Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET) is an integrative, evidence-based psychotherapy designed to help people with chronic pain reinterpret chronic pain signals as non-threatening and develop more capacity to be with difficult emotions to ultimately eliminate chronic pain.

Pain neuroscience research demonstrates that chronic pain is the result of a learned neural response that is perpetuated by a fear-avoidance cycle, rather than due to ongoing tissue damage. This extraordinary body of research reveals that if we can leverage the brain’s ability to change and reorganize itself, people suffering from chronic pain can experience substantial relief or complete recovery.

EAET targets this fear-avoidance cycle directly, helping patients make the connection between emotional and cognitive patterns that maintain their pain symptoms. In EAET, patients learn that their pain symptoms are their brain’s way of signaling threat and that key to their recovery from pain is experiential acceptance, whether of uncomfortable emotions or physical sensations. Patients learn to reinterpret pain signals as non-threatening, tune into uncomfortable physical sensations, and experience previously avoided affects, ultimately lowering perceived threat and retraining the brain to stop generating chronic pain signals.

The research evidence for EAET is substantial and growing. Here are several key peer-reviewed publications supporting its effectiveness for chronic pain, including among patients with fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and back pain.