A 10-WEEK SKILLS GROUP

Neuroplastic Pain and Overcontrol

A 10-week skills group for people with chronic pain and other neuroplastic symptoms whose pain has been slow to respond to standard treatment, and who recognize a familiar pattern of putting a lot of pressure on themselves.

Empty wooden chair pulled out at a long table, representing isolation

Many people with neuroplastic symptoms recognize the same pattern in themselves: incredibly conscientious, prioritizing others' care over your own, difficulty expressing anger or other emotions, a felt need to do everything correctly, and trouble letting go of control.

None of that is a character flaw. Those patterns often developed for good reason. But over time, the same vigilance that once protected you can keep a nervous system locked in alert, unable to fully register safety even when nothing is wrong.

This group helps give you the skills to teach your nervous system it is safe so that it can then ease off of the pattern that is generating symptoms.

Sign Up Now This group will be limited to twelve participants. By registering, you agree to our Terms and Conditions.

Pricing & Details

$99 per session, charged weekly starting the day you register
Your total commitment is $990 across all ten sessions.

Duration

10 weeks total, meeting once a week. Starts Wednesday, September 23, 2026. Ends Wednesday, December 2. (No group meeting Thanksgiving week.)

Cohort Group Meetings

1.5 hours per group session, every Wednesday, 6:00 to 7:30 PM Mountain Time.

Two Facilitators

Two professional facilitators co-lead every cohort together.

Recorded Sessions

Every session is recorded. Access recordings for up to one year.

Weekly Experiments

A new experiment to practice with between each session and share with the group every week.

Weekly Skills & Tools

A new skill introduced and practiced together each week.

Full Material Access

PDFs provided for everything presented, with additional goodies such as reference sheets, yours to keep.

Group Chat

A private group thread to stay connected between sessions.

Sign Up Now This group will be limited to twelve participants. By registering, you agree to our Terms and Conditions.

Session Dates

1Sept 23
2Sept 30
3Oct 7
4Oct 14
5Oct 21
6Oct 28
7Nov 4
8Nov 11
9Nov 18
10Dec 2

Who Is This For?

The group curriculum was designed to help those with neuroplastic symptoms, which are expressed physically and psychologically. Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) retrains what the brain has learned about physical sensations of danger. Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET) helps people express and process the emotions sitting underneath that oversensitive nervous system. And Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy (RO-DBT) is an evidence-based approach that specifically works with the temperament of those usually subject to neuroplastic conditions, giving the other two modalities a much better chance of being effective. This group shall thread the needle between these three treatment models.

This Might Be You

  • You understand your symptoms may be influenced by the brain and nervous system, but understanding the science hasn't been enough to create lasting change.
  • You put a lot of pressure on yourself to get things right.
  • You're highly responsible and conscientious, and have a hard time switching that off.
  • You tend to be much harder on yourself than you are on other people.
  • Your mind spends a lot of time worrying, planning, or trying to prevent things from going wrong.
  • You tend to minimize or suppress difficult emotions, especially anger.
  • You find it easier to take care of other people than to express your own needs.
  • You've noticed that monitoring, avoiding, or fighting your symptoms can sometimes make them more consuming.

This Might Not Be The Right Fit

  • You're looking primarily for a support group focused on talking about symptoms or comparing medical experiences.
  • You're looking for a passive class where you can listen without practicing between sessions.
  • You need certainty that every symptom is neuroplastic before you're willing to try a different approach.
  • You aren't open to exploring the possibility that stress, emotion, or personality patterns may influence symptoms.
  • Your primary goal is finding the one technique that makes a symptom disappear immediately.
  • Your symptoms haven't been appropriately medically evaluated, or you have a condition requiring restrictions this work would conflict with.
  • You're currently in an acute psychiatric crisis or need more intensive mental health support than a weekly skills group can provide.
  • You're looking for a program that promises to eliminate pain or guarantees a particular outcome.

We understand that your pain is real. However, this program does not require you to believe that it is completely neuroplastic. It does ask for curiosity about the possibility that the brain, nervous system, emotions, learned patterns, and your temperament can play a real role in persistent symptoms.

Sign Up Now This group will be limited to twelve participants. By registering, you agree to our Terms and Conditions.
Your Facilitators

Meet Your Facilitators

Neither of us arrived at this work from the outside. Danielle and Elijah both came through their own recoveries, using many of the same approaches this practice is built on, and both still practice them daily. Fourteen years of clinical experience sits behind the work. The starting point was personal.

People drawn to PRT and EAET tend to share a temperament: driven, self-critical, hard on themselves. RO-DBT speaks to that pattern directly, which is why it anchors everything else we teach.

Sign Up Now This group will be limited to twelve participants. By registering, you agree to our Terms and Conditions.
Danielle Szasz
Danielle Szasz, LMFT
Clinical Director & Co-Founder

A former big law litigator turned therapist, Danielle understands high-stakes pressure from the inside out. She specializes in treating the rigid perfectionism and chronic pain that come with an overcontrolled temperament.

Read Full Bio →
Elijah Szasz
Elijah Szasz
Managing Director & Co-Founder

Eli came to this work as a patient, recovering from chronic pain that no scan could explain. He is certified in Pain Reprocessing Therapy and works with coaching clients directly. Decades of putting pressure on himself before that recovery gave him a close, personal view of the pattern this group works with.

Read Full Bio →
As Featured On

Is Your Biotemperament Contributing to Your Pain?

Danielle recently joined Christie Uipi on Curable's Like Mind, Like Body podcast to talk about biotemperament, the same concept at the center of this group. The conversation covers why traits like perfectionism, people-pleasing, and conscientiousness show up so often in people with chronic pain, and what it actually takes to shift a nervous system from threat toward safety.

Frequently Asked Questions

Overcontrol isn't an all-or-nothing category. Most of us fall somewhere on a spectrum, and the same person may be highly controlled in some situations and much less controlled in others. People with overcontrolled tendencies are often responsible, conscientious, persistent, thoughtful, and good at delaying gratification. Those strengths can also come with a cost. You may put enormous pressure on yourself, struggle with perfectionism, worry frequently, have difficulty relaxing your standards, keep emotions tightly contained, avoid conflict, or find it difficult to show vulnerability or ask for help. It can also be surprisingly difficult to recognize these patterns in ourselves. As the saying goes, you can't read the label when you're inside the jar. You don't need to identify with every trait to benefit from this group. If you're curious about your own control style, you can take our free assessment here.
That's normal. This group isn't built around fitting neatly into a personality type. We're interested in whether certain patterns, such as perfectionism, self-criticism, worry, emotional inhibition, excessive responsibility, people-pleasing, rigidity, or difficulty tolerating uncertainty, are showing up in ways that may be relevant to your symptoms and your life. You don't need to qualify as perfectly overcontrolled.
A neuroplastic symptom is a real physical symptom that is generated or maintained, at least in part, by learned patterns in the brain and nervous system rather than being fully explained by ongoing tissue damage or disease. With chronic pain, the closest formal medical term is often nociplastic pain. In these conditions, the nervous system can become increasingly sensitive and begin interpreting safe or relatively harmless signals as threatening. Neuroplastic mechanisms can contribute to symptoms such as chronic back or neck pain, migraines, pelvic pain, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel symptoms, fatigue, dizziness, and other persistent physical symptoms, along with treatment-resistant anxiety or depression that hasn't responded to standard approaches. Neuroplastic does not mean imaginary, exaggerated, or all in your head. The symptoms are real.
Yes. Physical and neuroplastic mechanisms aren't mutually exclusive. Someone can have arthritis, disc changes, an old injury, endometriosis, or another medical condition and still have a nervous system that has become sensitized and is amplifying or maintaining symptoms beyond what the underlying condition alone would predict. The question isn't always "is this structural or neuroplastic." Sometimes the more useful question is how much each mechanism is contributing. This group is not intended to diagnose the cause of unexplained symptoms or replace appropriate medical evaluation.
No. We don't expect blind faith in the mind-body model. We do ask that you be open to exploring the possibility that your brain and nervous system may be contributing to your symptoms, and willing to experiment with approaches that target fear, attention, avoidance, emotional processes, behavior, and patterns of overcontrol. Healthy skepticism is welcome. Complete unwillingness to consider a neuroplastic component probably means this isn't the right group.
We're not suggesting overcontrol causes chronic pain or other neuroplastic symptoms. Our interest is in where the two overlap. People with overcontrolled tendencies often have heightened sensitivity to threat along with patterns such as perfectionism, self-criticism, worry, emotional inhibition, rigidity, excessive responsibility, conflict avoidance, and difficulty feeling socially safe or emotionally open. Many of those same processes can matter in neuroplastic symptoms. Fear and hypervigilance can reinforce the brain's perception of danger. Constant monitoring and attempts to control symptoms can make them more salient. Emotional avoidance can maintain physiological threat. And difficulty connecting openly with other people may make it harder for the nervous system to experience safety. Our working premise is that, for some people, addressing the style of overcontrol surrounding the symptoms may be just as important as addressing the symptoms themselves. That's the intersection this group is designed to explore.
Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy (RO-DBT) was developed specifically for problems associated with excessive self-control. It focuses on greater openness, flexibility, emotional expression, social signaling, self-enquiry, and connection with others. Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) is a neuroscience-based approach for neuroplastic pain. It helps people change the way the brain interprets bodily sensations and reduce the fear and threat responses that can reinforce persistent symptoms. Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET) helps people identify, experience, and more adaptively express emotions related to stress, conflict, trauma, and relationships. It has been studied specifically in people with chronic pain. Our program draws from areas where these approaches naturally overlap rather than attempting to deliver three complete treatments at once.
Comprehensive RO-DBT is a much larger treatment model, typically delivered through a 30-lesson skills curriculum alongside individual RO-DBT therapy. It also involves a minimum number of sessions clients commit to completing, with individual clinician check-ins built in throughout the treatment. This program selects specific RO-DBT concepts and skills that are particularly relevant to people with neuroplastic symptoms, especially work involving threat sensitivity, perfectionism, emotional inhibition, self-enquiry, flexibility, social signaling, openness, and connection, and integrates them with principles from PRT and EAET.
No. We'll teach the concepts and practices you need as we go. People who have already done individual pain-reprocessing work may find that the group helps them address patterns they haven't worked on before. People who are new to these approaches can start here as long as they're open to the underlying model.
There's no single required diagnosis. Participants may have chronic back or neck pain, migraines or headaches, pelvic pain, fibromyalgia, gastrointestinal symptoms, fatigue, persistent post-injury symptoms, nerve-like sensations, treatment-resistant anxiety or depression, or other ongoing physical or emotional symptoms in which neuroplastic mechanisms may be playing a role. Because the group focuses on shared mechanisms rather than one body part or diagnosis, members don't need to have the same symptoms.
Because the group itself matters. We want enough people to bring a variety of experiences and perspectives into the room, while keeping the group small enough that everyone can participate, ask questions, practice skills, and be known. Some of the work also involves openness, emotional expression, and interpersonal learning, which are easier in a small group that meets together each week rather than a large class. Once the cohort begins, we won't continually add new members.
This group isn't a traditional support group. There will be room to talk about what you're experiencing and to learn from other members, but the purpose isn't to compare symptoms or spend ninety minutes discussing how hard chronic illness can be. It's a structured, skills-based program that includes teaching, discussion, experiential practice, and work to try between sessions.
No. The group can be an important part of someone's recovery, but it can't provide the individualized attention available in one-on-one work. If individual therapy or coaching sounds like a better fit, or a helpful complement, you can book a free consultation. We also maintain a network of physicians familiar with neuroplastic symptoms if medical care is what you're looking for. Others may find the group provides everything they need at this stage on its own. This program should never be used as a reason to ignore new, changing, or medically concerning symptoms.
Yes, though we like to call them personal experiments 🧪. A major part of the program happens between sessions. Depending on the week, you may be asked to practice a skill, notice a behavioral pattern, complete a writing exercise, experiment with responding differently to symptoms, practice emotional expression, or try something outside your usual comfort zone. The goal isn't to give you hours of homework. It's to take what we discuss in ninety minutes and begin applying it to the other 166 and a half hours of your week.
Probably at times. RO-DBT's core skill is called radical openness, and it's different from the radical acceptance you may have heard about in standard DBT. Radical acceptance is about making peace with what already is. Radical openness is more active. It means getting curious about your own patterns to the point of intentionally doing the things you'd normally avoid, in order to learn from them. In practice, that means we're going to ask you to become curious about patterns that may have been operating for years, including how you respond to symptoms, how hard you are on yourself, what you avoid, what you try to control, and what emotions are difficult for you to experience or express. We won't ask you to disclose something you don't want to disclose, and discomfort isn't the same thing as progress. This is meant to be an experiential program, not simply a series of lectures. A willingness to become a little uncomfortable in the service of learning something new is part of the work.
You may be exactly the kind of person we're thinking about. You won't be required to disclose your deepest experiences to twelve strangers. Trust develops gradually, and you remain in control of what you share. At the same time, learning to notice, tolerate, and communicate emotions more openly is part of the work, and the group itself is part of how that happens. Being welcomed into a small group of people working on the same patterns, and watching others take the same risks you're taking, is its own kind of practice. What gets modeled here is meant to carry over into your other relationships, not stay contained to Wednesday nights. If you know from the outset that you're unwilling to engage with emotions at all, this probably isn't the right program.
We strongly encourage you to attend all ten sessions. This is a closed cohort, and each week builds on the work that came before it. Consistent attendance also matters to the relationships and trust that develop within the group. We understand that life happens, and missing an occasional session doesn't mean you've failed the program. Every session is recorded, so if you do miss one, you can catch up before the next week. But if you already know you'll miss several weeks, we'd recommend waiting for a future cohort.
Everyone in the group will be asked to protect the privacy of the other members and not share identifying information or personal stories outside the group. That agreement is essential to creating the kind of environment we want. Unlike confidentiality with an individual licensed provider, no facilitator can absolutely guarantee what another participant will do outside the group. We ask members to consider that when deciding what they choose to share.
You're always free to stop participating. Registration is a commitment to the full 10-week cohort, though. Your card is charged as you go, once a week, rather than all at once, but that charge continues for the full ten weeks even if you're not able to attend every session. We reserve your seat for the full cohort, and once it begins we don't add new members to replace someone who's left. For that reason, payments are nonrefundable once you register. If you're unsure whether the group is a good fit, talk with us before enrolling.
No. We'd be very skeptical of any program that made that promise. Research on approaches such as PRT and EAET has shown that some people experience substantial reductions in chronic pain, while others experience more modest changes. Improvements can also show up as less fear, less symptom preoccupation, greater activity, improved emotional flexibility, and a greater ability to participate in life even before symptoms fully change. Our job is to provide a thoughtful framework, good teaching, meaningful practice, and a supportive environment. We can't predict exactly how any one nervous system will respond.
That sounds like curiosity, which is exactly what we're hoping for 🤩. Send any questions to hello@thewisemindgroup.com.
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You Don't Have to Keep Doing This Alone

This group is small on purpose. One cohort, ten weeks, working through the same pattern together. If what you've read here sounds like your own experience, the next step is simple.

Sign Up Now This group will be limited to twelve participants. By registering, you agree to our Terms and Conditions.