Specialty · Chronic Pain
Pain that has outlived its cause is real — and more changeable than you’ve been told.
Your nervous system learned to protect you. That pattern can be helped to change.
Your pain is real, every bit of it. What today’s pain science tells us is more hopeful than dismissive. Pain is produced by the nervous system, and when it persists long after an injury should have healed, it’s often because the brain and nerves have become sensitized — sounding the alarm long after the danger has passed. That isn’t imaginary. It’s neuroplasticity. And what the nervous system has learned, it can often be helped to unlearn.
Some pain is structural and needs medical care — and I’ll always respect that and work alongside your medical team, never in place of it. But for the very common kind of persistent pain that a sensitized nervous system has amplified and maintained, there is real, evidence-based reason for hope, and a path back to a fuller life.
The Camus lens: the rock doesn’t have to own you.
Camus wrote about Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder uphill forever, only to watch it tumble back down. Within that repetition — that unchosen constraint — there is still room for meaning, defiance, and even something like joy. Chronic pain is a boulder many people carry. ACT doesn’t promise to make it disappear. It asks a different question: what kind of life can you build with the rock still there?
Experiential avoidance — the urge to organize your entire life around minimizing pain — often shrinks what’s livable far more than the pain itself does. The goal isn’t to stop caring about pain. It’s to stop letting pain make all the decisions.
Where the work focuses
Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT)
For pain that has outlived its original cause, PRT helps retrain the brain to read those signals as safe rather than dangerous, easing the fear that keeps pain locked in place.
ACT for Chronic Pain
You don’t have to wait for pain to vanish before you start living. Together we loosen pain’s grip on your attention and choices, and reconnect you with what you value.
PGAP
Gradually re-engaging with activity, work, and the roles pain has taken from you, while loosening the fear and avoidance that quietly shrink a life. I hold a PGAP certification.
EMDR
Pain and trauma are deeply intertwined. EMDR helps process the trauma that may be feeding the pain, or the distress the pain itself has caused.
Living with the Rock (group)
A group program, offered in cycles, for people carrying persistent pain. Built on ACT, it’s about learning to carry the rock differently — with others who understand.
The rock doesn’t have to own you.
A free fifteen-minute conversation is a low-stakes first step toward a fuller life.