Elijah Szasz
Certified Pain Reprocessing Therapy Coach
The Wise Mind Group
Elijah came to this work as a patient. Four years of chronic back pain, then plantar fasciitis, and an anxiety disorder, all of it eased through the approaches he now uses with clients. Certified in Pain Reprocessing Therapy, drawing on emotional awareness and expression therapy, and RO-DBT.
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If You Spot It, You Got It.
Elijah started his career in the fitness industry. It ended abruptly with a low back injury, followed by four years of extreme chronic pain. He was told he would need spinal surgery and would never play sports again.
He never had the surgery. After finding John Sarno's work on the mind-body connection, he made a full recovery and returned to strength training, bicycle racing, backpacking, martial arts, and yoga. His nervous system had been generating real, debilitating pain as a distraction from repressed emotional material.
That experience changed how he understood his own body, his drive, and the cost of controlling every variable in his life. The same wiring that made him effective, a serial entrepreneur, fourteen years sober, relentless about every system he could measure, was also the wiring producing the symptoms. Years of startups and burnout are their own evidence. He works with people built the same way, and with people heading down that road who would rather not arrive.
"I built companies the same way I managed my pain: control every variable, push through, never stop. The work started when I realized that strategy was the problem, not the solution."
Teaching the Brain It Is Safe.
Elijah's work is built on Pain Reprocessing Therapy, developed by Alan Gordon. In a randomized controlled trial published in JAMA Psychiatry, 66% of participants with chronic back pain were pain-free or nearly pain-free after treatment, compared to 10% in the control group. The premise is that persistent symptoms are often produced by a brain that has learned to read ordinary signals as danger.
The work is not about managing that response or building tolerance for it. It is about giving the brain enough repeated evidence of safety that the prediction changes.
He draws on emotional awareness and expression work, ISTDP, and RO-DBT alongside PRT, because the pressure people put on themselves is usually part of what keeps the danger signal switched on.
The Work
Building the Case
Most people arrive uncertain whether their symptoms are really neuroplastic. That uncertainty keeps the fear alive, and the fear keeps the symptoms alive. The first work is gathering your own evidence until the conclusion is genuinely yours.
Somatic Tracking
Attending to the sensation directly, without bracing against it. Done repeatedly, this is what teaches the brain that the signal it has been treating as dangerous is safe to feel.
The Pressure Underneath
Self-criticism and relentless internal demand register to the nervous system as ongoing threat. Working on how you treat yourself is not a side project here. It is often what determines whether the change holds.
Elijah went through this process himself before he ever guided anyone else through it, which is why he tends to be direct about what it actually asks of you.
How I Work With Clients
One-on-one behavioral coaching for people working through neuroplastic symptoms. Structured, direct, and pointed at an ending.
Who This Is For
People with chronic pain or symptoms that have not responded to conventional treatment, who have already been through a medical workup and come away without answers. Pain that moves, flares under stress, or has outlasted any reasonable healing timeline.
Coaching
What the Work Involves
Sessions built on Pain Reprocessing Therapy: understanding what is generating your symptoms, somatic tracking, and working on the self-pressure that keeps the danger signal switched on. Most of the change happens in the practice between sessions.
PRT Based
Coaching, Not Therapy
This is behavioral coaching, which means it is not clinical treatment and does not replace it. If what you are carrying needs a licensed clinician, Elijah will say so and point you toward one, including Danielle where that fits.
Scope
If you have been told to live with it.
That was the answer I was ultimately given, for years. The consultation is a straight conversation about what you are dealing with, what you have already tried, and whether this work is a fit. It costs nothing and takes one call to find out.
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