Are you still struggling with chronic symptoms despite trying various treatments?
If diagnostic tests haven't fully explained your symptoms or treatment hasn't brought relief, there's a good chance your symptoms are “neuroplastic.” Neuroplastic symptoms are the result of learned patterns in your brain and nervous system instead of damage or disease in the body. The brain is misinterpreting safe signals from your body and environment as if they are dangerous.
Healing is possible with the right approach. With neuroplastic symptoms, the work must include understanding why your brain is making this mistake and what it's interpreting as dangerous. We must then update the patterns of your brain and nervous system so that your body can feel safe enough to stop producing symptoms.
This is my specialty: using a science-backed, trauma-informed approach that retrains the brain and nervous system out of survival mode and into the safety needed to stop generating chronic symptoms.
Chronic symptoms I help with most often:
Chronic Pain
Chronic pain that moves around the body, doesn't resolve after physical treatments, or has no clear medical explanation is often neuroplastic. The pain is real and can be anywhere in the body — the back, neck, shoulders, jaw, hips, knees, even the toes! — or can be widespread as in the case of fibromyalgia. When standard treatments haven't eliminated the pain, it's often because what's needed is retraining of the brain and nervous system.
Migraines and Tension Headaches
Recurring migraines and chronic tension headaches are often driven by a nervous system stuck in alarm mode. When there's perceived threat, the brain can produce real, debilitating headache pain along with other changes in the body. The work involves understanding what's keeping the nervous system on high alert — life pressures, unprocessed emotions, lifelong patterns — and working with those sources directly, so the system can settle.
Chronic Dizziness (Including PPPD)
Persistent dizziness, lightheadedness, and a sense of unsteadiness are often the result of a nervous system that has learned to perceive ordinary signals as threatening. In the case of persistent postural-perceptual dizziness (PPPD), the brain develops a faulty prediction of how the body should feel in space and produces dizziness even when there's no underlying inner ear or neurological cause. These symptoms can be deeply disorienting and isolating, but they respond to the same kind of brain and nervous system retraining used for other neuroplastic symptoms.
Chronic Fatigue and Long COVID
Persistent exhaustion that doesn't improve with rest — including ME/CFS and the lingering symptoms of long COVID — often involves a nervous system stuck in a chronic stress response, with the body's resources locked in survival mode. While these conditions can have multiple contributing factors, the neuroplastic and nervous system piece is often a significant one, and it's an area where the right kind of work can make a real difference. I work alongside your medical team, focusing on the nervous system component while they address other factors at play.
Digestive Issues (IBS and More)
Persistent digestive symptoms, including IBS, are commonly neuroplastic. The gut and brain are in constant conversation through the nervous system, which is why chronic stress and unprocessed emotion show up so often as digestive symptoms. When medical tests don't reveal a clear cause, or when symptoms persist despite dietary changes, medications, and supplements, the nervous system is often the missing piece.
Anxiety and Depression
Anxiety and depression often go hand in hand with chronic health conditions. Sometimes they help drive the symptoms, and sometimes they're the natural response to feeling at war with your own body. They share many of the same underlying patterns as neuroplastic symptoms: a dysregulated nervous system, suppressed emotions, and fear-driven loops. The same approaches that help with chronic conditions can also be effective for anxiety and depression, whether they show up alongside other conditions or on their own. Many clients find that as they work on one, the other begins to ease as well.
Trauma
Trauma, whether from a single event or from developmental or complex trauma (CPTSD), is often at the root of neuroplastic symptoms. The unprocessed emotions and patterns of self-protection that stem from these experiences can keep the body in chronic alarm. In these cases, healing involves helping the body unlearn what it had to learn in order to survive.
Don't see your symptoms listed?
Those are only the neuroplastic symptoms I see most often, not the only ones that exist. If your chronic symptoms are due to learned patterns in the brain, they would respond to the same approach.
If you're not sure whether your symptoms are neuroplastic, you can take my free 5-minute quiz.