with Scotty Stiles

If you’ve wondered why your chronic pain doesn’t match your MRI… why nothing seems to fix it… or why pain moves around your body — this conversation will finally make it all make sense. Scotty shares exactly how he healed 15+ years of chronic back pain, hip pain, shoulder pain, and anxiety using mindbody techniques, Pain Reprocessing Therapy, emotional awareness, and nervous system retraining.

Mitch
All right, Scotty Styles is in the house bringing the pain today or or bringing the solutions for the pain. And uh I first reached out to Scotty. Uh we were chatting back and forth and I wanted to get him on because I have so many friends and family members and people that I’ve come in contact with that are that are dealing with pain and I certainly understand emotional pain, how to work with that. And it and it the more I dive into Scotty’s story, it seems like emotional pain and physical pain are very similar. And I’m really excited to dive into his story and to understand what helped him and and how he was able to not just manage but overcome physical pain. So Scotty, welcome to the show, man. Thanks, Mitch. It’s uh great to finally join you here and I’m a huge fan of your work and listening to your podcast. So, it’s a honor to be uh featured today. Uh and yeah, we’ve already been chatting uh offline ahead of time and we’ve got so many different uh turns that we can that we can go down different roads and paths that are uh super inspiring and hopefully people get a lot out of our conversation today. Amen, brother. And I totally agree. Um,

Emotional pain vs physical pain in chronic symptoms

Mitch
it’s really cool to see the similarities and I think we’re going to give people a lot of um hope and and tools if they’re dealing with pain, if they’re dealing with emotional or physical pain. And um I guess let’s start with awareness where we all start like when did this when did you start to to notice pain was an issue for you? Yeah. You know, today sitting here now I’m I’m thinking like, wow, how did I get here? and and how is it that I’m all of a sudden helping other people with this as a I’m a mindbody coach, you know, trained in pain reprocessing therapy. I like to say I’m a pain elimination coach because just like you said, it’s not about manage. We can actually eliminate chronic pain. Uh which sounds true, but yeah, we can eliminate chronic pain. It’s absolutely possible, right? chronic pain that is uh neuroplastic and and we can get into the definitions of all this stuff but most chronic pain is going to be neuroplastic for people. Um so yeah so now I’m a pain elimination coach and mindbody practitioner and um I help my clients online and uh we use psychotherrapeutic uh techniques and emotional processing and understanding brain brain science neuroscience that um we can uh train the parts of the brain and through neuroplasticity to turn off those neural circuits that are causing the pain without having to manipulate the body without having to take medication or surgery all those sorts of things. So, so how did I get here? I mean, it’s hard to remember, you know, when the pain started. I think I always had um some level of anxiety growing up, which is just another, you know, synonym for pain. They’re kind of one and the same, which we can unpack, of course, but uh you know, I love to talk about sort of this first moment in time when I did experience a very sharp pain that just woke me up. And it it can kind of um illuminate some things in hindsight as to why that might have happened. And uh so when I was a teenager, uh I I’m a musician. You can see there’s a piano behind me. Uh so I was uh doing this very um intense performance or at least it was very intense building up to it.

Scotty
And it felt like the stakes were very high and I was playing the piano and my friend was singing and it was a very big thing and we wanted to be perfect and great and there was a lot of pressure

Discovering neuroplastic pain & mindbody connection

Scotty
and and and all of these things. And so we success successfully finished the the performance and then afterward standing in the parking lot with with her my friend and then our moms, we um we’re just standing there having a regular conversation and all of a sudden I get this jolt to the back and I’m it just kind of caught me totally off guard and I’m thinking what the heck is that? I’m not even doing anything. I’m just standing here in this parking lot. And so, you know, at the age of 17, you might be thinking, “Oh, I’m getting some back pain because I’m getting older.” Well, isn’t that an interesting sort of reflection to make? You’re 17 years old. Why why would you be getting it? But it’s because that’s what I was conditioned to believe. You know, I see people all around in society that, you know, they have they have pain. It’s kind of normalized in society, right? Oh, you you’re supposed to have back pain. So, I kind of chocked it up to that. I just kind of thought, “Oh, well, maybe I’m getting older.” You know, my grandmother growing up, uh, she had, uh, I witnessed her growing up having so much pain. She’d have to kind of sit on a stool and she would kind of flinch and and make sounds every time she bent over. Now, she’s no longer with us, but, you know, I would speculate that she had a lot of neuroplastic pain and symptoms, a lot of chronic pain that was not actually structurally caused, even though it was very physically felt in the body. And so, you know, our beliefs affect everything. And so, if I were to believe, oh, I have my grandmother’s bad back or these genetics that will hold true in my body and my brain and nervous system will create that exact neural pathway. If I’m believing that I’m broken, you know, we can get into the neuroscience of why that is. But, um, so that’s kind of where it started. And now in hindsight, I’m thinking, “Oh, well, it was probably because in that moment, uh, standing with my friend and my and our parents that my brain was now scanning for the next possible threat and the next danger.” And probably on some sort of subconscious level, the pain came in to protect me because maybe I was fearful of the next big performance or this sort of like what is next? This big this looming sort of pressure of, you know, and so that was when the pain tried to come and save me. M it’s so interesting to and I’m sure it takes a lot to be able to go from I’ve got my grandmother’s bad back or I’ve got genetics that’s in my family to this is a neuroplastic pain. Yeah. Oh yeah. Seems like going against gravity. Oh yeah. Huge. And it

Early anxiety, pressure & the first pain triggers

Scotty
took probably 15 more years with all of the other pains that kind of continued to get to that place. But but if we just think about it like logically and scientifically like I’m standing in a parking lot not doing anything structurally other than standing on my two feet which I’ve always done. So why in that moment in time would I get all of a sudden like a jolt jolt of pain like that like a spasm where somebody in society we would say oh my back went out right but anatomically speaking backs don’t go out backs don’t go out when we’re not doing anything. Yeah. And I’m sure that’s got to be scary as hell to have done that. I mean, if it would make sense, more sense. It makes sense hearing it now. Um, but it would make more sense if you hurt yourself in the performance. True. Yeah. If some if somehow I sort of like fell off the piano bench or, you know, something came and knocked me in the back. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And even it’s interesting that we’re talk on this subject too of uh during the performance I would get a lot of back pain um while I was rehearsing. Oh, and I would just think oh it’s because I’m sitting on a piano bench with a unsupported chair for two hours. But now looking back I can see oh it was the amount of pressure you know emotional pressure can cause real physical pain in the body. It’s a stress response. And so it’s the amount of pressure I was putting on myself to uh literally perfect every single note that I was playing. And so that kind of emotional pressure when it puts the brain on high alert and when there’s enough sort of emotional danger built in the nervous system the the body then comes in and tries to save us with physical pain and that can just be a learned neural circuit. So, you know, if you’ve experienced pain um sitting on a piano bench, your brain remembers that, right? We have these parts of the brain that are associated with memory and learning. And that’s what causes neuroplastic symptoms because it’s just a habit that the brain has learned. It says, uh, oh, I’m I’m used to having um pain at this, you know, certain point of time. I’m sitting on the piano bench. I get pain here. So, then we expect it. And that becomes what we know as predictive processing, predictive coding, where we say, well, every time I do this, I get pain. It’s like learning a bike. And so, a lot of the work that I do with my clients is we unlearn that process. We actually teach the brain that wait a minute, it’s not the sitting on the piano bench that’s causing the pain, even though that is what I’m doing at the time, but that’s just that’s just a conditioned response. So, I’m going to train my brain to sit on this piano bench. I’m allowing the pain to come up. allowing is a big thing that we say and uh as practitioners and I’m going to not buy into the fear, right? I’m not going to buy into this story or narrative that it’s being structurally caused. I’m going to change my response to the the sensations that are coming up in my back as I’m sitting here playing the piano and and try to regulate out of that um response or or be with that response uh with some compassion and and and we can change that neuropathway and it can turn off when we uh sort of change our relationship to it. Yeah. I I just

Predictive coding: why chronic pain repeats

Scotty
get this image that that that I had going through as I’m still going through working through fear and and anxiety and that kind of thing. And I imagine it’s so similar for pain. It’s like I’m going to sit here and be in this fire and know and teach my body that I’m safe, that I’m not actually getting burned, that the flame actually can’t hurt. Yeah. Oh, and it’s so counterintuitive. Why would we ever think that we could do that? And especially when it brings up so much anxiety. And then I think that’s kind of the big other big part of my story is that, you know, they’re one and the same. So like I was saying, you know, even though I felt that back pain at that moment in time, I was probably having anxiety before that, you know, and all the anxiety around that performance was probably what was uh sensitizing my nervous system. And uh so I think I always uh gez from early on, you know, um had a lot of anxiety, dealt with a lot of feelings of shame around who I was and my sexuality and growing up and needing to hide my sexuality. And so that that you know, inevitably you you end up having sort of a fear-based um fear-based thinking or a dysfunctional relationship to fear. So it was kind of like I need to repress who I am. I can’t acknowledge that. And that is just really telling the brain that there’s a threat, there’s a danger. And then I’m experiencing, you know, pain and I’m like, “Oh, I can’t feel that.” Or I’m feeling anxiety and oh, I can’t feel that. And the more we don’t want to feel that those things, the the louder that volume gets because the brain is just trying to protect us. So yeah, the anxiety was was always there. And um and this is so common for people. I mean, it’s the human condition to feel anxiety. it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, which I had to learn later on. Um, it’s just trying to protect you. Anxiety is a danger signal just like pain is and not all pain is structurally caused. And the anxiety is can be just a learn neural circuit just like the pain. Um, and so we tend to have a lot of anxiety when we have certain personality traits where we’re putting pressure on ourselves. We’re we’re trying to be good people. Uh, we’re perfectionists. we’re uh you know we have high standards for ourselves, we want to succeed but it comes at a cost sometimes and all that pressure that we put on ourselves can disregulate the nervous system sensitize sensitization and then cause physical symptoms. So so yeah the anxiety is a big a big part of my story and um you know later on into my 20s and 30s I would have more sort of these acute flare-ups of pain. Now they were acute in the sense that they were maybe hanging around for 2 or 3 days and then I would get better. So I never really identified as a person having chronic pain

The moment chronic pain became daily

Scotty
but then eventually you know into my 30s I was having it every day and uh you know I would have uh back pain and I would have hip pain and sometimes shoulder pain and again I was just kind of repressing the fact that it was going on for me. I just it it just felt very normal. I thought, “Oh, well, everybody gets pain, right? It’s just we hear about that in society. Oh, you you work too long on your feet or, you know, you slept the wrong way.” All of these things that are myths. They’re pain myths in our society. You know, how how is it that you slept the wrong way? You slept the same way every night of your life. And then one day we wake up and we say, “My shoulder hurts cuz I slept the wrong way.” I mean, were you aware of what you were doing when you were sleeping? No, that’s not really a thing. You know, we’re not getting hit by a truck when we’re sleeping. Um, you could sleep in any way you want. Just putting that out there for people. Um, yeah. Sorry. I didn’t mean to catch you up. Keep going. Yeah. No, I was just going to say it’s it’s just I did what anybody would do in those moments. It’s just, you know, okay, I have some pain. I got to be off my feet and and rest. Take a few days off work and then and maybe and that was just kind of the merry-goround I was on in that time of my life before it got really really bad. That makes so much sense. Um, and I appreciate you sharing that, man. It seems like the the perfect storm of trauma, call it sensitization, chronic symptoms, is this this hypervigilance, this fear, this anxiety that starts at an early age, a suppression, and then a a pressure that we put on ourselves to perform perfectly or or whatever the our adaptive uh response is to get love. It seems like that’s kind of the perfect storm of creating, you know, whether you call it neuroplastic symptoms or trauma or dysregulation. Is that is that would you agree with that? Yeah. Oh, you just summed it up perfectly. That’s exactly what what was going on underneath the surface that I wasn’t aware of consciously. You know, as we talk about it now, we can say, “Oh, this is we’re looking at this person and what was going on psychologically and emotionally for them. That’s exactly what the cause of the pain was.” because there’s nothing that we can point to that was structurally causing the pain. Well, here’s the thing though. I went to go get an MRI. I went to go I went down that rabbit hole and sure enough, we will find something on our MRIs. Um, everybody has normal abnormalities. This is what uh Dr. Sarno, he’s this famous physiatrist. U he passed

MRI myths & why scans don’t explain chronic pain

Scotty
away uh maybe 10 years ago or so, less than 10 years. But um you know he would see people and and say hey the pain is not coming from the structures of your body. It’s coming from your repressed emotional world. Um these emotional threats that are putting your brain on high alert um such as putting pressure on yourself or not even not being able to be your authentic self. And um even just believing that your body is broken is enough to cause physical pain in the body. Yeah. That was Yeah. And that’s what I did. So, so um you know I had an MRI that said um this is in 2015 that said I had bulging discs, spinal stenosis, femoral narrowing and mild arthritis. Um and and so this is what a surgeon is looking for. Now a surgeon is, you know, they’re trained in what they’re trained in. They’re trained to look for these sort of abnormalities and then they would say, “Ah, well that’s that’s where the pain’s coming from.” But it’s just a correlation. It’s not a causation. And if we do a scan of 100 people on the street, um, you know, there’s studies that show this that the majority of people out there walking around with no pain also have the same MRI findings. So, how can we say that it was being caused by the bulging discs and the all of these things? I mean, I’m sitting here today, my spine is absolutely no different, and I don’t have any back or hip pain like I did 10 years ago, and I’m like much older now. And so if aging was the cause of pain, we’ve totally debunked that because it’s not that my spine is gonna somehow regenerate and and look any better. I’m sure if I did an MRI today, it would look just as jacked up as it did when I was in my gez, I was in my early 30s thinking I was getting too old. Can you imagine? Yeah. And I’m sure you were super relieved to to see, oh, there is something wrong. See, I told you. Uhhuh. Exactly. Yeah. And so then I clung to the MRI saying, “Oh, now I have a reason for it.” Now, um, this is what’s causing it. And and that didn’t actually help. Most people will find that when they get an MRI result, their pain will go will increase because now they have higher fear levels. Okay? And that fits perfectly with this idea of um the pain being caused by a perception of danger. So perception of danger is an emotional threat. It heightens your sensitivity and your nervous system and then that causes that danger signal which is pain or anxiety. And so if I’m believing my body is broken, well, I’m going to feel that physical sensation. So the famous uh um neuroscience study that that’s talked about in in this realm of physical pain uh that’s not structurally caused is the story of a construction worker and he uh steps on a nail and a nail goes through his boot. what seems to be, you know, through his foot and he’s he’s rushed to hospital in excruciating pain. They give him all this medication. They have to cut the boot off in order to not injure him further. And then when they get remove the boot from his foot, they see that the nail didn’t actually puncture his foot. It just went between his toes. But because he believed so strongly that he was physically injured, you know, through predictive coding, the brain created pain to try to protect him. So this belief, this sort of perception of danger that he was injured created that real physical pain to protect him. And we want that. We want our brain to protect us from something that could be a threat. And so sometimes the brain, it makes guesses and it doesn’t it makes mistakes or things like that. So if I’m experiencing some physical back pain and then I’m told by a surgeon, hey, it’s being caused by all these gnarly things in your spine. Now I’m picturing all of this stuff like, oh, every time I bend, I feel these pinching nerves and squeezing the discs and the bulging and all that language that they use. Even talking about it now, I feel like my body is kind of tensing up, right? Everything we think and believe is played out on the stage of our

The nail-in-boot study: perception of danger creates pain

Scotty
body. Our body is always listening to our mind. And so I love to to sort of say this quote. Uh, it’s from Dr. Schuberner, Dr. Howard Schubiner. He’s, you know, followed in Dr. Sarno’s footsteps. uh he would say um belief in harm leads to harm. So you know if you’re believing that your body is injured, you will feel that physical pain just like the guy who stepped on the nail that didn’t actually go through his foot went between his toes. So therefore the the you know the counterargument to that then is uh well then belief in well-being leads to well-being and that is kind of um sort of how how we boil down mind body medicine is is saying we just believe that we are okay and that can be enough to heal the physical body when we see that there is nothing that we need to do. There’s nothing that we need to fix in the body. We just have to have this confidence and belief that we’re okay. And when we do that, we’re actually lowering fear and sensitization because we’re believing in our own ability to heal. Sounds too good to be true, but we’ve got the neuroscience studies to back it up. Yeah. Yeah. And it it reminds me of the quote, what is it? Uh whether you believe it is true or not, you’re correct. Yeah. Yeah. And I I imagine as you’re sharing that, especially the part about seeing an MRI and getting more symptoms, more fear, more anxiety, more pain. I imagine it’s also a period of accepting that, hey, you’re okay. And it’s it’s in your brain. It’s in your nervous system because I can see myself going to, well, then I’m crazy and then I I don’t know how to work with this. And I think that’s where probably education comes in and it’s so important. Yeah. What’s that like to to hear that like it’s in your brain, it’s in your nervous system, right? When you first hear this talk conversation about the brain, it it can lose a lot of people. And people will often think, oh, are you saying the pain is in my head? And um you know, in fact, our brain has to process everything. If you were to break your arm, you still need your brain in order to feel that pain. Whether it’s a, you know, a structural injury like a broken arm or, you know, you could have that same sensation of pain in your arm without breaking your arm, you know, as exemplified by that study of the guy who stepped on the nail. You can have real, really excruciating physical pain in your arm. That’s created by perception of danger, trauma, emotional stress, you repressed emotions,

Belief systems that keep chronic pain alive

Scotty
learned neural circuits can all be that same cause of that pain. So, it doesn’t mean we’re saying it’s in your head. We’re just saying that all pain is constructed by the brain. It’s always has to be interpreted. You know, whether you put your hand on a hot stove, you that that signal that that heat has to come through your hand up the nerve fibers to your brain and your brain has to make a decision in like a nancond whether or not to send that pain. And so it’s reflexive and it’s good and we need that in order to pull our hand away. And the same is true for emotional pain. The pain is coming on to tell us, hey, there’s something going on in your life that you’re not tending to. And the subconscious mind is very clever. It’s a million times more powerful than our conscious mind. And it’s just kind trying to come in and save us. So, if you’re, you know, in a job that you’re not satisfied with or you’re in an abusive relationship or dealing with a narcissist or you are putting a lot of pressure on yourself or criticizing yourself or worrying, you have all of these unmet needs or you don’t set boundaries and you give everything to other people and and you’re people pleasing. Well, there is a part of your subconscious mind that feels very threatened, very threatened. And physical pain will come in to try to save you, just like putting your hand over a hot stove. So, we’re not saying the pain’s in your head. you’re not imagining it. This type of pain is actually more excruciating than um any other type of pain known to medicine is what Dr. Sarno would say as well. And uh were there were there things that that like I feel that in my body and I’ve heard friends describe how bad pain can be and it’s it’s hard to wrap your head around that. Um so so you hear that it’s it’s in the nervous system. It’s created from past conditioning. you’ve got all these unmet needs and emotions that you’ve never expressed and you’re you’re repressing yourself and and that that to me is like a perfect storm. It’s like the movie everything all at once is kind of what I hear. And so if if if somebody is kind of sitting in your shoes and maybe they’re in this place where they’re like maybe it’s not physical, maybe it is neuroplastic, then how do you go about working with that? What’s the next step? And oh, here’s another thing I want to ask too. Maybe able to help that. Were there how how did it what was it like letting go of like the physical stuff and and moving into that? Because I’ve heard some of your story and it feels like it was a journey. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good segue. Um because I didn’t get there overnight. Um I first discovered Dr. Asarno’s book. You know, he’s got a couple books that are very popular. One’s called Healing Back Pain. The other one’s called The Mind Body Prescription. So, I always recommend to people if you’re going

Mindbody breakthrough: reading Dr. Sarno

Scotty
to do anything, the first thing you should do is um seek out the book The Mind Body Prescription. It’s a really good place to start. So, in 2015, I find I I find this information and I read it and I’m receptive to it. But, you know, a lot of people will say in this community, I threw the book against the wall. I thought that is hogwash, bogus. I don’t believe it. And I think, you know, that’s kind of what happened to me. A little more gradual. I didn’t literally throw the book across the room. But over time, you know, over three or four days that, you know, that the belief system of thinking that there was something wrong with me because I had that MRI and I felt that that validated things and justified things for me. Oh, you just clinging to that MRI. But look, but look, look. Exactly. And I remember explaining it to um a roommate at the time that I discovered this guy, Dr. Sarno. And I I thought it was really interesting that, you know, emotional um pain and stress and it can cause real physical symptoms. And I mean, of course, why would we deny that, by the way, you know, you feel shame, your face turns red. That’s a physiological symptom. You feel, you know, all sorts of things. You cry and water falls out of your face. Like we feel emotions or stress in the body and we get things right. You get your heart rate. stuff happens physiologically. So, it’s just the same thing, but this chronic pain can linger longer even though the genesis was not structurally caused. Anyway, so I’m talking to this roommate of mine and she just kind of says to me once I explain Dr. Sarno’s theories uh that the pain it can go away and it’s not really structurally caused. And and that’s a great thing because it kind of sounds like, well, it’s not a problem. But her interpretation of that was, oh, so the pain’s just in your head. Oh, so there’s, you know, and I thought, well, no, but there is something wrong with me. Like, this is worse than that, right? It kind of sounds dismissive when you’re saying, oh, you know, just deal with it this thing, this brain thing. But no, we want to validate. The pain is very real. It’s very intense, but I felt in that moment, oh, I needed more validation. Like, that’s that’s unfair that she was saying this to me. And so, I said, you know, started to to cling to that MRI again, like you’re saying. I was like clutching at it being like, well, I have these bulging discs and that’s this is the reason. And so for two more years, I continued to do the same thing that was not helping me. Einstein says insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. And so I went to Oh goodness. I I tried everything. I tried uh chiropractic, physio, osteo, massage, acupuncture. Um I did uh I was hanging from trees. I was this a tree branch and ang thinking like, oh, that’s going to loosen something up, you know, and maybe in that moment I could kind of feel this expansion, but that wasn’t doing anything. Um, the the surgeon that I saw, so they said that I was not a candidate for surgery and they sent me to a sports medicine clinic and uh oh boy, he had horrible bedside manner which upped my fear levels and that increased the pain. Um, I had cortisone shots. um you know I was uh I went to the the sports medicine clinic where they

The “symptom imperative” explained

Scotty
um had me do sort of these different postures where you would sort of um stand on your feet in a particular way you know 40% on the balls of your feet and 60% on the and all of this manipulation of the physical body which did nothing for me. Um, it’s interesting too though because sometimes there would be stops along the way where I would find a little bit of relief and then I would think, oh, this is the thing. This is the golden ticket. This person recommended this, you know, osteopath that is is so well known. And now what we know about mindbody medicine is that, you know, the underlying mechanism that turns that neural circuit of pain off is the belief that you’re okay and the belief that this this treatment is working for you. So if my brain uh somehow was able to turn off that pain after, you know, a really successful in quotes successful osteopath treatment, it’s not because the treatment worked. It’s because of my belief that the treatment would work. That is the placebo. The belief in well-being leading to your well-being. So mind body medicine is actually you’re cutting out the middleman here and you’re saying, “I don’t need anything outside of myself to structurally manipulate my body in order to physically heal. I can just believe belief alone is enough to heal because you know that osteopath treatment it’s a placebo but not the kind that we want because it’s not not longlasting because then a couple weeks later the pain starts to come up come in again because if we’re fundamentally believing that the body is damaged just like the guy with the nail on the boot we’re still going to experience that physical pain. If I’m picturing my spine being cracked and bulging and all this stuff, I’m still going to experience that that excruciating pain to sort of match my belief system. And so finally in 2017, uh I took a trip to to Europe and I was really trying to enjoy myself. I I found that in those days I would I could go on a vacation and somehow feel better, which interestingly enough that um is another phenomenon called the vacation effect. You go wag that. Yeah. Ah yeah. you you you leave your sort of regular life, your typical stressors, and all of a sudden the pain just vanishes. Well, what more proves that there is some sort of psychological emotional factor than that? You know, you remove stress from your life and you put yourself in this happy situation. But anyway, on this on this vacation, I was I I was just more disregulated. Um, and in fact, I was wanting that sort of vacation effect. I was hoping and and and really not wanting the pain to be there. And that desire was so strong that of course the pain increased. What we focus on grows and expands through neuroplasticity, right? And so I was just, you know, I didn’t know about mindbody medicine very fully at this point. But, you know, that vacation really sealed the deal. I knew that u I I had to try something different and and you know, real change can sometimes be born out of desperation. Oh. Yeah. So once I got home, um I didn’t know what was coming, but I went to a used bookstore here in Toronto and uh and I saw Dr. Sarno’s book on the shelf and that was the moment. That was the moment I said, “Okay, I’m doing this again because I’ve now I’ve exhausted everything. I’ve tried literally everything short of surgery.” And so I took the book out and I read it in a week and within a week my back pain was gone. Now it came back because this is how symptoms work. But that is also enough to know if if I could read a book and it was making my brain feel safe understanding psychoeducation and the fact that the brain can cause real physical pain in the absence of tissue damage then what more evidence do I need? And so that that was when I just you know it took off and and I knew that this would be the path even though I wasn’t always fully there and it took a long time to fully get there.

Mitch
Mhm. What was it in that book, that first week that you think turned off the pain? Yeah. A lot of the neuroscience, right? So, psychoeducation is the first step to pain reprocessing therapy, which is the term that we talk about now that’s built off of Dr. Sarno’s work. But it’s this understanding that your body is structurally okay. Just knowing your spine has all of the same abnormalities that other people with no pain have. And even a a good How to heal chronic pain by reducing fear & meaning physiotherapist will tell you the same thing. You know, they’ll say, “Okay, yeah, you know, you can move your body. It’s safe to move your body.” And they’ll say things like, “Motion is lotion.” You know, if you were truly injured, they wouldn’t be telling you that. You know, and physiootherapy is great for rehabilitation of uh a serious injury, car accident, stroke, that sort of thing. But it’s doesn’t do a very good job of chronic pain. And this is what’s kind of missing. The medical model is so biomemed focused on, you know, treating the body as if it’s a car, you know, but we are so much more complex. We’ve got our psychology and our emotions and and the physical parts of the body and and our spiritual sense of selves. And so when we look at it at a holistic perspective, it it kind of makes a lot of sense why this pain can be happening when it’s not structurally caused. So yeah, the message of safety that my brain received from the book uh was enough to sort of set the stage and to sort of turn off that neural circuit. And it it happens like a light switch for people, right? Um the pain can turn on and off just like that. And it’s it’s it’s wild. I mean, sometimes that’s how it it begins. It kind of just sort of seemingly comes out of nowhere or it kind of sort of builds over time as well, but when it goes away, it’s like you’re it’s when you least expect it. And so um the pain goes away. I can immediately say it kind of feels like a magic trick. Really does. Yeah. Yeah. I I felt like am I because I’d been in the pain for two years or or three like every day, you know, obviously I had decades of pain, but on an everyday basis I had it all the time. I wasn’t working. I was literally lying on the floor. I couldn’t sit on couches. I never traveled. I had to lie on a yoga mat on the floor all day long. And I was constantly massaging and icing. And then all of a sudden and when it’s gone into your body, you almost kind of think, whoa, am I am I dreaming? Like like it’s like a magic trick. It doesn’t seem real. H And then, you know, right after right when the pain went away, I got this new symptom. And I didn’t know much about what was happening from this sort of uh neuro neuroysiological point of view, but I was experiencing what is known as this phenomenon called the symptom imperative. And this is what Dr. Sarno would talk about is that when one symptom goes away, the brain will now try to protect us in another part of the body. If that still feels safe, is that what’s going on? It’s exactly it’s still the root the root the subconscious root is still not fully uh realized. And so I got this um really excruciating dry eye almost like I thought there was something in it. And I’m and I’m thinking, did I scratch my eye in my sleep? Did something fly in my eye? What have I done? um all the while kind of still being aware of the symptom imperative but it’s the sensations that we feel with pain or um different symptoms that come up. It’s not just pain related symptoms. They seem so real real enough to think that we need to do something right. They they drive us to feel like we need to go to the hospital which I did many times on my journey. Uh things like that but we have to kind of decipher and sure it’s good to rule things out medically. Um, and that so that’s what I did. Even though in the back of my mind I thought, well, this is strange. My back pain went away. I’m experiencing what feels like a I have a boulder in my eye. Uh, I felt like my vision had even changed. So, I thought, okay, why don’t I go to the optometrist? Hadn’t been in years. You know, we’re supposed to go more often than or at least I was I’m supposed to go more often than I had been. And um, sure enough, there was nothing wrong with my eye. They look for,

Somatic tracking & embracing sensations safely

Scotty
you know, an optometrist will look for different sort of eye diseases, things like that. And um I thought I’ve said to the the optometrist on my vision I feel like I can’t see as well though. And trade off I need some glasses like I got some glasses because my eye my vision had changed. But it what’s interesting is that again the brain perceives everything. And so the perception that my vision had changed almost seemed like it had happened overnight but really it had just happened gradually. But because I was so hyperfocused on my eye having a problem then I thought oh now there’s something wrong with my vision. But I had never noticed it. That wasn’t in my conscious awareness until I was starting to have some eye symptoms. So, turns out I I had some glasses, but uh it was it was just um you know, for a stigmatism that was uh you know, watching TV and and driving would the glasses would help for, but there was no actual real eye damage. But um the sensitization was creating this very real physical symptom in the eye. And so I would have years beyond Yeah. and so many other symptoms are are symptom imperatives that would come along on my journey too. Um, which is what happens. It’s just how the the the brain wants to communicate to us. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that because it it feels like that’s what I’m seeing from myself going through this process of coming out of sensation and helping clients as well. There’s like an initial burst of relief. And I’m also aware I’ve never heard of the the symptom imperative, but I’ve seen like, okay, so I’m not I’m sleeping better. Um maybe I’m the fatigue that I was experiencing is better, but now uh I’m obsessed about something new, whether it’s like food or supplements or diet, you know, whatever it may be. And with the education, you’re able to catch, oh, this is the same thing. And ultimately it’s going back to meeting the fear, the root cause of our fear in our body. And so I I can imagine and I know for sure and I’ve seen with my clients too that when we have a big um breakthrough, if you will, especially if you’ve been dealing this for years, it’s easy to think like, “Oh, I’m done. I’m healed.” and and when that rubber band, you know, when we go back into another contraction of the nervous system, um the despair that can come up, like what’s it like to to feel like we’re going backwards and how do you work through that? Yeah, that’s a really important thing to point out. And you know, I love to say healing is not linear. And uh you know if all of a sudden your back and hip pain are better and you get a new symptom in the in the body, well that’s the brain doing what it knows best to protect you because if your back and hip pain is not going to scare you anymore, your brain is very crafty. You know, our brain’s not out to get us but it is protective. So if we’ve kind of dealt with that back and hip pain and we’ve reprocessed that using, you know, different mindbody techniques, well very cleverly the brain could now send you some shoulder pain and that might feel more terrifying to you. And so that’s just kind of what happens. It’s like whack-a-ole through the body. This is the symptom imperative. So, you know, um it just finds a new crafty way to get your attention. And if it’s something you’ve never experienced before, you’re going to feel more uniquely terrified by it. I’ve had some of the strangest symptoms since then. I had the most one of the most recent ones was I was uh traveling in in Vancouver and I had this very strange mouth sensation and you know what started off as almost like jaw pain and then I felt like I was sucking on like a sour candy. So the brain can create literally any physical sensation or symptom in the body. So you know if the if the body is the mechanism for you know having for housing a symptom the brain can be co-opted to be that root

Why trying to fix pain keeps you stuck

Scotty
cause the subconscious mind and brain and nervous system. If the body has the ability to express it the brain can be the the source of it. So, it’s interesting to hear too that it sounds like, you know, you built so much awareness and you’ve worked through this stuff and still stuff can pop up and it’s and is it is it the basically the same tools that got you out of the sensitization that get you out of like a little small flare these days? You’re like, oh, you know, maybe I need to slow down. Maybe I’m putting pressure on myself. Maybe there’s an emotion that I’m not feeling. You know, what’s your process for when something new pops up? cuz I feel like it’s so easy to go, “Oh my god, I’m going backwards.” And to reensitize oursel. How do we pull oursel out of that? So true. And it’s like learning to master anything. It’s like learning to master an instrument. Um, you know, and to not get discouraged. And I I hope that listeners aren’t thinking like, “Oh, he’s a chronic pain coach and he still gets symptoms.” Well, well, actually, yeah. We again all have a brain and nervous system that is built um to survive through all of these centuries. um to protect us with pain when we need it, whether it is putting your hand on a hot stove and needing to pull it off or something emotionally and stressful going on. So, it’s kind of a barometer of understanding that maybe there’s something in our life that we need to tend to. So, my pain if if I do get a certain sort of twinge or something like that or a new symptom, it never becomes chronic because again, a chronic pain uh as one of my mentors Nicole Sax says, it’s an epidemic of fear and meaning. And so as as long as you’re not um you know adding more gasoline to the fire which is fear and meaning then it won’t become chronic. And so just seeing it just like you said as a barometer for you know maybe there’s some stress or I’m putting pressure on myself or all these things. Ah it’s getting my attention. Okay. So what is it that I need to deal with in my life emotionally? And then I can start to see this sort of any symptom or new sensation as an indication sort of as like a superpower. Oh, I feel a twinge. That means there’s something going on. I’m feeling unsafe emotionally or psychologically. And ah okay, I can kind of realize that uh I can express myself in this way and feel and feel more confident and and it’s really kind of a language a nervous system language that we build. Uh so you know chronic pain I it’s it it’s not meant to be around forever. Uh and we can absolutely unlearn it. But can we remove um the human condition? No. And nor do we need to. So it’s okay to get things here and there. You know I sometimes will have a a call with a client and they’ll have a particular symptom and we could do different um mindfulness exercises. One of the the biggest ones

The 7 F’s that fuel chronic pain

Scotty
that we do is sematic tracking. And we could be doing an exercise where we’re allowing, right? We’re we’re leaning into the physical sensations of the body to teach the brain that those sensations are not dangerous. And this is, you know, how we change our relationship to the symptoms in pain reprocessing therapy. And we’ll be doing this practice. And I’ll be, let’s just say the the client has pel pelvic pain. And we’re paying attention to the pelvis and they’re paying attention to their sensations and I’m guiding them through this practice. And now, of course, as we’re working through the practice, I’m paying attention to my own pelvic area. And now I’m starting to feel, oh, how does my pelvis feel? And then even doing this right now, I’m, oh, I actually I wasn’t paying attention to my pelvic area, but now I am. And oh, is it actually feeling tight? And is it doing anything? And if I start to label that area as wrong or dangerous or oh, I feel some tension and maybe I have a disease and maybe I have a bladder infection. Guess what happens? Belief in harm leads to harm. And I’m going to start feeling more somatic sensations. And if I have a perception of threat or danger believing that I’m injured, it’s going to increase. So what do I do when I experience this with a client? I I I might even express that to them. I might even say, “Hey, look, you know, symptoms are contagious, not on a pathological level, but on this sort of suggestability level. This is how I learned pain from my grandmother, right? I was so suggestible of not wanting that sensation that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.” So, I’ll explain to my client, I’ll say, “Oh, you know, I’m even feeling um physical sensations in my pelvic area and really normalize that and say that’s just just human. We’re human beings. You can feel anything in any part of the body if you you you know, you put your mind in that in that location.” But it’s how we label it. It’s like, are we labeling that with fear and meaning? Are we picturing it there being something wrong? And as soon as we do that, then that neural circuit gets learned, right? It’s the parts of the brain associated with memory and learning and it holds and it creates through neuroplasticity a neural circuit for pain and that’s what locks it on. That’s what keeps it chronic. I love you laying that out and and I want to highlight, hey, yeah, we got a we got a chronic pain coach here that helps people eliminate pain and he gets pain too. And the difference that I hear is that you’re no longer stuck. That you can trust that what goes up must come down. And and I can certainly relate to this um on the more emotional level and dealing with anxiety and fatigue and things like that, burnout and um eventually seeing how quick this process can be and how much attaching that secondary fear keeps us stuck and also trying to figure it out and fix it. I want to go there next. Yeah. But for me, it was so interesting to get a process kind of like you did and to actually stay with the the pain and to see, yes, it’s going to increase, it’s going to get louder, it’s going to get scary, but if I can stay with it and trust and love the [ __ ] out of it, then all of a sudden the magic trick happens and I come out of it and it’s like you So, you’re telling me for all these years I was resistant to moving through this and That’s a big part of what caused all this uh emotional backup c and and fear causing this pain. And if I can just sit with it and love myself and teach myself that it’s okay that eventually it goes away. Like that sounds nutty. Yeah. Yeah. Really, you know, the bedrock of this work is feeling safe with sensations. That’s kind of like the first level. And that’s exactly what you’re saying now. It’s like um sit with that sensation. Don’t add add any more fear.

Rewiring the brain through new responses

Scotty
to that fear or meaning because that’s like the gasoline to the fire that’s kind of already going. And if you’re sitting with that with that sitting with that sensation with compassion and knowing that you’ll be well and knowing that um you know if we sit long enough um without that resistance the brain will get the message that there is no threat and it will unlearn that symptom. You know it’s kind of spoken about um in the language of saying feel it to heal it. So on a sematic level, we would just want to feel that sensation through this lens of neutrality to know that we’re not in danger. And you know, the other parts of this work is can be um to be doing the same with our emotions um to be doing uh to feeling a sense of safety with our thoughts and not necessarily buying into those fear thoughts. And then our behaviors and movements. So even though you might have physical pain, you know, walking is going to teach your brain behaviorally that walking is safe, that you’re not damaged. And so the more we can sort of gradually um incorporate more movement into our lives as well and this I work with a lot of athletes that are you know they’re having setbacks because they’re believing that they’re injuring themselves. But when we believe again when we believe the body is damaged the body will try to protect us with physical pain. So that’s a big hurdle. It’s just a conditioned response for people. And um you know an example would be uh you know with my back pain it would hurt when I bent over. So, of course, anyone would think, “Oh, every time I bend, uh, I’m causing something structural.” Okay, so now I learned that the pain was not structurally caused. So, why does it still hurt when I bend over if it’s not structurally caused? It’s because the brain creates physical pain um that’s uh psychologically, emotionally rooted through memory and learning. So, your brain has this predictive coding process of saying, “Every time he bends over, I’m going to send him some shooting pain.” And that’s just a conditioned response. Wow. So, but then I was able to notice, wait, I bent over. Nine times out of 10 I had back pain, but there was that one time that I bent over and it didn’t happen. So, that just totally debunks this idea that the pain is structurally caused. Why would if it was structurally caused it would hurt every single time it would be predictable. So, I had to look for those prediction errors to see ah okay it’s not structurally caused. If I was able to walk, you know, so we want to start testing our body. So, you know, we want to incorporate movement, feeling safe with movement and behaviors to say, “Hey, I can go outside. I actually realize, oh, I actually feel better when I’m walking.” Well, that’s really strange. Why am I I’m lying on my floor all day long and excruciating pain, but I feel better when I’m walking. That doesn’t add up, right? And then the last part is just feeling safe with who we are and safe in our lives. You know, there’s a lot of things in our for people that, you know, they can’t reach full safety. um you know in the world we live in there might be some threats in their lives um that are impossible to eliminate but it’s this idea of feeling safe enough right we don’t need 100% safety but um so

Building safety, emotional awareness & resilience

Scotty
that is kind of the yeah the bedrock of it all um and then um but yeah this on the sensation level absolutely we we don’t want to be resisting um you know Carl Young famously says what we resist persists and so that just makes perfect sense if we’re focusing on this pain and we don’t want it, we’re resisting. And what we focus on grows and expands through neuroplasticity. So the opposite to that is to actually embrace to erase. So if what if what we focus on grows and expands, what we embrace, we erase. And isn’t that so counterintuitive to embrace the pain? Why would anybody want to embrace their pain? But when we do that, we’re actually changing our relationship to it. We’re embracing it with you’re going to be okay. We’re embracing it with that selft talk that everything is actually fine. this sort of neutrality that there is no nothing structurally wrong. We’re allowing that sensation to be there through this lens of safety and then the brain and nervous system starts to calm because we’re no longer feeding it with with those messages of danger. We’re embrace we’re just embracing that sensation. or kind of um getting curious about it and getting familiar with it to see see it for what it is without attaching any story or meaning to it because it’s that story of saying I’m broken or I don’t want this, you know, I want this to go away. Saying that actually increases it. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like it it starts with awareness. We get to the and we get education. We learn about predictive patterns. We have to go against gravity, against conditioning, up against the the band-aid that society tells us to to put on the boo boo. And and then what I hear is and something that Simona talked to me about that really hit was, you know, safety is something that’s built built through repetition. Um I know knew that I needed to build safety. Um but it’s really hard to do that if we’ve never experienced that before. It’s like learning a new language. And with education and awareness, we can start to move towards these things and and challenge them. I I’d say in a a titrated way. And once you see the ball go through the hoop a couple times and you you’ve got awareness and it’s like maybe maybe this is something that I’ve created. And if I can if I can work with the fear and teach my body that it’s okay and I can do that over and over again in different situations, challenge these predictive

Scotty’s final advice: You can heal chronic pain

Scotty
um uh what do they call it? Predictive pattern processing, then eventually my my brain’s going to learn just like it learned the fear. American Anmar. Yeah, that’s exactly it. Yeah. Shout out to Simona, by the way. She’s good friend of Yeah. I I want to go back to We were talking about this prior to hopping on, prying to hit record. You know, speaking of Simona, got a nice little le uh uh entry point here. She stopped me in my tracks when we had a podcast together when she said, “You know what keeps us in sensitation is trying to fix it and figure it out.” And I’m like, I felt like somebody put a high beam on me because I was the biohacker. I was the trying to and it if we’re in pain, it makes sense. We want to get rid of it and we want it to get better. We want to figure it out. Um, but you mentioned that there’s some other S. So, if it’s not if it’s fix it and figure it out, what are what are some other things that keep us stuck in fear? Yeah. So one of my mentors Dr. Howard Schubiner who again is another pioneer in mindbody medicine um that you know started his work after Dr. Sarno. Uh so he initially started off creating the five Fs and so um F uh is is you know the first letter of each word obviously and um and then he expanded it to six and then I gave him one more so now it’s seven. Um, so they’re just different reactions to how um we respond to pain or anxiety or other symptoms um symptoms that are uh cause resulted um of sensitization. And so naturally, if you feel something uncomfortable in your body, you’re going to feel fear. And so that’s the first F, right? You feel fear, that upregulates the nervous system, you have more anxiety. And in pain reprocessing therapy, we talk about it as if uh it’s called a pain fear cycle. So you feel some fear, and that upregulates the nervous system, then you feel some pain. And then the more pain you feel, the more fear you feel, and then it just cycles like that. So it’s kind of no wonder. Oh, we start to think that there’s something wrong with us. Everything starts to feel like more of an emergency. And then the pain gets higher, higher, higher. And so we want to isolate the fear, recognize, okay, that’s a natural reaction to pain. Of course, we feel fear, but we have to actually, it’s counterintuitive. We actually have to recognize that and say, okay, that’s just how I’m reacting, but now I’m going to choose a new response. And so, it’s this idea of not buying into the fear. Oftenimes our thoughts are telling us all of these things that aren’t true like the pain will never go away or maybe I’m injured or you know we have 60 to 70,000 thoughts a day. Think about how many of those thoughts aren’t true, right? We’re worried that somebody’s looking giving us a dirty look. Like there’s so many things that we could be telling ourselves and they’re quite often fueled by a negativity bias. That’s just how we’re wired. It’s not a problem. We always want to look for the negative in order to protect ourselves. So, of course, you’re going to have a fear thought when you’re feeling an uncomfortable sensation, but it’s what we do with it that matters. So, that’s the first F is the fear. Um, the second one is focus. So, if you are focusing on something like you don’t want it there, it’s going to grow. It’s going to grow and expand through neuroplasticity. Neurons that fire together wire together. This is why the the term neuroplastic pain is is perfect because neuro um meaning brain generated and plastic meaning the ability for it to change through repetition. It’s plastic neuroplasticity. You know the brain can change at any age. And so uh when we have uh this idea of focus, if we’re focusing on it with the wrong intention, like we don’t want this here, we’re really um this desire for it to be gone is this sort of wrong type of focus. it’s going to keep it’s going to keep through neuroplasticity it’s going to increase. You know, every time I think about my pain, a lot of people will say, “I can’t stop thinking about it.” Um, you know, it’s kind of like OCD, right? You’re like it. And and what it really is, I’ve heard um Alan Gordon, he’ll say, uh, this this pain that you’re feeling in your body is like kinesthetic OCD. It’s like thinking about a sensation over and over again loops that sensation. We want to try to break that. And we can break that. we can kind of say, “Oh, I’m focusing on this. That’s just my conscious. I’m subconsciously focusing on or consciously and that’s actually increasing the pain.” So, if I can notice my part in how much focus and energy I give something and shift my attention and say, “Woo, I’m going to try to focus on a movie. I’m going to try to maybe have a little distraction or some avoidance behaviors.” That can help break that cycle a little bit. And again, that’s just another form of fear. It’s just another one of the Fs. Um so uh the next two are quite similar. Um you know we have fighting if we’re trying to push through pain or symptoms or we’re getting angry uh by the symptoms or we’re resisting the symptoms. That type of energy will absolutely upregulate the nervous system. It’s just another form of fear. Frustration, you know, we’re feeling irritable. We’re, you know, we’re frustrated. We’re we’re getting kind of annoyed by it. If we’re buying into that another day of pain and h I’m so frustrated, I don’t want this. You know, again, that desire for things to be different is read by the nervous system as fear. And so frustration, even feeling frustrated by um non-pane threats in your life, you know, you’re frustrated by your job, you’re frustrated by yourself, you’re criticizing yourself. That puts the brain on high alert, too. So it’s not only being frustrated by the pain, it’s being frustrated by non-p pain threats. If you’re buying into this idea that uh you know your life is more difficult than it is on on such u minute things, then that’s going to send the brain into high alert. You know, I use this example all the time talking about how uh I would be at the grocery store standing in line at the checkout and I’d get really frustrated that oh, I should have chosen the other line because it’s moving faster and h and now I’m being hard on myself and getting irritable and and then if we think about it logically, am I in a rush? You know, is it okay to be one minute late? So that idea of being frustrated about something that really is in the grand scheme of things kind of insignificant was putting my brain on high alert. And now in hindsight, I can look back and say, “Oh, I actually had more higher higher levels of back pain in in those moments.” I remember always standing in line up a checkout, feeling more tension in my body, feeling more back pain. And now when I look back, oh my goodness, it’s really associated with sort of this uh fear-based thinking that I was stuck in and stuck in frustration. So if you’re if you’re noticing frustration, you know, we want to validate it and say, “Okay, I’m frustrated.” But we don’t need to buy into it and we don’t need to stay there. we can say okay moving on now you know I don’t have to add it what about what about expressing it because I hear I hear the the uh repression type of stuff with some of these these emotions coming up and and I do have wondered it’s like I want to allow it to be here I don’t want to dismiss it that was a a big pain for me growing up is being dismissed when I’m emotional and so how do we let it be there without letting it take over and without trying to make it go away. Seems like a like you’re walking a line there. Mhm. Yeah. We want to validate any emotions. We don’t want to be repressing emotions because that’s exactly how symptoms get expressed when we’re repressing emotions. So, if you feel uh you know um some anger towards somebody or resentment sometimes that we do have to um come to grips with and come to terms with that that that’s how we’re feeling. We don’t necessarily have to express that to somebody else in order to heal. you know, you can do some deep emotional work on yourself without having to heal that relationship with that person. They might be no longer living with us or something like that too, right? Sure. Uh but, you know, in terms of, you know, um the pain itself, when we’re more frustrated with the pain, that’s just going to further upregulate the nervous system. So, is that kind of like adding the second fear to it? So, you’re adding frustration to the pain. Is that exactly? Yeah, that would be like a second fear. But I see what you’re saying. Absolutely. We if you’re feeling you know um frustration from you know you know we want to we always want to be feeling our emotions and we can do that in so many different ways using different mindbody tools. Um but it’s more about allowing those emotions and feeling them on a sematic level and but then we don’t need to stay there right we don’t need to kind of um get stuck and dwell and and kind of you know build further resentment. We just want to bring some compassion to those emotions and change our relationship to those emotions and validate those emotions so that they can be let go of. So if we’re feeling frustrated, we could say, “Ah, I see you’re feeling frustrated.” We recognize we bring mindfulness is always the first step. We bring mindfulness to what is. And we say, “Ah, okay. This must be really hard for you.” And we bring self-compassion to that, but we don’t need to buy into it and stay and and stay there any longer than we need to. Yeah. Um, and so the next two Fs, uh, are the ones that you’ve mentioned, the fixing and the figuring out. And so fixing could be, let’s just say you didn’t know about mindbody medicine and you were fixing yourself by going to a physical therapist, getting a massage. I used to use this tennis ball or lacrosse ball and I would rub it into my joints, like rub it into my hip and shoulder every day. Every day, all day long. It was like an addiction. And if I wasn’t getting that relief and that that sort of, you know, um trigger point reliefs, I would feel anxiety. And so that was a fixing modality. My brain then thought that I needed to do this thing to fix my shoulder or to fix my hip. And that never solved the pain. Maybe temporarily a fixing modality can kind of give you some relief, you know, whether that’s like a ice pack or a heating pack, but that’s not going to be the cure to your chronic pain because you know, when we’re trying to fix the body with a um you know, physical modality, you’re sending mixed messages to your brain. You’re you’re communicating to the brain that there must be something structurally wrong with you. Why would you be putting an ice pack on a physical symptom that’s actually caused by your brain and nervous system thinking that there’s a psychological emotional threat? So, if we continue to, you know, behave as if we’re treating something structurally, the brain’s going to think that we’re broken still. You know, if I’m going to continue to ice my my hip, then I’m I’m believing that I’m injured. So, you know, I had to give up those physical modalities as if I were to be giving up smoking, which I also done. You know, it’s like you got to not feed the brain that nicotine and eventually it’s it’s the brain’s going to say give me that cigarette, give me but the nicotine receptors will eventually, you know, give up. And so the same is true with the ba the brain and those fixing modalities. Yeah. It kind of reminds me of like what I learned from Simona too and that I’ve experienced is like soothing soothing um trying to fix anything ultimately keeps us stuck and and like I learned so many tactics to to through building capacity and learning to be with sensation and it seems like the resources are certainly helpful when we’re disregulated and can help us soo and ultimately we have to see that this is kind of keeping us stuck and we got to let go of And that is that’s that’s a tough one. You know, if you feel like you’re doing something good for your body and and seeing that, hey, the good thing that you think you’re doing is actually the thing that’s keeping you stuck, that’s kind of a a mind buck, you’re right. It’s like, yeah, it’s it’s so that’s why I say I told Irene Lion, um, you know, doing this trauma work, this nervous system brain retraining stuff, it’s like the ultimate red pill. and and you you wake up and you see what’s going on with your life and what’s going on in your family life and what’s going on with society and we learn that it’s ass backwards and we kind of got to go down the rabbit hole of forgiveness and love and um allowing and accepting and that is just not what society is doing. It’s it’s put a band-aid on it, take this pill, go see this thing, you know, crack it, rack it and crack it. Um and such a quick fix. And let me ask you this too. Yeah. Is there is that to get us out of sensitization? And is there a point where you’re like, “Yeah, I’ll go get a massage because I get in this modality of if I have symptoms, I notice myself going to fix it.” And I’m typically like, “Ah, don’t do that right now.” And that is what helps. But does there come a point kind of like, you know, we don’t follow the compulsions in the beginning of sensitization. Maybe the compulsion is to fix it, but is there a place where we can start to respond to those impulses again in a healthy way? Like are you asking? Could could you go to a massage again once you’re out of chronic? Yeah. Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m asking. Like now are you able to enjoy that? Are you like not good for me? Yeah. Yeah, that’s a really good question. Um yes, to be transparent, I’ll go for a massage once a year if that just for pleasure and relaxation of the nervous system. Now, if I were to have a symptom popping up, of course, it would be short-lived. You know, um a neuroplastic sensation, you know, the longest flare I’ve had in the past two or three years is was, you know, eight days of back pain um in terms of my original pain. But, um you know, I’ve been in situations before where I I’m fully bought into this idea that my pain is neuroplastic and said, I’m just going to go for a massage and tell them that I don’t have pain. Meanwhile, I did have pain. And so again, I’m reinforcing, you know, this You’re kind of a sneaky at that point. Yeah. Yeah. So I I would tell the practitioner, I’m just here for nervous system regulation. Now, it might have felt good in the moment, but again, we’re fooling ourselves to think that uh we need to do this um to fix the pain because the ultimate thing that needs to be rewired is your belief system and your subconscious programming that thinks that you need this pain and changing those neural circuits, unlearning that pain and and then it can go away. Um this this and this reaching for something outside of ourselves means reach inside. It means your insides, your little parts, your younger self, your wounds, they need you so much. Like today, I was telling you I had a little bit of a freeze stuff yesterday. Coming out of that today, I’m like, “Oh, I’ll take some had some brain fog this morning.” Um and I’m like, “I’ll take some methylene blue or I’ll do you know this or that to get my brain right.” And I’m like, “Ah.” And that’s another thing from Simona that when that comes up, trust, that’s the next thing. That’s the next thing to work with. And so we kind of move from this place, and this may sound crazy to someone that’s listening that’s in it. It would have sound crazy to me six months ago, but it’s like we go from this place of, “Oh [ __ ] the pain is back until, oh [ __ ] the pain’s back.” Like the the pathway in my brain is open. Um, I’m able to work with this and meet this. And what’s on the other side of this healing? because it’s going to be more capacity. Wow. That’s a huge switch for people to make. And I didn’t understand until recently. Yeah. That’s what we would call a corrective experience, right? If you’re able to reappraise what’s happening to you as not being a problem even though it’s uncomfortable and you don’t want it, you’re learn you’re teaching yourself from it and you’re you’re you’re understanding that that it’s just information. This this this sensation and whatever it is that’s happening in your body is just information. It’s not to be feared. And um I love what you said about like that that that notion of trying to um you felt like the need that you needed to try some sort of physical modality to help yourself and that and just that questioning of things is figuring out, right? And that’s the sixth is is trying to figure it out. Whether it’s uh trying to figure out what’s structurally wrong with you or now that we know about neuroplastic symptoms that are psychologically emotionally rooted, people are trying to figure out their trauma or they’re trying to figure out what’s emotionally wrong with them. And that can put the brain on high alert when we keep trying to think like I got to find that one thing. Quite often it’s not. It’s just a sort of a built up in your system over time of how your brain is operating um to current your current environment based on what it’s been programmed uh by from the past. And so yeah, this idea of figuring out is is it’s it’s it’s often hidden in there, right? Because you know, even just not wanting the pain is enough to cause dysregulation, upregulate the nervous system. just figuring out is just another form of fear. It’s just completely masked. Yeah. And then the very last one, the seventh F that uh that I gave to Dr. Schubiner to use, I think he might be putting it in his new book. Um uh we’ll see next year. So it’s feeling forlorn. So if you’re feeling forlorn, you’re feeling hopeless and helpless, that is sending a message of threat to your brain. And if you believe that you’re never going to get better, if you’re hopeless and you you you know, you don’t think you’ll ever get better. You wake up every day and another one of these days and you’re kind of thinking, h it’s going to be a bad day. If you believe it’s going to be a bad day, it’s going to be a bad day. We have to start looking for those glimmers. We have to start looking for the hope. We have to start looking for the exception to the rule of those prediction errors to see, wait a minute, I bent over and it didn’t hurt that time. My brain is capable of change. Even if it’s small, even if you oftentimes, you know, a lot of clients of mine or even myself, I would wake up and for that first five seconds, I wouldn’t experience pain. And then as soon as you put your feet on the ground, oh, symptoms are back. Oh, yeah. Well, in that, even though it might seem small, in that 5 seconds, that’s what that’s what we’re looking for. We want to train the brain to see that we can rely on hope and optimism as a mechanism to fight this sort of uh notion that we are stuck or that we’re that we’re um you know feeling for Lauren that we’re really um un unrescuable you know we’re the ones that are going to get ourselves out of this. So, if we’re buying into this delusion, of course, it’s a natural response to, again, all of these Fs are natural responses to pain or um symptoms or sensations, but we then get to choose our new response. I don’t have to be um even though it’s natural to feel depressed and feel foreign, I don’t have to be as depressed or for learn. It’s it’s a spectrum. Can I feel a little more optimistic? Can I feel like I’m going to heal? um and and look for the evidence of that because again through neuroplasticity we can absolutely change the brain we can unlearn those neural pathways um even when things seem so desperate. Oh my goodness I I never could have imagined that it would have worked for me lying on the floor like that. How could I? And of course, I’m going to feel depressed, you know, not working and lying on the floor and feeling like nobody could tell me what was wrong with me. Feeling like I was going to live with this live with this for the rest of my life, you know. Um it it just feels like doomsday. But recognizing, whoa, it’s my thinking that is perpetuating that. If I keep on thinking that I’m never going to get out of this, then that’s going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Amen. Brother, I uh I know we’re getting short on time and I really just want to say thank you so much for sharing your journey. Um I imagine and we’ll do a we’ll do a round too because I imagine you and I could keep going on and on. Yes. I tell all of my clients I’m a big believer in um find someone out there that’s been through what you’ve been through and and and get in their back pocket, learn as much as you can. And so I I imagine people are watching and they’re like res they’re hearing all these things to look out for and and maybe thinking like, “Oh my gosh, this is me.” Um and so I want to encourage those people to to reach out to Scotty to check his uh got a big following on on social media. Um the the handle is if I can find it, how to heal chronic pain. Real easy. Exactly. How how to heal chronic pain. Yeah. just tell us for the people that are interested, where can they find you and and how do how do they work with you? Yeah, absolutely. Well, so my main sort of little uh hangout is on Instagram, but I’m also on Facebook and Tik Tok and uh trying to get some more stuff up on YouTube. Um but everywhere online, just put in how to heal chronic pain. Um and my name’s Scotty Styles. And um yeah, if if people are wanting to connect and they’re feeling inspired and they want some support on their journey and and to see maybe there’s some limiting beliefs, maybe there are things that they’re not fully looking at and not one person’s nervous system is the same as others. And so every single client of mine is completely different, but you know, the same root cause is generally the same for everyone. It’s this sort of mindbody disconnection and we want to find the reasons why. Um, and so without trying to figure it out, without trying to figure it out. Yeah. Yeah. We’re trying things on, right? It’s like trying on different hats, it’s like let’s just see, you know, it’s a little bit of experimentation that we can do. And and just like you, like I’m so inspired by um this world because there’s so many different angles to look at things. And so that’s kind of what I I like to um what I bring to the table is that I I’ve kind of studied so many different nooks and crannies of this the healing world. And um I love to just you know explore that with with different clients because we don’t know what what can work for somebody and what’s going to make their brain feel safe enough to turn off that uh neural circuit to to regulate their nervous system so that those um learn neural circuits or you know maybe those repressed emotions whatever is um you know causing that symptom we don’t necessarily know until we get in there and find out. So yeah, so people can reach out to me, they can shoot me a DM. Uh I offer free 30inut discovery calls for people that are confident that they want some support. And of course I offer lots of free resources online. You know, I’ll do, you know, some ask me anything and um share different uh success stories and and testimonials for from other clients of mine, too. Beautiful, man. Well, thank you so much for sharing your journey and and giving us so much information that can help so many people. And if anybody’s resonating with this, definitely reach out to Scotty. We’ll we’ll get him on for round two. Um any any last closing arguments before you hop off? Yeah, I love that. Well, I mean, I I appreciate being here today. This has been so fun. Um oh my goodness, I wish we could have another hour, but again, like you said, let’s try this another time and we’ll we’ll add some more there. This is just endless conversation. But um to sum it all up, I would just encourage people to realize that healing is possible. It’s just as simple as that. You know, we can heal a broken bone. Well, if that can heal, so can this type of chronic pain. We just have to understand uh what the mechanism is and and um the solution is out there. And you are the solution. Yes, you are the medicine and uh not managing fixing or maybe we shouldn’t say fixing, maybe we should say uh getting rid of. Yeah. Yeah. Nice dog coming on, brother. And yeah, we’ll talk to you again soon. Awesome.