You are listening to the Life Coach School Podcast with Brook Castillo episode number 396.

Welcome to the Life Coach School Podcast, where it's all about real clients, real problems, and real coaching.

And now your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brook Castillo.

Well hello, my beautiful friends.

Welcome to the podcast today. I am really excited to talk to you about this podcast. I was recommended a book called The Way Out by Alan Gordon.

And I actually, I wasn't recommended the book. One of my students who has been a long suffer of chronic pain was actually reading the book and just had mentioned something in one of our channels had just said like, I am obsessed with this book.

And so I decided to read it. It was called The Way Out and it was talking about chronic pain. And one of the reasons why I wanted to read it is because when I was developing the content for my program on over drinking, I read the work of Sarno who talked a lot about the connection between mental pain and physical pain.

And so I've always been fascinated with that combination. I've always been fascinated to know what is the difference between physical pain and emotional pain and how they related.

So I got this book and started reading it, read it voraciously. I really enjoyed it. I think anyone who is suffering with chronic pain, physical chronic pain would enjoy reading this book.

I read it with the lens of trying to understand how does chronic pain and the treating of chronic pain align with emotional pain and the treatment of emotional pain.

That is an area that I have worked on extensively in self-coaching scholars and in certification at the school and with my clients.

And one of the main things that I learned from reading both these books from Sarno and from Gordon and also from studying emotional pain with my students and in my own life is that there are very similar treatments for both of them.

And one of the fascinating things about the book The Way Out is how he describes some chronic pain.

And he basically says and all of his work is based in neuroscience. And he basically says while chronic pain feels like it's coming from the body, in most cases, it's generated by misfiring pain circuits in the brain.

And the way that he describes it, and I'm summarizing here, you need to go get his book and read it. But basically what happens is when we are injured physically in our bodies, there is a signal that sent to our brain that generates fear.

So the pain, although it feels like the pain is happening at the spot, at the injury, it's oftentimes it is the actual pain signal is created in the brain, which I find totally utterly fascinating anyway.

The brain is what processes pain.

So one of the ways that I've always described this is that like a sensation of physical pain starts in the body and travels to the brain and emotional pain starts in the brain with a thought and travels to the body as pain.

And so as I was reading this book with this lens of pain, being something that is created in the brain, I opened up so many questions that I wanted to answer in my own life and in all of, you know, the lives of my students, everything that I always work with on myself, I always want to work with on my students.

And so one of the main thesis that he has in there is pain being associated with fear.

And so the questions that came up for me were, where does pain come from? Why is it there? What can we do about it? And then what does fear have to do with it?

In the book is that fear perpetuates pain and fear fuels pain. And the more we fear pain, the more chronic pain we're going to have.

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