Dr. Joe Tatta | The Healing Pain Podcast

In this episode, we're going to do something different. Instead of me interviewing someone, I'm going to share a simple yet powerful technique that will help you whether you're someone living with pain or a practitioner who treats people. This exercise is called Dropping an Anchor. It's typically one of the very first techniques that I teach patients who suffer from pain or pain catastrophizing, having problems with difficult emotions, emotion dysregulation, anxiety or any challenge that's coming up in the therapy room. Before we begin, we probably should revisit the term pain catastrophizing and review and identify what that means. Pain catastrophizing is the tendency to magnify the threat value of pain, feel helpless in a context of pain or the inability to inhibit pain-related thoughts in anticipation of a painful encounter. The last part, the inability to inhibit pain-related thoughts in anticipation of a painful encounter, is what I would like you to think about as we go into this episode. Think about so