While there are some reasonable ideas in this book that may be helpful in reducing and managing chronic pain, the book is a bit too chatty and fluffy for my liking. I have read John Sarno's book on back pain and found it no help at all, but this book has a more nuanced and sophisticated approach than that book. John Sarno's book, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection, and am surprised it was never mentioned in Gordon's book.

I recently started seeing a therapist who specializes in Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) and she recommended this book to me as an overview of the technique.of your pain along with a lot of positive thoughts and the repeated mantra that there is NOTHING wrong with your body -- your tissues, muscles, back, spine, stomach, wrists, etc.

Over time, supposedly, you can disconnect fear from feelings of pain, which will reduce their hold over you. Whatever the case may be, I think this book can at the very least clearly spell out the patterns, habits, and path forward to finally provide you some relief, and maybe like it did for me, provide you a whole new perspective on your symptoms. This book is approachable and delves into how some chronic pain can be attributed to pain centers in your brain misfiring rather than external physical triggers. Of all the stories, studies, and statistics that I’ve presented in this book, this is the most mind-boggling. The University of Colorado at Boulder recently conducted a large randomized controlled study on PRT, and the results are remarkable.

Alan Gordon, a psychotherapist and the founder of the Pain Psychology Center in Los Angeles, was in grad school when he started experiencing chronic pain and it completely derailed his life. After x-rays showed there was nothing structural wrong with my lower spine, I saw a physiotherapist, then a massage therapist, then an Alexander Technique teacher. I was in and out of the ER with facial and head pain that started during the run and would not subside.

I think I was in a period of high stress (living through a pandemic, putting pressure on my newly bigger body to exercise beyond my capacity, changing from a part-time job to a full-time job, stressing over finances and finding a librarian position now that I had a Master's. If you have mind-body symptoms, you have probably tried just about EVERYTHING to rid yourself of them, and if you are like me, you have struggled to make sense of what's going on or make progress.It combines accessible science with a concrete, step-by-step plan to teach sufferers how to heal their own chronic pain. This book helps you take a good, loving, kind look at yourself and know that you deserve to feel safe in your body again. And after 3 weeks of applying the mindfulness and having this mantra in my head with positive thoughts, I can now say that 50% of my pain is already gone. However, I have also had setbacks (guaranteed crash after being on an exercise bike or running), so I continue with avoidance behaviours (I don’t do them for now).