Somatic Tracking: Reduce Neuroplastic Pain with Pain Reprocessing Therapy

If you’ve been living with chronic pain, it’s easy to feel stuck in a cycle of fear, frustration, and endless searching for answers. What most people don’t realize is that pain is not always a sign of injury or damage. Often, it is neuroplastic pain - a learned pattern in the brain that can be changed.

This is where somatic tracking comes in. Somatic tracking is a core tool in Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), a breakthrough approach for healing chronic pain. Working with a pain reprocessing therapist, clients learn to gently observe their sensations and show the brain: this is safe. When the brain no longer interprets these sensations as dangerous, it can actually turn the volume of pain down.

What is Somatic Tracking?

Somatic tracking is the practice of mindfully noticing the sensations in your body without judgment, fear, or trying to fix them. Instead of fighting against discomfort, you approach it with curiosity and safety.

Think of it as teaching your brain a new language. Each time you notice a sensation and pair it with calmness, reassurance, and safety, your brain receives the message:

“This sensation is safe. You don’t need to send pain signals right now.”

Over time, this retrains the pain pathways in your brain and helps break the cycle of chronic pain.

The Five F’s: How We Accidentally Reinforce Pain

Our subconscious brain is always scanning for danger. When pain shows up, many of us fall into automatic survival patterns created by Howard Schubiner, a pain physician and researcher. He calls them the Five F’s:

1. Fight – Getting angry at the pain, trying to push through it.
   “Why won’t this pain go away? I can’t stand it anymore!”

2. Frustration – Feeling defeated and stuck.
   “I’ve tried everything. Nothing works.”

3. Fear – Worrying the pain means something is broken or dangerous.
   “What if this never gets better? What if I’m really damaged?”

4. Figuring it out – Googling, researching, bouncing from one doctor to another, hoping for the magic answer.

5. Focusing on the pain – Becoming hyperaware of every sensation.
   “It’s all I can notice. It’s taking over my life.”

Each of these responses reinforces to the subconscious brain: this is a threat. And when the brain senses danger, it increases pain as a way of keeping you alert and safe.

Why Working with the Subconscious Brain is Essential

Your subconscious brain is the part that runs your survival systems: heart rate, breathing, hormones, blood sugar, immunity, and yes, pain. It’s always working to keep you alive.

When you feel stressed, overwhelmed, or caught in fear-based thoughts, your subconscious doesn’t know the difference between an actual emergency and a busy day of overthinking. It triggers a cascade of stress responses: shallow breathing, increased heart rate, muscle tension and bracing, and release of cortisol and other stress hormones.

The problem? Chronic stress tells your body that danger is always present, and your pain system responds by turning the volume up.

Pain, Emotion, and the Limbic System

The limbic system, the emotional center of your brain, is where both pain and emotions are processed. That’s why heartbreak literally hurts in your chest, and why fear or anger can create physical pain in your body.

But in our modern medical system, we’ve been taught to look for a broken part to fix, rather than recognizing that many pain patterns are emotional, neuroplastic, and reversible. This leaves so many people feeling powerless, stuck in cycles of medical appointments, frustration, and fear.

How Somatic Tracking Helps

Somatic tracking interrupts the stress–pain cycle by gently showing your subconscious brain that you are safe. Instead of reacting with fear or frustration, you practice calm observation:

• “I feel a sensation in my back. It’s not dangerous. I can let it be here.”

• “This is my body sending a signal, but I don’t need to interpret it as a threat.”

Over time, the brain learns a new association: sensation = safety. And when the brain feels safe, pain signals begin to turn down.

This is the essence of Pain Reprocessing Therapy: noticing, soothing, and retraining the brain’s response to pain.

Somatic Track Your Pain Away

You can’t think your way out of pain with logic alone. You can’t always fix it with stretches, supplements, or surgeries. Healing happens when your subconscious brain feels safe, and somatic tracking is one of the most powerful tools to make that happen.

If you’ve been struggling with pain that no doctor can explain, working with a pain reprocessing therapist can help you understand your symptoms, retrain your brain, and finally find relief.

Pain doesn’t have to control your life. Your brain has the ability to change and rewire, and you can learn how to guide it.