Transcript: The last part of Jennifer’s question is about the dynamic neural retraining system. I looked into that recently and I think it’s another mental strategy, and there are many people who can’t do it. But I talked to somebody recently who did it and has been doing it successfully. It takes a lot of work. Any good treatment programs, especially self-improvement programs, take work. Usually, people want a pill, take it now and the pain is gone, and they don’t have to worry about it or think about it. And I don’t have to do anything else other than taking the pill. Well, that’s why we have an opioid crisis.
So dynamic neural retraining can be very useful. It’s not going to heal you. It’s going to make you be able to tolerate your pain better. If you have a mild problem that’s causing your pain, and healing is part of the solution for that problem, then maybe the neural retraining system can work for you. At the very least, it could help your brain deal with the pain problem a lot better and you could live with it.
People who did studies with mindfulness meditation wrote a book called Full Catastrophe Living, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. They found in their studies that the people who are doing mindfulness meditation work had the same level of pain, they didn’t get rid of their pain, but they were able to live with it. And that’s a theme that’s in a lot of the interviews in the pain solution summit, that your pain is your friend. It’s a gift.
How can I say that it’s a gift? Pain is never a gift. Well, if you didn’t have pain, your leg might fall off because you’d be ignoring something that’s brewing and is horrible. People who have congenital absence of pain die young because they don’t have pain signals. So pain is a gift to us. Chronic pain, you could argue, is less of a gift, but chronic pain is a gift because it’s telling you that you have to change. We want to be the way we were. Well, the way we were is what got us into trouble in the first place. So if you want to get rid of your problem, then you’ve got to be a different person. You have to change who you are and dynamic neural retraining is one of those ways. Mindfulness meditation is one of those ways. Any kind of meditation process, any one of those ways that can help, thought field therapy, emotional freedom technique. Any techniques that you do to quiet yourself down to get more balanced mentally, emotionally will help you with your pain problem and lead to healing to the extent that the healing can be done.
