September 4, 2024 • 26 mins
In this episode, Dr. David Hanscom talks with Vanessa Blackstone, a therapist and Executive Director of the Pain Psychology Center. She candidly discusses her tumultuous childhood, entering foster care at a young age, and the normalization of the chaos in her life. She talks about how chaos came to feel comfortable and how she later learned that her brain created chaos as a way for her to feel comfortable. This came through her migraines, emotional distress and compulsive thoughts. When she became a therapist and discovered Pain Reprocessing Therapy she applied it to her own situation and began to heal. Vanessa Blackstone, ACSW, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation, is the Executive Director of the Pain Psychology Center. She earned her M.S. in Social Work from the University of Southern California. After overcoming chronic pain herself, Vanessa became a therapist in 2018. She specializes in chronic pain treatment, sex therapy, substance use recovery, mindfulness-based relapse prevention, and works as an Onset Wellness Professional. Vanessa, a former foster youth, advocates for foster youth by sharing her experiences at public speaking events. She is the author of the forthcoming book, The Pain Reprocessing Therapy Workbook, to be released in November 2024. For more information, visit: https://painpsychologycenter.com
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Please note that all XZBN radio and/or television shows are Copyright © REL-MAR McConnell Meda Company, Niagara, Ontario, Canada – www.rel-mar.com. For more Episodes of this show and all shows produced, broadcasted and syndicated from REL-MAR McConell Media Company and The 'X' Zone Broadcast Network and the 'X' Zone TV Channell, visit www.xzbn.net. For programming, distribution, and syndication inquiries, email programming@xzbn.net.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Back in Control Radio with Doctor
David Hanscombe.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of Back in
Control Radio with Doctor David Hanscombe. I'm your host, Tom Masters,
and our guest today is Venessa Blackstone, the executive director
of the Pain Psychology Center. After overcoming chronic pain herself,
she became a therapist in twenty eighteen. She specializes in
(00:36):
chronic pain treatment, sex therapy, substance use recovery, mindfulness based
relapse prevention, and works as an onset wellness professional. A
former foster youth herself, she advocates for foster youth by
sharing her experiences at public speaking events.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Welcome, Thank you, Tom, I'd like it, Vanessa Blackstone. She
her group reached out to me, which I'm excited about.
She is asacs W, a member of the Eastern Band
of the Cherokee Nation. She is the executive director of
the Pain Psychology Center. She earned her MS and social
work from the University of Southern California. After overcoming chronic
(01:19):
pain herself, Vanessa became a therapist in twenty eighteen. She
specializes in chronic pain treatment, sex therapy, substance use, recovery,
mindfulness based relapse prevention and works as an onset wellness professional.
She is a former Foster Youth advocates for Foster Youth
by sharing her experience at public speaking events. So, Vanessa,
(01:41):
welcome to the show.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
And So I didn't realize Vanessa was the executive director
of a group that I know well for years. Doctor
Allen Gordon is a very well known psychologist who had
a group of about ten psychologists maybe fifteen years ago,
ten years ago, and he and I have talked back
and forth over the years. You and I've never officially
met him, and they've been one of the leaders in
(02:05):
pain psychology for a long time. And Vanessa runs that group.
And she told me that y're not up to forty
five psychologists.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
Yeah, yeah, therapists, coaches, associates, Yeah, psychologists forty five of us.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Right. So nice, welcome, and so excited you reached out
to me and they're interested to hear your story. So
how did you tell you briefly about your chronic pain
yourself and how you came out of that.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
Yeah, I'm one of those people that has maybe six
different symptoms and they just increased over the years. My
symptoms started with migraine and head pain, specifically vestibular migraines
when I was eleven, and then they just graduated into
neck pain, ibs, pelvic floor pain. I started getting chronic
(02:52):
hives when I would get really hot or stressed out,
and all the vestibular symptoms started to grow as well,
turning into nausea and just this content feeling of like
the world was vibrating. And my symptoms got really bad
during graduate school. But I'm a type A perfectionist and
I am I have a degree in powering through and
(03:14):
so what I would do is just push through everything.
I ran the Honor Society in my graduate school. I
was the president of that. I had the best internship.
I worked full time, I went to school full time,
and then I had also gotten into a PhD program
from mindfulness based relapse prevention and going into the PhD
(03:35):
program right around graduation time, my grandfather, who's my mentor
for all of this, he pretty much said, you need
to stop and take a break and take care of yourself.
This is not a way to start a PhD program
and just reevaluate where you're at. So I deferred, and
in the differing process, my previous supervisor from my practicum
(03:57):
had gone to a conference Alan was at, and I
think she was recommending PRT to me on a personal note,
but I took it as a professional opportunity, of course,
and so I learned about PRT professionally. And then in
my training process with Alan, I started to realize that
(04:19):
it fit me a lot of the character traits, a
lot of the barriers that I had, and a lot
of the symptoms that I had that seemed to be
inexplainable or blamed on this and on that. And we've
tried so many different medications and treatments and specialties, and
then I started realizing that this would work for me.
So when I was.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Learning, for a second, so can you explain what part
stands for? Just going to detail later, but just in general,
explain which PEART stands for, and actually just a general
flavor of what it does.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
Yeah. So it's pain reprocessing therapy. That's the modality that
we specialize in. And the aim of pain ree processing
therapy is to rewire We rewire your neural pathways in
order to get us to change the way in which
we respond to pain, the which we relate to pain,
in order to dial down pain's intensity.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Okay, great, So for so you were you restart a
PhD program, and it does sound like you're going about
one thousand miles an hour, and but it sounds like
you also have a lot of symptoms while you were
working hard, you also experienced a lot of these symptoms
at the same time. Is that a first datement?
Speaker 4 (05:32):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Yeah, Well, how how did you keep going?
Speaker 4 (05:37):
I don't entirely know. I just know that I often
have this unrelenting tenacity where I go, like you said,
a million miles a minute with no ability to slow down.
And I think for the first time, when I deferred
on my PhD program and started learning of pain reprocessing
(05:58):
therapy while I was training as a staff clinician, it
really kind of forced me to slow down. If anything,
learning the modality and trying to practice it with other
people really humbled me because I felt like it was
the first thing that I didn't know right away intellectually,
and I had to actually slow down to learn it.
(06:20):
And when I slowed down to learn it, I learned
a lot about myself and realized that there were so
many areas in which I could use to respond to
the sensations in my own body through a different lens,
and it took some time, but I really did learn
this work personally and professionally kind of at the same time.
(06:41):
And the more that I worked with clients, the more
that I found my own answers, so it not only
providing it to other people, it was kind of like
providing it to myself at the same time.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
So let me jump back. You said you were eleven
years old and you started with the different types of
migraines and stuff like that, and if I read between
the lines here, you were a foster youth.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Yes, it's not a very easy childhood.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
No it's not. Nope. I went into foster care when
I was I believe fourteen or fifteen. But before that
time period, things were pretty chaotic, really unstable, really unsafe,
And I've always just normalized a chaotic life to the
point where when things are too quiet, it's too uncomfortable.
(07:31):
It's like when a child or your dog goes into
the next room and it's suddenly really quiet, and your
first thought is what are they doing, what's wrong? What
are they getting into?
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Right?
Speaker 4 (07:40):
That's how my brain was constantly anytime things were calm
or peaceful, so.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
That's unusual to go into foster care at age fourteen
or fifteen. So I'm guessing that your home environment early
on was more than a little.
Speaker 4 (07:54):
Chaotic, right, Yeah it was. Yeah, it consisted of a
lot of many levels of big T trauma and big
T trauma being much larger kind of velocities of trauma,
while also consistency because consisting of a lot of little
TA trauma. Financial insecurity, you know, food and stability, things
(08:17):
of that nature got it.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
And then in the foster world, so you became kind
of how old you are?
Speaker 4 (08:23):
I'm sorry, No, I don't apologize. I'm thirty two, because
you never ask a woman her age, right, It's okay,
I should ask you.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
That you I mean, obviously you look very young, but
also you've been through a lot. So I'm trying to
forget this time frame about how this stuff got fit
into a young age. So, okay, thirty two is young,
and the lots gone on. So when he came a
therapist in two thousand and eighteen, year in your late twenties,
and so when you had you come out of the
chronic pain at that point, or you just sort of
(08:52):
coming out of the chronic pain and learning at the
same time or how did that? Let me just jump
fast forward. What do you think? Well, two things. So
your story is normal in very many instances. I mean
I had the same thing where very coding childhood. It's
sort of normal because you don't know anything else. And
(09:14):
then at some point you realize, well, things aren't like
I think they really should be. They don't seem normal anymore.
That's one of the steps. And then you know, things
go pretty sour a lot of time just because you
don't have the tools to deal with life in general.
But I think a lot of high level professionals become
that way because I think in medicine it's really rampant
(09:35):
where you come from a difficult past, you don't have
much self esteem, and you become an overachiever to outrun
your past. So that's where it becomes tricky and medicine
because there's a lot of intensive medicine, a lot of burnout,
high suicide rate, all sorts of things are happening in medicine,
and so outrunning your past I think is a pretty
(09:58):
common It's sounds like you in a work for a while, right.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
Yeah, Oh, it's quite helpful and becoming really successful. It
really gets you to where you're trying to go, but
then it's almost one part. It's never enough. I think
that was my greatest barrier. I remember being in graduation
from USC, which was my dream school. Attending USC was
such a big deal for me, and I had all
(10:27):
these chords. I had one chord for having a four
point zero. I had one chord for being the president
of the Honor Society. I had one chord for this
research project that I had contributed to. I had all
these things on my neck, and all I could think
about through graduation while my stomach felt like I was
going to explode, and my head just felt like it
weighed one hundred pounds and it was so dizzy, and
(10:51):
I was getting a cold, and I had the worst
sore throat, and I was starting to break out in hives,
and I just remember sitting there at graduation being like,
I just want to get this over with so I
can get into the PhD program, because once I do that,
I'll finally have like done well. And I realized, I
don't think this is good. I don't think this is
a way that you're supposed to feel well.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
I like you to speel a bit more time in this
because it's pretty common in high level athletes and performers
that are superstars that they crash and burn. Yeah, drug
abuse issues, suicide issues, really bad decision issues, and unfortunately
they're in the public spotlight, so we all get to
see it. So we sort of intellectually know that we
(11:34):
cannot outrun our cannot outrun our minds, right, but we
don't stop trying because we don't know what else to do. Absolutely,
show the same thing. I became a high level spines
short and went to the top fellowships in the world,
but I had seventeen different physical and mental symptoms at
the same time. So I was very successful on paper.
You look successful to yourself, you look successful in the world,
(11:56):
but then you're visible. But the point I want to
bring out is that, Okay, you achieved everything that you
want to feel better and you're misible. I remember that
exact moment in time in my story that it hits
you hard. I mean, what do I done everything I'm
supposed to do on paper to be successful, which i e.
Means happy? Right? I mean, why do we do all
(12:19):
this right? And then in our society now we put
such a high value on winning, like somehow winning is
going to solve your pain, right and it doesn't work. No,
So did you come to that spot where you're It
(12:39):
sounds like you're sitting on all these honors, you're sitting
on stage, I mean, which's I mean, I was pretty busy,
as it sounds like I was standing and still compared
to you. But okay, you're sitting there with all the
honors in the world and you're physically and mentally pretty miserable.
What were your thoughts at that point?
Speaker 4 (12:57):
I think at that point I knew there was something
wrong with the way that I was doing this. It
felt like deeply uncomfortable, and I didn't know how to
resolve it. And as you know, like not knowing how
to resolve it or when it's going to go away,
that uncertainty is so incredibly painful. I think that there
(13:18):
was something in me that realized, I don't know if
this is supposed to be this way, And I think
that the knowledge that I gained as a therapist really
allowed me to evaluate. I have always felt really unsafe
in my body, in my home, but I'm not living
that same life anymore. This is different. This is supposed
(13:42):
to be good, So why does it feel just as
bad as it did growing up? I think that's what
I'm very grateful for in the perspective, in coming into
this work and into my own work already having this
like therapist brain that was ready to help other people
and know how to have the insight to go. Sometimes
the chaos that we experience in our childhood gets carried
(14:05):
over into our own life, even when the chaos isn't
continuing the same way as it did before, because we're
so comfortable and familiar with the chaos as much as
we wanted to get out of it. Our brain also
only knows chaos, so will it will create it in
a new way. And this was my brain's way of
creating a chaos the way that I lived my life,
(14:28):
the way that I felt in my body, so that
I could still be connected somehow to the only thing
that I know, and that was living in this chaotic,
unsafe way, even though we were no longer in that
home anymore.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Right, there's an aging paper that you know ran Summer Anderson.
By chance, she's part of the PPDA.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Group anyway, she's original psychologists many decades ago, and she
and utter laying out of Arizona wrote a paper that humans
do not tolerate mental pain.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
They do not tolerate emotional pain, and what the body
will do as a substitute, they actually create physical symptoms.
And so somehow you've externalized your emotional pain, which sounds
like you had plenty of that. And then that's why
people do cutting, because they've externalized their pain. They can
see it. So the body will either create physical pain
(15:30):
or latch on physical pain. And when I read this paper,
I realized that, Okay, I'm a surgeon. I'm asking people
to give up their physical pain so now they could
get to experience their emotional pain, which is intolerable. And
so in my experience, that's where my work has evolved
into the mental pain because when people don't with physical
(15:50):
symptoms which are miserable enough, these ruminating thought patterns and
mental pain are just brutal. That was the worst part
of my experience. Now, if that was part of your experience,
was was the mental pain and issue with you also
at that point, Yeah, I.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Am such a perfect example of that, like type A
high anxiety part I feel like I move a million
miles externally, but my brain just won't stop going and
I think that was the biggest part of why it
was even hard to sleep consistently, and I would have
(16:25):
a lot of maintenance insomnia where I would just wake
up maybe four or five times throughout the night and
try to reset. Is because my brain was just going
at such a pace that it was so hard to
know that it was okay to slow down. Where I
became so conditioned to have these kind of compulsive thoughts
that I couldn't control, a lot of uncertainty and over
(16:46):
and over and over again. Because I couldn't solve it,
it would just keep happening, right, And so the rumination
is such a tough part of this work. It's what
I see it on a lot of my clients, and
it's something to be honest. I still even navigate today.
But though I've gotten much better at catching myself when
I'm getting stuck on the treadmill and knowing how to
(17:06):
get off the treadmill and leave the gym, it's still
a part of the way that my brain operates. Sometimes
it really helps and gets things done, and sometimes it
keeps me stuck and makes procrastination happen, and then I
feel worse, and then it snowballs. From there. So yes, So.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
I want to jump ahead a bit into your pretty
bad shape and even though on the surface you were
in credibly successful. So when did you get exposed to
the PRT pain Ross pain reprocessing therapy because you become
a therapist in twenty eighteen and you've been working out.
(17:46):
Now you actually run the group, now, correct I do?
I do run the Fortifi therapists. So and you're still
practicing in psychology right, yes, yes, okay, so you're still busy.
Speaker 4 (17:57):
Still busy hasn't stopped.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
So I like to just we'll talk about the details
of paying you're processing therapy in the second podcast, but
I just want to give a synopsis about what I
won't go in too much. You tell me. I know
you've bossed on the medical system. Doctors don't what's going on.
They're treating symptoms, et cetera, which is very frustrating. So
(18:20):
you have lots of physical mental symptoms and nobody knows
what to do. In a minister right now, we're focused
on structure, not the body's chemistry. And you know symptoms,
illness and disease occur from your bodies chemistry being in
fight or flight and when it sustain people get sick.
That's been documented for a long time. The reason why
I cut my practice because we're doing things to people
(18:44):
surgically without any data. And the symptoms are symptoms are
really coming from the body being in fight or flight chemistry.
So there's a whole calming process that allows the symptoms
to resolve. But in ministry, I never say, well, we
can't see something on a test that's not be so
assuming you went through a lot of.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
That, yes, gosh, for the head pain, I mean I
tried so many different chiropractors, acupuncturists, massage therapists, different medications,
different topical treatments. I mean, just so many things. And
(19:25):
then for the pelvic floor pain, I think my last
birth control, I had gotten to a point where it
was probably my fourteenth birth control and then I'd stopped
trying to make it work. And the same thing with
the hives. I tried many different cocktails of medications to
see what would work and what would and all the
all the kind of like needle bed testing to see
(19:49):
what was causing it. And same thing with the IBS symptoms.
And I believed that the neck pain, and I was
told that the neck pain also was caut by and
induce headpain. So that's where the chiropractors came in, and
I just kind of did the run around for a
very long time.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
Yeah, so I'm assuming your symptoms are sort of gone.
Is that a first statement?
Speaker 4 (20:14):
I can totally consider myself recovered.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, so, I just wanted to let this out.
We talk about the PRT in the second half of this,
But what happens all these symptoms, there's multiple symptoms. They
all come from the core cause every body's chemistry creating
animal changes in your body. Your body's an incredible balance,
and when you're in fight or flight all the time,
you have no time to risk and recover and regenerate.
(20:39):
So the part that keeps I think Vanessa go and
calls some also myself, is that the healing we see
is profound, and the medical profession actually makes things not
only worse, but a lot worse. That we do stressure
interventions that physically hurt people and were really become very
efficient in actually creating disability. It's a big So when
(21:03):
you hit the parot he you were exposed to it.
Speaker 4 (21:05):
When I was exposed to it in twenty eighteen when
a supervisor of mine had gone to a conference that
Allan attended, okay, yep, and he had announced at the
conference that he may be hiring at the Pain Psychology Center.
And I think that my previous supervisor was trying to
introduce me to the center to seek my own healing.
(21:28):
But of course I took it as a job opportunity
and interviewed with Alan and Christy Weepy, who is the
host of a curable podcast and she's the CEO of
the Better Mind Center, and I interviewed with them together,
and I think the interview went really well, and then
I was hired probably shortly after and started training. In
(21:50):
those days, there was such a small group of us
that we would meet in Allan's apartment for group supervision.
So yeah, I just got started then and then picked
it up from there.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Great, So you actually sort of healed yourself on the
job sort to speak.
Speaker 4 (22:08):
Yeah, I had so many clients who's I'm an EmPATH right,
many of us are. Many of us therapists are at
least too where just like we're here because we feel
for people, and I'm an EmPATH. I feel for people
and probably sometimes a little too much and have learned
how to kind of disconnect that. Over time, as I've
gotten good at my job, and I just met with
(22:29):
so many clients whose stories I could so linearly relate
to and found myself wondering more and more if this
just makes sense for me too. And I had one
client whose trauma history related a little closely to mine,
little too closely, and I had a really bad burst
(22:52):
of symptoms. I started getting really dizzy in session. The
light that is usually above my computer suddenly felt like
it was my eyeballs, which is a kind of startup
of my vestibular symptoms. And my gut started moving, and
my neck was firing up, and all these things were
happening at the same time. And when I talked to
my team after for support and I talked to Alan,
(23:15):
what I had learned is that something was happening during
session that instead of learning how to slow down and
tend to my own disregulation, why while my client was
actively disregulated. If I could learn to do that, I
could actually learn to tend to myself in the same
way that I'm teaching my clients. And then I started
(23:37):
realizing it was time to focus on this personally, and
luckily the client didn't even notice that I was having
a hard time. I thought they noticed and was like,
oh my gosh, I'm the worst therapist ever. And then
the next session, this client said, wow, you were so
supportive and really how I'm really hard on myself. So
that's when I took my own healing seriously.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Got it great. So we're gonna go to our next
podcast here in a second. So thanks for being on
this section, and we're to find a lot more about
the actual treatment. But you're can you can you tell
us about your center that you're running and how to
access it.
Speaker 4 (24:17):
Absolutely, So this is the Pain Psychology Center and our
website is Pain Psychologycenter dot com, where you can learn
more about our modality, about our team and our contact forms.
You can either email our admin team or you can
make a call through the through the phone number on
the website.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
And then you're physically located in Los Angeles.
Speaker 4 (24:39):
Yes, we do have an in person office. It's not
used often, but it's there. It's in Beverly Hills. Most
of us work virtually we have since before the pandemic,
so we've been on zoom for a while.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
And then you can cross statelines.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
Correct, we can, Yeah, we can work out of state,
out of country, and in fact most of our clients
come from the US, of course, the UK and Canada.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Okay, perfect well, Vanessa, thank you very much, and I'm
excited to connect with your group and tell Alan Gordon hello.
And so he's done a great work and there's a
whole group of us. It's a growing group who are
seeing the obvious that medicine has somehow gone way off base.
(25:22):
We're treating structure and not the body and not the person.
And when you treat the body and the person as
one unit, I don't like the term holistic because it's
sort of an oxymoron. I mean, we're living creatures and
we're going to respond in different ways. So no, so
I'm excited to see your effort grow like that. That's
fantastic and it's some tipping point mainstream medicine is going
(25:46):
to have to pay attention. So anyway, thank you for
your efforts and great you every on the shows.
Speaker 4 (25:50):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
I'd like to thank our guest Vanessa Blackstone for being
on the show today and sharing her difficult childhood, her
work to overcome chronic pain, and how those experiences help
shape her therapy. Practice. I'm your host, Tom Masters, reminding
you to be back next week for another episode of
Back in Control Radio with Doctor David Hanscomb, and in
(26:14):
the meantime, be sure to visit the website at www
dot backincontrol dot com.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
Thanks for listening today and join us next week for
Back in Control Radium
Hello, and welcome to Back in Control Radio with Doctor
David Hanscombe.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of Back in
Control Radio with Doctor David Hanscombe. I'm your host, Tom Masters,
and our guest today is Venessa Blackstone, the executive director
of the Pain Psychology Center. After overcoming chronic pain herself,
she became a therapist in twenty eighteen. She specializes in
(00:36):
chronic pain treatment, sex therapy, substance use recovery, mindfulness based
relapse prevention, and works as an onset wellness professional. A
former foster youth herself, she advocates for foster youth by
sharing her experiences at public speaking events.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Welcome, Thank you, Tom, I'd like it, Vanessa Blackstone. She
her group reached out to me, which I'm excited about.
She is asacs W, a member of the Eastern Band
of the Cherokee Nation. She is the executive director of
the Pain Psychology Center. She earned her MS and social
work from the University of Southern California. After overcoming chronic
(01:19):
pain herself, Vanessa became a therapist in twenty eighteen. She
specializes in chronic pain treatment, sex therapy, substance use, recovery,
mindfulness based relapse prevention and works as an onset wellness professional.
She is a former Foster Youth advocates for Foster Youth
by sharing her experience at public speaking events. So, Vanessa,
(01:41):
welcome to the show.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
And So I didn't realize Vanessa was the executive director
of a group that I know well for years. Doctor
Allen Gordon is a very well known psychologist who had
a group of about ten psychologists maybe fifteen years ago,
ten years ago, and he and I have talked back
and forth over the years. You and I've never officially
met him, and they've been one of the leaders in
(02:05):
pain psychology for a long time. And Vanessa runs that group.
And she told me that y're not up to forty
five psychologists.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
Yeah, yeah, therapists, coaches, associates, Yeah, psychologists forty five of us.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Right. So nice, welcome, and so excited you reached out
to me and they're interested to hear your story. So
how did you tell you briefly about your chronic pain
yourself and how you came out of that.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
Yeah, I'm one of those people that has maybe six
different symptoms and they just increased over the years. My
symptoms started with migraine and head pain, specifically vestibular migraines
when I was eleven, and then they just graduated into
neck pain, ibs, pelvic floor pain. I started getting chronic
(02:52):
hives when I would get really hot or stressed out,
and all the vestibular symptoms started to grow as well,
turning into nausea and just this content feeling of like
the world was vibrating. And my symptoms got really bad
during graduate school. But I'm a type A perfectionist and
I am I have a degree in powering through and
(03:14):
so what I would do is just push through everything.
I ran the Honor Society in my graduate school. I
was the president of that. I had the best internship.
I worked full time, I went to school full time,
and then I had also gotten into a PhD program
from mindfulness based relapse prevention and going into the PhD
(03:35):
program right around graduation time, my grandfather, who's my mentor
for all of this, he pretty much said, you need
to stop and take a break and take care of yourself.
This is not a way to start a PhD program
and just reevaluate where you're at. So I deferred, and
in the differing process, my previous supervisor from my practicum
(03:57):
had gone to a conference Alan was at, and I
think she was recommending PRT to me on a personal note,
but I took it as a professional opportunity, of course,
and so I learned about PRT professionally. And then in
my training process with Alan, I started to realize that
(04:19):
it fit me a lot of the character traits, a
lot of the barriers that I had, and a lot
of the symptoms that I had that seemed to be
inexplainable or blamed on this and on that. And we've
tried so many different medications and treatments and specialties, and
then I started realizing that this would work for me.
So when I was.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Learning, for a second, so can you explain what part
stands for? Just going to detail later, but just in general,
explain which PEART stands for, and actually just a general
flavor of what it does.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
Yeah. So it's pain reprocessing therapy. That's the modality that
we specialize in. And the aim of pain ree processing
therapy is to rewire We rewire your neural pathways in
order to get us to change the way in which
we respond to pain, the which we relate to pain,
in order to dial down pain's intensity.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Okay, great, So for so you were you restart a
PhD program, and it does sound like you're going about
one thousand miles an hour, and but it sounds like
you also have a lot of symptoms while you were
working hard, you also experienced a lot of these symptoms
at the same time. Is that a first datement?
Speaker 4 (05:32):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Yeah, Well, how how did you keep going?
Speaker 4 (05:37):
I don't entirely know. I just know that I often
have this unrelenting tenacity where I go, like you said,
a million miles a minute with no ability to slow down.
And I think for the first time, when I deferred
on my PhD program and started learning of pain reprocessing
(05:58):
therapy while I was training as a staff clinician, it
really kind of forced me to slow down. If anything,
learning the modality and trying to practice it with other
people really humbled me because I felt like it was
the first thing that I didn't know right away intellectually,
and I had to actually slow down to learn it.
(06:20):
And when I slowed down to learn it, I learned
a lot about myself and realized that there were so
many areas in which I could use to respond to
the sensations in my own body through a different lens,
and it took some time, but I really did learn
this work personally and professionally kind of at the same time.
(06:41):
And the more that I worked with clients, the more
that I found my own answers, so it not only
providing it to other people, it was kind of like
providing it to myself at the same time.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
So let me jump back. You said you were eleven
years old and you started with the different types of
migraines and stuff like that, and if I read between
the lines here, you were a foster youth.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Yes, it's not a very easy childhood.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
No it's not. Nope. I went into foster care when
I was I believe fourteen or fifteen. But before that
time period, things were pretty chaotic, really unstable, really unsafe,
And I've always just normalized a chaotic life to the
point where when things are too quiet, it's too uncomfortable.
(07:31):
It's like when a child or your dog goes into
the next room and it's suddenly really quiet, and your
first thought is what are they doing, what's wrong? What
are they getting into?
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Right?
Speaker 4 (07:40):
That's how my brain was constantly anytime things were calm
or peaceful, so.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
That's unusual to go into foster care at age fourteen
or fifteen. So I'm guessing that your home environment early
on was more than a little.
Speaker 4 (07:54):
Chaotic, right, Yeah it was. Yeah, it consisted of a
lot of many levels of big T trauma and big
T trauma being much larger kind of velocities of trauma,
while also consistency because consisting of a lot of little
TA trauma. Financial insecurity, you know, food and stability, things
(08:17):
of that nature got it.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
And then in the foster world, so you became kind
of how old you are?
Speaker 4 (08:23):
I'm sorry, No, I don't apologize. I'm thirty two, because
you never ask a woman her age, right, It's okay,
I should ask you.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
That you I mean, obviously you look very young, but
also you've been through a lot. So I'm trying to
forget this time frame about how this stuff got fit
into a young age. So, okay, thirty two is young,
and the lots gone on. So when he came a
therapist in two thousand and eighteen, year in your late twenties,
and so when you had you come out of the
chronic pain at that point, or you just sort of
(08:52):
coming out of the chronic pain and learning at the
same time or how did that? Let me just jump
fast forward. What do you think? Well, two things. So
your story is normal in very many instances. I mean
I had the same thing where very coding childhood. It's
sort of normal because you don't know anything else. And
(09:14):
then at some point you realize, well, things aren't like
I think they really should be. They don't seem normal anymore.
That's one of the steps. And then you know, things
go pretty sour a lot of time just because you
don't have the tools to deal with life in general.
But I think a lot of high level professionals become
that way because I think in medicine it's really rampant
(09:35):
where you come from a difficult past, you don't have
much self esteem, and you become an overachiever to outrun
your past. So that's where it becomes tricky and medicine
because there's a lot of intensive medicine, a lot of burnout,
high suicide rate, all sorts of things are happening in medicine,
and so outrunning your past I think is a pretty
(09:58):
common It's sounds like you in a work for a while, right.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
Yeah, Oh, it's quite helpful and becoming really successful. It
really gets you to where you're trying to go, but
then it's almost one part. It's never enough. I think
that was my greatest barrier. I remember being in graduation
from USC, which was my dream school. Attending USC was
such a big deal for me, and I had all
(10:27):
these chords. I had one chord for having a four
point zero. I had one chord for being the president
of the Honor Society. I had one chord for this
research project that I had contributed to. I had all
these things on my neck, and all I could think
about through graduation while my stomach felt like I was
going to explode, and my head just felt like it
weighed one hundred pounds and it was so dizzy, and
(10:51):
I was getting a cold, and I had the worst
sore throat, and I was starting to break out in hives,
and I just remember sitting there at graduation being like,
I just want to get this over with so I
can get into the PhD program, because once I do that,
I'll finally have like done well. And I realized, I
don't think this is good. I don't think this is
a way that you're supposed to feel well.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
I like you to speel a bit more time in this
because it's pretty common in high level athletes and performers
that are superstars that they crash and burn. Yeah, drug
abuse issues, suicide issues, really bad decision issues, and unfortunately
they're in the public spotlight, so we all get to
see it. So we sort of intellectually know that we
(11:34):
cannot outrun our cannot outrun our minds, right, but we
don't stop trying because we don't know what else to do. Absolutely,
show the same thing. I became a high level spines
short and went to the top fellowships in the world,
but I had seventeen different physical and mental symptoms at
the same time. So I was very successful on paper.
You look successful to yourself, you look successful in the world,
(11:56):
but then you're visible. But the point I want to
bring out is that, Okay, you achieved everything that you
want to feel better and you're misible. I remember that
exact moment in time in my story that it hits
you hard. I mean, what do I done everything I'm
supposed to do on paper to be successful, which i e.
Means happy? Right? I mean, why do we do all
(12:19):
this right? And then in our society now we put
such a high value on winning, like somehow winning is
going to solve your pain, right and it doesn't work. No,
So did you come to that spot where you're It
(12:39):
sounds like you're sitting on all these honors, you're sitting
on stage, I mean, which's I mean, I was pretty busy,
as it sounds like I was standing and still compared
to you. But okay, you're sitting there with all the
honors in the world and you're physically and mentally pretty miserable.
What were your thoughts at that point?
Speaker 4 (12:57):
I think at that point I knew there was something
wrong with the way that I was doing this. It
felt like deeply uncomfortable, and I didn't know how to
resolve it. And as you know, like not knowing how
to resolve it or when it's going to go away,
that uncertainty is so incredibly painful. I think that there
(13:18):
was something in me that realized, I don't know if
this is supposed to be this way, And I think
that the knowledge that I gained as a therapist really
allowed me to evaluate. I have always felt really unsafe
in my body, in my home, but I'm not living
that same life anymore. This is different. This is supposed
(13:42):
to be good, So why does it feel just as
bad as it did growing up? I think that's what
I'm very grateful for in the perspective, in coming into
this work and into my own work already having this
like therapist brain that was ready to help other people
and know how to have the insight to go. Sometimes
the chaos that we experience in our childhood gets carried
(14:05):
over into our own life, even when the chaos isn't
continuing the same way as it did before, because we're
so comfortable and familiar with the chaos as much as
we wanted to get out of it. Our brain also
only knows chaos, so will it will create it in
a new way. And this was my brain's way of
creating a chaos the way that I lived my life,
(14:28):
the way that I felt in my body, so that
I could still be connected somehow to the only thing
that I know, and that was living in this chaotic,
unsafe way, even though we were no longer in that
home anymore.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Right, there's an aging paper that you know ran Summer Anderson.
By chance, she's part of the PPDA.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Group anyway, she's original psychologists many decades ago, and she
and utter laying out of Arizona wrote a paper that humans
do not tolerate mental pain.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
They do not tolerate emotional pain, and what the body
will do as a substitute, they actually create physical symptoms.
And so somehow you've externalized your emotional pain, which sounds
like you had plenty of that. And then that's why
people do cutting, because they've externalized their pain. They can
see it. So the body will either create physical pain
(15:30):
or latch on physical pain. And when I read this paper,
I realized that, Okay, I'm a surgeon. I'm asking people
to give up their physical pain so now they could
get to experience their emotional pain, which is intolerable. And
so in my experience, that's where my work has evolved
into the mental pain because when people don't with physical
(15:50):
symptoms which are miserable enough, these ruminating thought patterns and
mental pain are just brutal. That was the worst part
of my experience. Now, if that was part of your experience,
was was the mental pain and issue with you also
at that point, Yeah, I.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Am such a perfect example of that, like type A
high anxiety part I feel like I move a million
miles externally, but my brain just won't stop going and
I think that was the biggest part of why it
was even hard to sleep consistently, and I would have
(16:25):
a lot of maintenance insomnia where I would just wake
up maybe four or five times throughout the night and
try to reset. Is because my brain was just going
at such a pace that it was so hard to
know that it was okay to slow down. Where I
became so conditioned to have these kind of compulsive thoughts
that I couldn't control, a lot of uncertainty and over
(16:46):
and over and over again. Because I couldn't solve it,
it would just keep happening, right, And so the rumination
is such a tough part of this work. It's what
I see it on a lot of my clients, and
it's something to be honest. I still even navigate today.
But though I've gotten much better at catching myself when
I'm getting stuck on the treadmill and knowing how to
(17:06):
get off the treadmill and leave the gym, it's still
a part of the way that my brain operates. Sometimes
it really helps and gets things done, and sometimes it
keeps me stuck and makes procrastination happen, and then I
feel worse, and then it snowballs. From there. So yes, So.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
I want to jump ahead a bit into your pretty
bad shape and even though on the surface you were
in credibly successful. So when did you get exposed to
the PRT pain Ross pain reprocessing therapy because you become
a therapist in twenty eighteen and you've been working out.
(17:46):
Now you actually run the group, now, correct I do?
I do run the Fortifi therapists. So and you're still
practicing in psychology right, yes, yes, okay, so you're still busy.
Speaker 4 (17:57):
Still busy hasn't stopped.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
So I like to just we'll talk about the details
of paying you're processing therapy in the second podcast, but
I just want to give a synopsis about what I
won't go in too much. You tell me. I know
you've bossed on the medical system. Doctors don't what's going on.
They're treating symptoms, et cetera, which is very frustrating. So
(18:20):
you have lots of physical mental symptoms and nobody knows
what to do. In a minister right now, we're focused
on structure, not the body's chemistry. And you know symptoms,
illness and disease occur from your bodies chemistry being in
fight or flight and when it sustain people get sick.
That's been documented for a long time. The reason why
I cut my practice because we're doing things to people
(18:44):
surgically without any data. And the symptoms are symptoms are
really coming from the body being in fight or flight chemistry.
So there's a whole calming process that allows the symptoms
to resolve. But in ministry, I never say, well, we
can't see something on a test that's not be so
assuming you went through a lot of.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
That, yes, gosh, for the head pain, I mean I
tried so many different chiropractors, acupuncturists, massage therapists, different medications,
different topical treatments. I mean, just so many things. And
(19:25):
then for the pelvic floor pain, I think my last
birth control, I had gotten to a point where it
was probably my fourteenth birth control and then I'd stopped
trying to make it work. And the same thing with
the hives. I tried many different cocktails of medications to
see what would work and what would and all the
all the kind of like needle bed testing to see
(19:49):
what was causing it. And same thing with the IBS symptoms.
And I believed that the neck pain, and I was
told that the neck pain also was caut by and
induce headpain. So that's where the chiropractors came in, and
I just kind of did the run around for a
very long time.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
Yeah, so I'm assuming your symptoms are sort of gone.
Is that a first statement?
Speaker 4 (20:14):
I can totally consider myself recovered.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, so, I just wanted to let this out.
We talk about the PRT in the second half of this,
But what happens all these symptoms, there's multiple symptoms. They
all come from the core cause every body's chemistry creating
animal changes in your body. Your body's an incredible balance,
and when you're in fight or flight all the time,
you have no time to risk and recover and regenerate.
(20:39):
So the part that keeps I think Vanessa go and
calls some also myself, is that the healing we see
is profound, and the medical profession actually makes things not
only worse, but a lot worse. That we do stressure
interventions that physically hurt people and were really become very
efficient in actually creating disability. It's a big So when
(21:03):
you hit the parot he you were exposed to it.
Speaker 4 (21:05):
When I was exposed to it in twenty eighteen when
a supervisor of mine had gone to a conference that
Allan attended, okay, yep, and he had announced at the
conference that he may be hiring at the Pain Psychology Center.
And I think that my previous supervisor was trying to
introduce me to the center to seek my own healing.
(21:28):
But of course I took it as a job opportunity
and interviewed with Alan and Christy Weepy, who is the
host of a curable podcast and she's the CEO of
the Better Mind Center, and I interviewed with them together,
and I think the interview went really well, and then
I was hired probably shortly after and started training. In
(21:50):
those days, there was such a small group of us
that we would meet in Allan's apartment for group supervision.
So yeah, I just got started then and then picked
it up from there.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Great, So you actually sort of healed yourself on the
job sort to speak.
Speaker 4 (22:08):
Yeah, I had so many clients who's I'm an EmPATH right,
many of us are. Many of us therapists are at
least too where just like we're here because we feel
for people, and I'm an EmPATH. I feel for people
and probably sometimes a little too much and have learned
how to kind of disconnect that. Over time, as I've
gotten good at my job, and I just met with
(22:29):
so many clients whose stories I could so linearly relate
to and found myself wondering more and more if this
just makes sense for me too. And I had one
client whose trauma history related a little closely to mine,
little too closely, and I had a really bad burst
(22:52):
of symptoms. I started getting really dizzy in session. The
light that is usually above my computer suddenly felt like
it was my eyeballs, which is a kind of startup
of my vestibular symptoms. And my gut started moving, and
my neck was firing up, and all these things were
happening at the same time. And when I talked to
my team after for support and I talked to Alan,
(23:15):
what I had learned is that something was happening during
session that instead of learning how to slow down and
tend to my own disregulation, why while my client was
actively disregulated. If I could learn to do that, I
could actually learn to tend to myself in the same
way that I'm teaching my clients. And then I started
(23:37):
realizing it was time to focus on this personally, and
luckily the client didn't even notice that I was having
a hard time. I thought they noticed and was like,
oh my gosh, I'm the worst therapist ever. And then
the next session, this client said, wow, you were so
supportive and really how I'm really hard on myself. So
that's when I took my own healing seriously.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Got it great. So we're gonna go to our next
podcast here in a second. So thanks for being on
this section, and we're to find a lot more about
the actual treatment. But you're can you can you tell
us about your center that you're running and how to
access it.
Speaker 4 (24:17):
Absolutely, So this is the Pain Psychology Center and our
website is Pain Psychologycenter dot com, where you can learn
more about our modality, about our team and our contact forms.
You can either email our admin team or you can
make a call through the through the phone number on
the website.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
And then you're physically located in Los Angeles.
Speaker 4 (24:39):
Yes, we do have an in person office. It's not
used often, but it's there. It's in Beverly Hills. Most
of us work virtually we have since before the pandemic,
so we've been on zoom for a while.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
And then you can cross statelines.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
Correct, we can, Yeah, we can work out of state,
out of country, and in fact most of our clients
come from the US, of course, the UK and Canada.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Okay, perfect well, Vanessa, thank you very much, and I'm
excited to connect with your group and tell Alan Gordon hello.
And so he's done a great work and there's a
whole group of us. It's a growing group who are
seeing the obvious that medicine has somehow gone way off base.
(25:22):
We're treating structure and not the body and not the person.
And when you treat the body and the person as
one unit, I don't like the term holistic because it's
sort of an oxymoron. I mean, we're living creatures and
we're going to respond in different ways. So no, so
I'm excited to see your effort grow like that. That's
fantastic and it's some tipping point mainstream medicine is going
(25:46):
to have to pay attention. So anyway, thank you for
your efforts and great you every on the shows.
Speaker 4 (25:50):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
I'd like to thank our guest Vanessa Blackstone for being
on the show today and sharing her difficult childhood, her
work to overcome chronic pain, and how those experiences help
shape her therapy. Practice. I'm your host, Tom Masters, reminding
you to be back next week for another episode of
Back in Control Radio with Doctor David Hanscomb, and in
(26:14):
the meantime, be sure to visit the website at www
dot backincontrol dot com.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
Thanks for listening today and join us next week for
Back in Control Radium
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