458. The Pain/Brain Connection with Alan Gordon
From Psychologists Off the Clock by Debbie Sorensen, Jill Stoddard, Yael Schonbrun, Michael Herold & Emily Edlynn
May 5, 2026 · 53 min · Episode 458
About this episode
Jill Stoddard interviews Alan Gordon about the connection between pain and the brain, exploring how to retrain the nervous system to alleviate chronic pain.
We’ve been taught that pain always means something is broken, but it’s often just a "stuck" danger signal in the brain. To show us how to turn that signal off, Jill Stoddard talks with Alan Gordon, the founder of the Pain Psychology Center and author of The Way Out . Drawing on his own recovery from chronic pain, Alan explains how fear and conditioning keep us hurting even after we've healed. Through fascinating stories like the "construction worker" case and MRI surprise, they dive into the science of neuroplastic pain and the tools you can use to retrain your nervous system, build stress tolerance, and finally feel safe in your own body again. Listen and Learn: Alan’s personal frustration with navigating a broken medical system and how that led to the discovery of a groundbreaking mind-body approach that offers lasting relief for chronic pain How your brain can misinterpret emotional stress or past memories as physical danger to create real, persistent pain even after an injury has fully healed The specific clues that can reveal whether your chronic physical pain is actually coming from your brain, and how to break the cycle of fear that keeps symptoms alive …
People in this episode
Host: Jill Stoddard
Guest: Alan Gordon
Topics covered
- chronic pain
- neuroplasticity
- mind-body connection
- pain management
- fear and conditioning
Keywords
- chronic pain
- neuroplastic pain
- pain reprocessing therapy
- stress tolerance
- mind-body approach
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Pain Psychology Center
Books & works: The Way Out
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