Retrain your Brain against Pain
- Are you are a long-term sufferer of chronic pain who has tried everything from traditional health care to alternative methods?
- Are you resigned to the ineffectiveness of traditional pain management practices?
- How many times have you heard the same diagnosis couched in different language by a different practitioner?
- Are you ready to change your thinking about chronic pain, and in doing so eliminate it forever?
Then read on!
In this report I will reveal the one piece of information that holds the key to a pain free future. By reading the report and understanding this fact and how it relates to your life, you have taken the first step towards having a pain free life. In some cases this information alone has set people free from their chronic pain problem.
Why is it that chronic pain persists when the injury blamed for causing the pain has long since healed?
TMS is Too much Stuff
The underlying cause of chronic pain is caused simply by Too Much Stuff, not due to some injury or structural abnormality. What do I mean by “Stuff”, quite simply it is the stuff of life. All the every day things that happen to us, some big others small.
This flies in the face of what you may have been told in the past about your back pain, shoulder pain, fibromyalgia or whatever the many faces and names your chronic pain may have. It may even trigger an angry response because you have been accused in the past of imagining the pain “it must be in your head as the injury has healed” or the evergreen “we can’t find any reason for your pain”. I need to clarify three things when it comes to this statement:
- Your symptoms are real, the pain is caused by a lack of oxygen to the affected tissue, not actual tissue damage.
- You are not crazy (although the pain may drive you crazy)
- The pain is caused by stress and overwhelming emotions not structural damage
- The pain is acting to distract you from emotional hurt or life stresses in order to protect you.
What I am saying is your chronic pain originates from your brain, not from some structural abnormality as may have been suggested.
Pain that results from an injury or illness is there to protect the tissues from any further damage, likewise with chronic pain, except here the brain attempts to protect you from some emotional hurt or stress. Normally when there is pain the signal originates at the source of the damage and then it is sent to the brain. In the case of chronic pain, it starts in the brain. The unconscious mind sends a signal to an area of weakness in the body, causing what is believed to be a mild oxygen deprivation to the affected tissues thus causing pain.
This has been diagnosed and named many things, TMS (Tension Myoneural/Myositis Syndrome or The Mind-body Syndrome), learned pain, distraction pain to name but a few, I simply call it TOO MUCH STUFF. Treating chronic pain based on this diagnosis has led to tens of thousands of people around the world being free from pain. That’s right NO PAIN!

By relieving the stresses and acknowledging the hurts, by changing the way we deal with these aspects of our lives there is no longer a need for physical distraction pain, and so it stops.
What causes the chronic pain cycle to start?
In a survey conducted by John E Sarno MD, author of many books on the subject including “Healing Back Pain” and the pioneer of what is now referred to as mind-body medicine, it was found that 40% of respondents reported some trigger event. For example, it may have been a sporting injury or as a result of a car accident to name a few. For the remaining 60% the pain seemed to appear over-night or came on gradually from no apparent cause, often some past injury or accident being blamed.
If the pain is not due to a structural problem then what?
It could be an argument with our partner or spouse, the pressures of maintaining a work-life balance, dealing with traffic, any number of things. Over time these things build up in our system, on their own they are seemingly small and insignificant, but just as an avalance starts with a single snow flake. We set them aside with an internal note “I’ll deal with that later”.
We are all different, people deal with stress and their emotions in many different ways. Repression is one of a variety of coping mechanisms we use, unfortunately over time these emotions build up in our systems and eventually Eventually something has to give. Eventually there is “Too Much Stuff” your mind and body become overwhelmed.
I often describe pain as acting like a safety switch that trips when the pressure of life becomes too much. The pain forces you to slow down and in some cases makes you stop what you are doing because your system goes into over-whelm and the result is chronic pain. This is the brains way of protecting you from the stresses of life and distracts you from the emotional hurts that you haven’t dealt with yet.
Think back to the times your pain has flared up and see if there is a common trigger or triggers in your life, there may be more than one.
I recently had a client recognise that stress was the trigger for their recurring chronic back pain, upon recognising and acknowledging this, then making some adjustments in their life the pain has disappeared.
The stresses of life are ever present, a Voytex Pain Solutions program has been designed to work through every aspect of your life and together we work towards clearing the past that has caused the pain until now and developing new strategies for coping with stress, thus eliminating your pain forever.
Treating symptoms not cause
If the pain was due to some structural abnormality, then the treatment of your symptoms should have rid you of your pain. The most common form of chronic pain in the modern world is lower back pain, which is often blamed on some form of structural problem with the disc, a bulge, a rupture, a protrusion or extrusion. Studies around the world have shown that two out of three middle aged people have some form of abnormality of the disc, yet they show NO PAIN. If the diagnosis of such an abnormality were the real cause of chronic pain then these people should also be in pain, but they are not. Often some form of back surgery may be performed to relieve chronic pain, in the USA it has been found that only a third of these operations succeed in relieving the pain.
Why haven’t the treatments I have been receiving worked?
Up until recently all research has focused on the problem and not the cause. There has been an emphasis on creating ways to MANAGE the pain with physical manipulation, drugs or surgery and the problems keep increasing with seemingly no answer until now. While modern medicine is a wonderful tool, it has largely adopted a philosophy of treating the mind and body separately, in the case of chronic pain generally treatment focuses on the pain symptoms. In most cases the treatment of these symptoms brings about temporary relief at best.
Since the invention of the MRI and other scanning technologies there has been an increase in the prevalence of back surgeries as a means of dealing with lower back pain. The technologies have made it easy to blame structural abnormalities because there appears to be a visible reason for the pain in the lower-back as there may be a structural abnormality in roughly the same location. The fact that two thirds of the population can have the same structural abnormality and not have any pain is not widely known and suggests that the structural abnormality is not the cause of the pain. Your mind has a way of finding an existing weakness in your system and exploiting it, Dr Sarno has found that in the case of patients he has diagnosed with TMS if the underlying personal issues are not dealt with the pain will return in a different form.

Healthcare Systems only dealing with one third of the problem
There appears to be many sorts of pain these days, chronic back pain, fibromyalgia, acute pain, nerve pain, burning pain, shoulder pain, the list goes on. All forms of pain, regardless what name they have been given, are interpreted by the brain. What a lot of treatments fail to address are the factors in our lives that affect the way the brain interprets that pain. Most treatments deal with the biological or physical symptoms of your pain condition, in doing so they are only dealing with potentially one third of the problem.
The Biopsychosocial model of optimum healthcare takes into account not only the biological/ physical factors presenting themselves, but also the psychological and social factors that influence our health. It recognises that all three parts of our lives need to be in balance in order for us to be healthy.
- The biological factors include all aspects of physical health such as pulse, blood pressure, blood chemistry etc.
- The psychological factors could be anything from personality type, whether we are male or female, anxiety, how we deal with emotions and so on. Stress has been long linked to a wide range of conditions and yet is rarely addressed as a root cause.
- Social factors could be workplace stress, home life, whether or not we have personal down time or not, and many more things can play a part in how we deal with and process our pain.

The psychological and social factors in our life have a huge influence on how our mind processes and remembers the pain experience. A simple thing told to a young boy, “don’t cry son, be a man, men don’t cry” can teach someone to repress not express their emotions, which can lead to a whole range of problems later in life. Even though there is a small but growing part of the medical profession considering these factors, doctors simply don’t always have the time to find out the reason for a person’s anxiety. Patients are often also looking for a quick fix to their problem, prescribing medication to relieve the symptoms of anxiety provides them that.
How does a Voytex Pain Solutions program help?
The Voytex Pain Solutions program is a coaching program that takes the time to look at every aspect of your life, your attitudes, your beliefs about yourself and your chronic pain. It seeks to address the two thirds of your life that may not be effectively looked at under your current care. It deals with the fears and anxiety that can become very powerfully associated with chronic pain and step by step we change the way you deal with these stresses. As each issue is uncovered we resolve it immediately, make the required change and move on to the next one. It is often a combination of factors in our life that lead to chronic pain becoming entrenched in our lives and so each needs to be dealt with. I often use the example of a boat tied up at a jetty as an example of how a range of issues can keep chronic pain locked in your life, each one needs to be cut in order for your life to be set free.

During a succession of sessions I take the time to deal with every aspect of your life, to uncover every possible link to their chronic pain and cut the link thus eliminating the pain forever. Each session builds upon the previous one constantly working towards our final goal, NO PAIN.
I was once asked what my strategies for helping people manage their pain were? My answer was, I don’t seek to manage their pain. The goal of a Voytex Pain Solutions Program is to eliminate chronic pain forever, once my clients understand that the true cause of their chronic pain lies in their brain then we simply work towards retraing their brains against pain.
Fear and pain, the link and how to break the cycle,
In the case of any extreme pain there is a fear factor that is immediate in it’s presentation, any movement of a broken limb is met with a pain experience, and an associated fear, which is the brains way of protecting the area to prevent further damage. Very quickly we become fearful of certain movements because they cause us pain. As the pain heals we generally lose the fear and proceed through our rehabilitation cautiously at first testing the boundaries of the pain until the pain and fear have gone. The catch is that we often don’t think of fear as being a factor in our pain, when a medical professional tells us don’t push too hard in your rehabilitation in case you re-injure your self, they are using fear as a motivator. Pain and fear serve a similar purpose in our lives in the appropriate circumstances.
- Pain is to prevent further injury
- Fear is to protect us from doing it again
However Pain and Fear can become very closely associated and create a self-perpetuating bio- feed back loop. This can lead the brain being hardwired in pain and so chronic pain begins.
It is widely recognised that there are only two fears that are natural, a fear of falling and a fear of loud noises all the rest are learned. Fear of re-injury is a big part of what can keep chronic pain in place, a Voytex Pain Solutions program works through all these fears and helps you unlearn them. It only took a moment to learn, it will only take a moment to let them go.
Mind Body Healing the way forward.

The treatment of chronic pain requires a whole mind/body approach in order to be successful. Those people who have successfully charted a course out of chronic back pain, shoulder pain, fibromyalgia pain, have done so because they refused to accept that they have to learn to live with it, they looked elsewhere for the solution. In short, they engaged their option of choice, and said “I am going to find a solution to my pain”. This simple empowering process of making a decision to not give up and to keep on believing there is an answer is an important step in engaging the most powerful healing tool we have at our disposal.
The ability for our minds to heal our bodies is clearly demonstrated in the placebo effect, where patients taking a sugar pill in a drug test can get better, merely because they believe they are taking the medication being tested. Why is it so difficult to accept that the mind could be the underlying cause of chronic pain and therefore also the solution.
Engaging your mind and understanding it’s part in the chronic pain process is the fastest and most painless way to get over chronic pain. Treating the symptoms is very effective in some forms of acute and physical pain but does not translate to the area of chronic pain. This is because it fails to take into account the true cause of chronic pain. Gaining knowledge is the key, take it and unlock the door to a life free of chronic pain, allow me to be your guide to a pain free life.
Wojt Kowaluk
Voytex Pain Solutions.