic, putting pressure on themselves, practicing endlessly, hours and hours a day, they have super high rates of of chronic pain. So fatigue is just another example of the brain's warning signal, like anxiety can be, like depression can be, like insomnia can be, like ringing in the ears can be, like diarrhea can be, like urinary, uh, issues. I mean, it's amazing how often numbness and tingling in the hands and feet, we see that all the time. It's, it's so interesting when you think of it as as a protective mechanism.
And I think helpful to to think of it in that way because the, the body has sort of built-in fail-safes, just like a computer. If you have too many apps running in the background and too many tabs open, and then you push it to try and edit videos at the same time, right, the fans are spinning and the computer's trying to cool itself down. At a certain point, it's just gonna cut power and and take a break, um, so that it can, it can reboot. And it's so counterintuitive, you know, it's so counterintuitive to what we think and we know. If you have pain, if you have fatigue, you're, you know, if you're having urinary diarrhea, ringing in the ears, headaches, you know, you're, you've got to think there's something wrong with me. I'm physically broken. You have to think that. Everyone thinks that. And then your doctors think it, and then the alternative medicine doctors think it. And everybody's telling you you're broken in a whole variety of ways. And that can feed on itself. The more broken you feel, the worse the symptoms get. The more you fear the symptoms, the worse they get. The more you're focusing on them, the more you're, the more you're like trying to figure them out and trying to push through them, the worse actually people get. The more frustrated and angry you are with them, the worse people get. And that's a vicious cycle. And most people with these chronic situations actually get worse over time despite treatment, or they may get a little bit better and then they get worse again. You know, because some treatment has a placebo effect. "Oh, I tried this herb and then I got better for a while." Or, "I tried this chiropractic, or I tried this PT thing, or I tried this acupuncture thing, or I tried this diet, you know, and I got better for what, then I got worse." And, you know, it's, it's, it's so weird that this happens and so common. The vast majority of people with chronic conditions, not, I'm not talking about cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, dementia, ALS. Not talking about that. Autoimmune disorders are kind of in the middle. So a lot of people have autoimmune disorders that are structural because there's tissue damage in the body, obviously, and medical treatment can certainly help. But the brain can also affect the immune system. So mind-body work can actually help people with autoimmune disorders as well.
Yeah, it's the way you described it as a downward spiral. Um, it's, it's kind of, you know, I'll describe it as like an allostatic system, using my, my framework of the physical body and, you know, structure and movement and so forth. But I, I kind of think of it as, you know, if, if you're in a state where you have postural problems and some, you know, movement patterns that are suboptimal, and you start adding a lot of weight, let's say you're trying to strengthen your squat, you start adding more weight to the bar. The more weight you add until those, uh, kind of postural distortions have been corrected, it's going to actually keep getting it worse as it adds more, more compression. Um, at a certain point, you need to kind of get out from under the weight and go and, you know, do some corrective exercises and repattern and, and, you know, shift your posture. And then when you're in a, in a state of, of alignment where you're, you know, functioning, uh, in, in sort of good, good rhythms, good patterns, good, good movement sequences, now that same stimulus that was breaking you down earlier, of adding more weight to the bar, is actually a catalyst for growth and increased strength. So when someone, when when people come to you and they're in that downward spiral, what's the first thing that you, you do? Um, how do you help them make that pivot, hopefully without reaching up, you know, system, major system crash, right?
Yeah, well, there's kind of a five-step approach that we have to helping people. One is is explaining how the brain works, that we talked about already. It's called predictive processing. That's the neuroscience, um, model that we use. And the second thing is assessing, making sure there is no structural problem that needs medical attention, which usually there is present. And then, then we have treatment options. And the three treatment options: one is what we tend to call pain reprocessing therapy, or neuroplastic recovery therapy. Second is emotional awareness and expression therapy. And the third is what you need to do to change, make any changes in your life that might be contributing to this, putting so much pressure on oneself, having way too many things going on, dealing with a situation with a boss, or a spouse, or a job, or a neighbor, actually doing something that is that needs to be changing, needs to change in your life. Because the warning signal may be, "You need a change in your life." I mean, I've seen some people who needed to get divorced. You know, it's not like we say, "Oh, everyone should get divorced." That's not the case. But sometimes that that is the trigger that is causing all this downward stream stuff. But the other, the main therapies, the pain reprocessing and the emotional awareness, are specific therapies. The pain reprocessing is helping people start to move, little by little, start to be engaged in physical activity with less fear, less worry about it, calming and soothing the neural circuits in the brain, the fearful, worry neural circuits. And that can literally turn off the pain, helping people to tell themselves, give their brain the truth, which is, "I'm not damaged, I'm not broken, I'll be okay." And the emotional awareness part is dealing with, not everyone needs emotional awareness processing work, but some people are harboring lots of guilt, harboring lots of grief and sadness, harboring lots of anger and resentment. And those feelings can activate the real symptoms of the brain because the neuroscience shows that that stress and emotion cause real neural circuits in the brain to create pain, fatigue, anxiety, depression, insomnia, etcetera. So that's kind of an overview of the model that we use.
Could you say a little bit more about, um, PRT, Pain Reprocessing Therapy? You know, how does that work? Maybe break it down for someone that hasn't, um, encountered it before, what those steps may be?
Yeah, so the, the steps of PRT is, once you've assessed and made the diagnosis, then what you're, you start giving yourself the message, "I'm not damaged, I'm not broken, I'm safe, I'm not in danger, I'll be okay." And see how that feels to you. How does that feel to say, "Actually, my body's not broken. I can get better. I'm okay." How does that feel? A lot of times people say, "Well, that's a lie. I can't believe that." Now you're fighting yourself because you're getting, you have information that you're safe from medical, our, our evaluation that I talked about. But you also have all these fears and doubts that have been inculcated through obviously what everyone's been through, assuming that they're physically damaged and broken. So fixing that, you know, getting alignment, because people are not going to get better when they're misaligned, when they're fighting themselves. So getting agreement on that is, is that truly the case? Well, maybe I need more testing. Maybe I need more understanding. Maybe I need to wait and see. And let's see what happens to the pain when I go to, go to visit my family, what happens over Christmas, what happens, you know, when I, uh, when I do the, when I do squats, squats one day and I feel pretty good, and the next day I can't get out of bed. Why is? How's that inconsistency? So getting the data. And then, then, then once you have that data, then what you want to do is you want to start, let's take, take squats or some kind of exercise. What you want to do is you want to start imagining doing the exercise without fear, imagining doing the exercise, giving yourself the safe messages and the powerful messages, "I'm safe, I'm not in danger, there's nothing wrong, I'll be fine." And you're telling yourself, and you're imagining doing that, because athletes have to imagine doing their activities, right? All good athletes have to visualize doing their, whatever it is they do. In your case, it was surfing. And then you start to do the activity with those same powerful messages of safety. And then what happens is people start to unlearn. The brain starts to unlearn the pain, starts to unlearn the fatigue. Because now, as they're beginning, as they're visualizing doing the exercise, maybe it's just walking around the block, visualizing it with, and then doing it, their brain starts to make those changes. Their brain starts to get better. And then it'll get worse, and then it'll get better, and then it'll get worse. And then you see more inconsistency. And then you're like, "Hey, I got this. I see what's going on here." And then you start to liberate yourself from the fear that you're damaged and broken.
It sounds like a, like a step-by-step process and something that's, you know, a practice, really, a to have this sort of awareness, uh, maybe for, like practicing it just in its own right, like you, like an athlete would do visualization, right? And then bringing that awareness into and throughout your, your day and life.
Exactly. And when you, and when you get the sensations, what you're doing is you're, you're responding to them with less, like tightness, less fear, less worry. You're just saying, "Oh, yeah, that's, that's okay. That's my brain. This is transient. I'm on the path to getting better."
Yeah, I'm curious to know how you guide your patients through the initial phases of this, when, when they're learning about it, it's a bit of a paradigm shift. And then when they start to actually engage their awareness, especially around those uncomfortable symptoms and sensations. On the one hand, that's part of that's required for the reprocessing, right? Because we have to engage those with those circuits. I think where the challenge sometimes comes in is that with that additional monitoring comes an increase in in hypervigilance, right? And that tension is sort of counter to what we're actually trying to do when we start to reintroduce ourselves to these sensations.
Yeah, exactly. And so one of the other techniques, the, the one I just described is what I would call provocative testing, where you're imagining the situation and then changing your relationship to the imagined activity, and then the actual activity. The, the other main, uh, component of of PRT is called, um, somatic tracking, or basically mindful awareness. And it's using mindfulness skills to observe the sensations from a bit of a distance, from an observing point of view, watching from, kind of smiling, if you can, at, um, uh, kind of having a lighter mood, and just seeing, "Oh, my brain's doing this now. My brain's doing that. Let's see what's happening. Let's watch the show." And that can be, you know, challenging to do that because the symptoms are are real. They can be severe and overwhelming, certainly at times. But we're trying to help people separate from them, little by little, in small little ways, you know, using calming techniques, mindful techniques, and then dipping into the feeling of the sensation in the body, and then dipping out of it. And that's called pendulation. So you're going into it and out of it. And again, it's a prescribed method of practicing learning to be aware of those sensations with less, like that, less tension, like that, less, like you mentioned, a less hypervigilance and reactivity. It's, it's not easy, necessarily, you know, it can be challenging.
Yeah. Why do you think it is that it's so, it's so counter-instinctual? Like we're, like we're really good at creating force, at contracting our body. It's really hard for many of us to learn how to power down and how to, you know, do the opposite.
Because fatigue and pain and, and these other symptoms are warnings. They were designed to get your attention. They're designed to make you stop doing what you're doing and pay attention to them. But in this case, it's basically a kind of a false alarm. It's like a smoke alarm that goes off because there's steam rather than smoke. There's no smoke, there's no fire, but it's just steam, you know, from a, a coffee pot or, you know, something, or a shower can cause steam and a fire alarm goes off. So it's a false alarm. It's the sensitivity of that smoke alarm might be a little bit too high. And people who had trauma in their life are more likely to have their sensitivity of that danger signal be at a higher level, or a lower level, in the sense that it goes off a little bit more easily. So that's where the emotional processing work can come in as well on that front.
Have you found that it's necessary, uh, for people to address past traumas, um, in order to really make headway and fully resolve these issues? Or, you know, there are some schools of thought that say, like, that's, you know, kind of necessary, and other people say, you don't necessarily have to go there. I'm curious if you have, um, experience or thoughts on that.
No, you, you don't necessarily have to go there, but it sometimes can be the most important thing that you do. So it really is a case-by-case, individual basis. Clearly, many people have had trauma. The amount of people who have had trauma in their childhood and trauma in their lives is vast. Do not all of them have chronic pain or fatigue or all these symptoms. Certainly they don't. So people can have resilience and people can deal with those things. They can be in the past. So to say that everyone has to dredge up all of their past trauma would not be, it's not true. It's not necessary. On the other hand, sometimes that can be a driving force. Because what's happening in people's lives is that the situation may be ongoing in some ways. Like I said, if you have a situation in your life with the relationship, if you were abandoned as a child, father left, uh, you know, mother was too busy working, you were, you felt alone, you felt neglected, you know, that's a hurt, that's a trauma. You grow up, you're okay. But now you're in a relationship with a partner or a spouse, and all of a sudden, that person is cheating on you, or abandoning you, or not paying attention, and all of a sudden, that can trigger that warning signal that you developed early in life. And again, that sounds crazy. You know, it sounds like, "Oh, come on, that's psycho-babble." You know, but it actually can be the case. And so in those situations, you want to be able to deal with the emotions you have toward the partner and spouse, trying to repair that relationship, trying to be honest about it, authentic about it, as much as possible, deal with that. But also, sometimes we have techniques for going back and dealing with the emotional hurt from the past. And that's Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy that we use.
Yeah, I think, you know, what's, what's great about this, at the same time, challenging for for people, is that in Western medicine, you know, we're really, we love protocols. We love things that can be, you know, five steps that can be applied across the board. And you, you mentioned something so key, which is that this is a really individual journey. And, yeah, that journey, I think, often unfolds itself as we're taking steps. We might go in certain directions and, you know, find that we, we reach a certain level of improvement, and then the next challenge reveals itself, that is the next thing that we have to, um, you know, to, to work with. So I'm curious if, you know, practitioners like yourself, or or colleagues that you may know, kind of work in this, this guidance for, to help people support their individual journey.
It's, that's just what you have to do. You know, no two people are exactly alike. The model works really well across the board. The model works really well, but how you apply it is is individual. And the thing is, is that when there's a crisis, there's also an opportunity. And most people who have chronic fatigue and pain and anxiety and depression and all these overwhelming symptoms, once they realize that it's, you know, that that it's their brain, that's a neuroplastic condition, you know, they think there's hope. There's, there's the idea that they can get better. So that's incredibly liberating and transforming. But also, it may have happened for a reason. There may be something about their life situation, or them, or how they treat themselves. A lot of people treat themselves with with like criticism, you know, internal criticism and harshness, and they're not really kind to themselves, and they're not really taking time for themselves, and they never say no to other people. They always say yes, and they're always giving everything to everybody. And those patterns can be harmful. And when the brain recognizes those patterns are harmful, it can cause symptoms. And when you, in order to change, you may need to grow as a person. You may need to change who you are and how you treat yourself and how you treat others in your life, which is the opposite of post-traumatic stress disorder. It's post-traumatic growth. It's using the situation that you've been through as a springboard to becoming the person that you need to be, that you want to be, changing yourself and your life in ways that make you a better person. So you come out on the other side with better relationships, with a better feeling about yourself, with toning down some of the overly stressful situations in your life that were harming you and damaging to you.
I think that's that's a really, um, pivotal point that I've seen a lot of people, not not everyone, but many people who really, you know, go on to to complete healing or having a really, um, transformational healing journey, describe this sort of, you know, pivot point. I, I remember being there myself, where there was some mind shift of like, "I need to get back." You know, at first it was like, "I need to get back to the way I was and to what I was doing before." And everything was like, all my intentions, all my efforts were trying to get me back there. And the more I persisted in that way, the more resistance I would feel, more tension, the worse the symptoms would become, and so forth, vicious cycle. Yeah. And then something somewhere along the way starts to shift in you, and it says, "It's not about going back, but about changing your your approach and changing fundamentally, kind of your way of being in the world." As cheesy as that sounds, um, it's a profound shift. And I think once we get to that point of realization and acceptance and willingness, and even excitement to step forward in that new terrain, it's like life just goes, opens up, and all these possibilities for ourselves come online.
Yeah, no, I think that's really well put. And, um, it's hard to think of pain or fatigue or these other symptoms as a gift, right? That's like the last thing you, let's lead with that. "Hey, it's really a gift." You know, and, you know, people are going to like kill you. You know, want to strangle you because it's been destroying their life. But in a way, when people go through this journey, they often can see that there is a reason or a meaning or something there that was really important to them that they could gain from it. And that can really be a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful part about this work. And not everybody gets there, obviously. There's a tremendous amount of resistance to this work from the medical profession, from the alternative medical profession, from the public at large, from active groups, people in the, in the, you know, patient advocate groups, who, as soon as you say anything about the brain, they start to feel you're saying it's not real and you're invalidating their experience. Then that's the last thing we want to do. Because the whole point of this work is to be compassionate and caring to people. The whole point about this work is to understand people, what they've been through, and why it's not only the physical symptoms that they're suffering with, but it's also the situations in their life that they have been suffering with as well. And it's a double whammy. And if we don't treat folks with caring and kindness and compassion and meet them where they're at, we're not going to make headway for anybody, you know, it's not going to help anybody. Um, and I think that has to really be kept foremost in our minds when we talk about this. And a lot of people, like, you know, we've written books, and they, you know, they read one of our books and they throw it against the wall, they want to burn it, you know, they're offended and they're they're hurt that someone is, you know, saying that it's all in their head. And that's not what we're saying, obviously. But maybe a year later, they've tried all sorts of other treatments and they weren't effective. And maybe they start to see how the symptoms change and shift and move and are triggered by innocuous things. And they they begin to see other people who've gotten better. They read stories of recoveries like your own, that can inspire people to say, "Well, let me try this. Let me look at it again. Maybe it's time for this to, uh, for me to look into this, because nothing else has worked." And out of that desperation, oftentimes comes true healing and true recovery.
Yeah, yeah. I feel like compassion is the key to to lead with. And that that door to healing is always open. Um, it, it certainly requires some some doing to reorient ourselves in that direction. But it's, it's, um, it's so helpful, I think, for so many people to hear, you know, this, this message of hope, all of the research that's happening in this area, which is growing by leaps and bounds daily, it seems like, and, you know, all the interest in in neuroscience these days. Um, so Dr. Schuer, I think this is a great place to land on. Where can people learn more about you, your, your endeavors, next steps, follow, see what you're up to?
There are several free and nonprofit sites. The first one is the ATNS. We have a nonprofit educational, professional, and open to the public organization called the Association for Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms. The website is symptomatic.org. And there's a whole bibliography of all our research on there. All of our research, and our research is showing that these, these models work, and they work better than the standard treatments that are proposed. So we have data and research. I didn't have time to go through that today, but that's there, and it's all there on that website. There's lists of practitioners there. There's information about neuroplastic symptoms. So it's symptomatic.org, nonprofit, free. There's the TMS wiki.org. TMS wiki.org, peer-run, patient-led support groups with another practitioner list and, uh, tremendous amount of information and recovery stories that are inspiring. Um, I have a, I have a course, a free course. So if you go to Coursera.org, learnr of pain, reorigin of pain, reorigin of pain, on Coursera are totally free, you know, going through all this, all this information with videos and recovery stories. And then there's all sorts of books. And at the symptomatic.org, there's a list of all the different books that people have written. My books are there. My website is unlearnyourpain.com. My books are there as well. There's training opportunities for people who are, who are, uh, physicians, or nurses, or PTs, who are massage therapists, who are personal trainers, who are, you know, coaches, life and health coaches. And we offer training again on my website for all these, uh, conditions, or for all these professionals to help other people do this work. So there's a lot of, a lot of material that's really low-cost, uh, or free. I know it was a long answer.
Yeah, no, it's perfect. And we've captured all these. We're going to put them in the show notes to this post, which will be found at reorigin.com. For one more URL, link in there. And, uh, yeah, this was really fantastic, really inspiring to hear that you're, um, your work is reaching and now training so many other practitioners. And that's a great way to get the awareness out there and to get some real tools in people's hands that can help people with these, these conditions. So Dr. Schuer, it's really been a pleasure enjoying our conversation today, and I really appreciate you taking the time.
Thanks, Ben. I really appreciate the work you're doing as well. Keep going.
We do likewise. Bye-bye.