Healing Neuroplastic Pelvic Pain

What Is Neuroplastic Pelvic Pain?

Neuroplastic pelvic pain occurs when the brain and nervous system become hypersensitive to pain signals from the pelvic region, creating a vicious cycle of increased muscle tension, anxiety, and persistent pain, even after the initial injury or cause is gone. In this blog post, I’ll share some free videos explaining this type of pain and outlining ways to recover.

A Headache in the Pelvis

In David Wise and Rodney Anderson’s grounding book A Headache in the Pelvis, the authors use the metaphor of a headache for explore how chronic neuroplastic pelvic pain is both experienced and perpetuated.

“The major contributing factor involves a chronically knotted up, contracted pelvis—­typically a physical response to years of worry—­that leads to tight, irritated pelvic floor tissue, leading to a reflex response in the pelvic tissue of protective guarding that creates a self-feeding cycle that gives pelvic pain a life of its own. In what we can call pelvic pain related to pelvic floor dysfunction, sore pelvic floor tissue once established doesn’t have a chance to heal the way other sore human tissue heals. You can think about the ongoing reflex protective guarding of irritated, sore pelvic tissue as a kind of ongoing pelvic charley horse.This chronic charley horse keeps the pelvic tissue irritated and preventing its otherwise natural healing. Ongoing pain from this sore tissue leads to protective pelvic muscle guarding, anxiety, continued dysfunctional protective guarding, and chronic painful tissue irritation.”

— David Wise

Determining If Your Pain Is Neuroplastic

As with any medical concern, it is important to start by talking to your medical provider to rule out structural disorders. The first fundamental step is to understand why you have this pain. The resources below are for those who have ruled out structural disorders and ruled in neuroplastic pain.

Remember, all pain is real. Pain functions as danger signal. Neuroplastic pain results from the brain misinterpreting safe messages from the body as if they were dangerous. In other words, neuroplastic pain is a false alarm.This kind of pain can be unlearned.

In a different blog post, I’ve included free videos of somatic practices that can also help with pelvic pain.

Introduction to Persistent Pain

Below, I’ve including some paradigm shifting videos as a primer to neuroplastic and persistent pain. I’ve also included some videos that are specifically focused on neuroplastic pelvic pain.

Professor Lorimer Moseley explains how pain works and how to tame pain.

Dr. Howard Schubiner is a wonderful resource in the pain community. This is a short animated video that explains what pain is. He has a series of short videos that explain pain and how to treat it.

A longer video from Dr. Howard Schubiner on neural-circuit induced (learned) pain.

Video from Dr. Howard Schubiner on the root causes of pelvic and urinary issues.

Dan Buglio explains how pelvic pain and pudendal neuralgia can be a form of TMS.

Somatic Tracking for Urinary Frequency

How to do somatic tracking for urinary issues.

General somatic tracking practice.

Healing Chronic Pelvic Pain Webinar

Healing chronic pelvic pain webinar from Lin Health.

Peter Levine, the creator of Somatic Experiencing, shares an approach to healing pelvic pain.

Success Stories

TMS healing story about pelvic pain from Dan Buglio and Laura Haraka.

These combined resources reflect a wide array of ways to work with neuroplastic pain, especially neuroplastic pelvic pain.

Psychotherapy for Neuroplastic Pelvic Pain

Everyone’s journey through pain is unique. I recommend an integrative approach, which I use in my therapy practice. In my work, I’ve found a combination of Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET), Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Somatic Experiencing (SE) works well for healing at the root.