Can you Unlearn Pain?
If you've been living with chronic pain; migraines, back pain, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, pelvic pain, chronic fatigue, and you've seen doctor after doctor without finding a clear structural cause or an effective solution, Dr. Howard Schubiner's book Unlearn Your Pain might resonate deeply and be an important part of healing.
This is a book about neuroscience, neuroplasticity, and the growing evidence that a significant portion of chronic pain is generated not by tissue damage or structural problems in the body, but by learned neural pathways in the brain; pathways that can, with the right approach, be rewired.
And, perhaps most relevant to the work we do here, Dr. Schubiner is explicit about the role of emotional processing and specific therapy modalities in that healing process.
Who Is Dr. Howard Schubiner?
Dr. Howard Schubiner is an internist, researcher, and Clinical Professor at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine. He has spent more than two decades conducting clinical trials and authoring over 100 scientific papers focused on what he calls Mind Body Syndrome (MBS); chronic pain and related conditions that originate in learned neural circuits rather than actual tissue destruction.
He is also the co-author, alongside leading ISTDP researcher Dr. Allan Abbass, of Hidden From View: A Clinician's Guide to Psychophysiologic Disorders, a collaboration that makes clear exactly where Schubiner lands on the role of emotional processing in physical healing.
The Central Idea: Your Pain Is Real, and Its Source Might Be in the Brain
One of the most important things to understand about Unlearn Your Pain is that Schubiner is not saying "it's all in your head" in a dismissive way. He's saying something far more precise and scientifically grounded: the underlying reason for much chronic pain is nerve sensitization and learned nerve pathways, rather than actual tissue destruction. The pain is completely real. The question is where it originates.
Using cutting-edge research, the book demonstrates that the underlying reason for much chronic pain is learned neural circuits in the brain. When the nervous system learns to generate a pain signal in response to certain triggers; stress, certain movements, certain emotions, certain situations, it can continue firing that signal long after any original injury has healed, or even in the absence of any structural damage at all. This is what's sometimes called central sensitization, and it's one of the mechanisms behind conditions like fibromyalgia, chronic back pain, irritable bowel syndrome, and many types of persistent headaches.
The hopeful part: for most people, the answers lie in the science of neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to form new pathways, and to unlearn patterns that are no longer serving it.
The Role of Emotions in Chronic Pain
Here's where the book moves firmly into territory that aligns with the work we do. Schubiner's premise is that "Mind Body Syndrome is caused by unresolved emotions, and it is usually necessary to resolve them to get better." Unresolved emotions include depression, hopelessness, helplessness, fear, anxiety, and stress from unresolved conflicts, as well as childhood traumas and other problems.
In other words, the path to reducing chronic pain isn't only about brain retraining exercises, it also requires going toward the emotional material that the nervous system may be using the pain to hold, avoid, or express. This is a deeply experiential understanding of how the body works, and it maps closely onto what researchers in AEDP, somatic therapy, and Polyvagal-informed approaches have also been demonstrating: that unexpressed or unprocessed emotion doesn't just disappear. It gets “held” somewhere, and the body is often where it “lands.”
What Therapy Does Schubiner Recommend?
This is the part that particularly caught our attention. In his clinical work, Schubiner recommends therapy approaches that directly address the emotional processing piece, specifically pointing to ISTDP (Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy), a model developed by researcher Dr. Habib Davanloo and expanded significantly by Dr. Allan Abbass (Schubiner's co-author on Hidden From View).
ISTDP is an experiential, emotion-focused approach that works directly with the anxiety, defenses, and underlying core emotions, including grief, anger, fear, and longing, that often lie beneath physical symptoms. The goal is to help the body's nervous system complete emotional processes that got stuck, so that the need for physical symptoms to carry that load is reduced.
AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy), developed by Dr. Diana Fosha, shares the same experiential, emotion-focused foundations as ISTDP. Both approaches work directly with core emotions in the context of a safe therapeutic relationship; both emphasize the body as a site of healing, not just the mind; and both understand that insight alone, understanding why something happened, is rarely sufficient for lasting change. The felt, experiential processing of emotion is what moves the needle.
In our practice, AEDP is one of our primary modalities, alongside IFS, Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, EFT, and Polyvagal-informed approaches. All of these share the same underlying philosophy that Schubiner's medical work points toward: that emotional experience, when it can be safely felt and processed in the body, is itself therapeutic, and may be essential for those carrying the physical manifestations of unresolved emotional stress.
What the Program in the Book Involves
The program in the book gives a wide range of information to help you assess the causes of your pain and learn how to rewire neural circuits in the brain to reverse it, including methods for addressing stressful and traumatic life events.
Therapeutic writing exercises designed to bring suppressed emotional material into awareness
Mindfulness and meditation practices
Education on how the brain generates pain and how neuroplasticity works
Guidance on identifying personality traits and life stressors that may be maintaining the pain cycle
Tools for developing a different relationship to pain; moving from fear and avoidance toward curiosity and understanding
Why We Keep Recommending This Book
We recommend Unlearn Your Pain, along with Dr. Schubiner's companion book, Unlearn Your Anxiety and Depression, because it does something most chronic pain resources don't: it takes both the physical reality of symptoms and their emotional roots seriously at the same time. It doesn't dismiss structural medicine, and it doesn't dismiss the role of the nervous system and emotional experience. It holds both, rigorously, with research behind it.
And it arrives at the same conclusion we keep returning to in our clinical work: that the body and the mind are not separate systems, and that healing one often requires attending to the other.
If you're carrying chronic pain or persistent physical symptoms that haven't responded to conventional treatment, or if you've wondered whether stress, emotional history, or nervous system dysregulation might be part of the picture, this book is a meaningful place to start.
The experiential therapy work Schubiner recommends doesn't have to wait until you've read the book, either. That's exactly what we do.
Curious whether this kind of work might help you?Reach out to schedule a consultation — we'd love to talk it through.