2026 ATNS Conference

Workshop Summary:

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In this work, we focus a lot on how our childhood experiences influence the development of neuroplastic symptoms. But we don’t really talk about the role that parenting plays. In this talk two providers in this field will share their own unique parenting experiences with their children with special needs, and how this has influenced their care. We will also discuss parenting from as “preventative“ standpoint. Finally, we will outline parenting styles throughout the years, and how this influences their children’s personality traits, adaptive and maladaptive strategies and contribution to development of neuroplastic symptoms.


Learning Objectives:

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1. Learners will be able to describe 2-3 parenting styles/philosophies associated with different generations (eg. baby boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Y).
2. Learners will be able to identify 3-4 current parenting styles and practices that may still be harmful and contribute to personality trait development the leads to neuroplastic symptoms
3. Learners will be able to list a 3-4 "gentler" parenting practices that parallel the tools we use to help patients recover from neuroplastic pain.

1. Workshop Summary:

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The fear-avoidance model has been studied extensively and understanding and addressing the components of it can be useful for patients struggling with fear and specifically fear of symptoms, movement, injury, postures, activities, etc. Working through this model can help patients reduce fear, regain confidence, and restore agency, as well as reduce symptoms. The fear-avoidance model includes some core components that can cause and then continue to contribute to a vicious chronic pain cycle. These components include pain catastrophizing, pain-related fear/ kinesiophobia, hypervigilance, avoidance, disuse, depression, and disability. Many of these components can be assessed for and then addressed in the treatment.
For some patients, the main threat or danger (fear) are the symptoms themselves, what they mean, the importance they take on, and the threat value they represent. For. example, prior learning, beliefs, and negative medical information like physical diagnoses and mis-interpreted scans can raise the threat value of the symptoms. This can lead to a sequelae of downstream negative effects like mental catastrophizing (thinking for the worst), excessively or intently focusing on the symptoms (hypervigilance), and then fearing the symptoms and the activities that could cause them (kinesiophobia). This can then lead to a cycle of avoidance in attempt to keep symptoms at bay. A person's world can then shrink leading to disuse, potential disability, and feelings of depression. This is the fear-avoidance cycle in a nutshell.
The goal is to first identify if these fear-avoidance components are at play in a patient. Assessing the patient can include direct enquiry and questioning, but it could also include proven and validated screening tools like the Pain Catastrophizing Scale (PCS)for example. Then the clinician or coach can look to address these fear-avoidance components, working with a number of strategies. This first would be ruling out that the symptoms are structural (physical) and then ruling in they are neuroplastic (using patient history and the FIT criteria). One could then use for example, Pain Re-Processing Therapy (PRT) to address hypervigilance and graded exposure to address avoidance.

Learning Objectives:

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1. To understand what the Fear-Avoidance Model is and the research that supports it in relation to chronic pain and neuroplastic symptoms.
   


2. Learn the core components of the fear-avoidance model, what they mean, and how to assess for them in patients or clients. -
   


3. What strategies can you use to address these components to help people reduce fear and reduce neuroplastic symptoms.
   

Workshop Summary:

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The brain has a built-in negativity bias designed for survival: to detect threat, avoid danger, and protect us from harm. While this system is adaptive in acute danger, many individuals living with chronic pain, mind-body symptoms, trauma-related conditions, and neural circuit disorders become stuck in persistent protective states long after the original threat has passed. In these states, the nervous system prioritizes vigilance, symptom monitoring, fear, and self-protection
while often disconnecting from experiences of pleasure, ease, safety, and enjoyment.


This presentation explores how intentionally cultivating positive and pleasurable embodied experiences can help shift the brain and body out of protection and into safety, creating the conditions for neuroplastic healing. Drawing from neuroscience, positive neuroplasticity, and mind-body approaches, participants will learn how pleasurable emotional and somatic experiences support regulation, learning, and neural rewiring. Research shows that positive emotional states, intrinsic motivation, play, and reward-based learning enhance neuroplasticity by strengthening new neural pathways and helping the brain update outdated protective patterns.


Central to this workshop is the HEAL framework, developed by Rick Hanson, PhD, which offers a practical method for transforming beneficial state experiences into lasting internal traits. Participants will learn how to intentionally notice, enrich, absorb, and optionally link positive experiences in ways that help counter the brain’s negativity bias and build durable inner resources.


The session will also explore common barriers to pleasure and positive experience, including hypervigilance, fear, perfectionism, emotional inhibition, and people-pleasing patterns that often accompany chronic symptoms and trauma-related adaptations. Through experiential exercises and practical applications, attendees will learn how to help clients reconnect with embodied experiences of pleasure, safety, curiosity, connection, and ease.


Learning Objectives:

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1. Describe how the brain’s negativity bias contributes to chronic protective patterns and how positive neuroplasticity practices help counterbalance those tendencies.
2. Understand and apply the HEAL framework to help clients transform beneficial state experiences into lasting internal resources and traits.
3. Explain how positive and enjoyable embodied experiences help shift the nervous system out of protective states and support neuroplastic healing.
4. Recognize common barriers to pleasure and positive emotional experience, including fear, hypervigilance, perfectionism, and people-pleasing patterns.
5. Apply practical experiential tools that help clients cultivate embodied safety, emotional openness, pleasure, and resilience in clinical or coaching settings.

Workshop Summary:

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With an estimated 20% of the global population suffering from chronic pain, one of the primary challenges for providers is finding ways to expand our reach (without also expanding our work hours and burnout risk) in a manner that allows more individuals to have access to much- needed care. Our presentation will focus on an effective and rewarding way to meet this challenge: offering groups, such as group medical visits, therapy groups, and coaching groups.


Working with clients in a group setting can provide unique benefits, such as lessening clients’ sense of isolation, improving health outcomes, enhancing the effectiveness of individual sessions, and providing the opportunity for clients to learn new skills and strategies in a safe and supportive environment. We’ll discuss clinical, logistical, and  administrative elements, potential challenges that can arise in a group setting, and what we’ve learned from our experience working with patients and clients utilizing this format.


Learning Objectives:

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At the conclusion of this session, attendees will be able to:

1. Understand the value proposition of various types of groups (i.e., group medical visit, therapy group, and coaching group), both from a client perspective and a provider perspective
2. Understand the basic elements of groups, including clinical, administrative, and logistical components, depending on the setting and type of group being offered
3. Understand the common issues and unique challenges in groups treating chronic pain, and how to manage difficult dynamics
4. Utilize strategies for communicating about a neuroplastic pain and symptom recovery framework with colleagues and patients/clients in mainstream healthcare

Workshop Summary:

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This session explores how personal spirituality can serve as a powerful resource in the treatment of neuroplastic pain. Drawing from research on meaning-making, existential coherence, and spiritually integrated psychotherapy, we will examine how connection to purpose, values, and personal spirituality may reduce neural threat signaling, enhance emotional regulation, and support healing.
Participants will gain practical tools for ethically integrating spirituality into clinical care while honoring diverse belief systems. Through experiential exercises including visualization, breathwork, and structured relational reflection, attendees will experience firsthand how these approaches can foster greater safety, connection, and resilience.
This presentation invites clinicians to consider spirituality not as an adjunct to treatment, but as a meaningful dimension of human experience that can support recovery, well-being, and lasting transformation.

Learning Objectives:

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1. Differentiate between spirituality and religion in clinical practice and articulate an ethically grounded approach to spiritually integrated psychotherapy.
   


2. Describe theoretical mechanisms by which meaning-making, identity coherence, and personal spirituality may reduce perceived neural threat in neuroplastic pain.
   


3. Identify how existential distress, shame, and identity fragmentation can contribute to persistent pain activation.
   


4. Experience and evaluate spiritually informed interventions (including visualization, breathwork, and structured relational reflection) that may support mood regulation and pain recovery.

Workshop Summary:

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Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) is a complex multisystem condition increasingly recognized in both Long COVID and as a standalone condition. This workshop explores MCAS through a neuroplastic and neuroimmune lens, integrating emerging science on mast cells, stress physiology, autonomic regulation, and nervous system function. Drawing on both scientific evidence and lived experience, participants will gain a practical framework for understanding symptoms and recovery, highlighting mind-body approaches to care.


Learning Objectives:

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1. Describe the features and diagnostic criteria for mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS).
2. Recognize how stress physiology, threat perception, and learned neural pathways can contribute to symptoms and their persistence in MCAS
3. Identify evidence-informed mind-body approaches that support recovery

Workshop Summary:

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In this experiential session, you will be guided through simple somatic movement practices that can deepen emotional awareness and expression, and provide the brain with direct experiences of safety, freedom, and wellbeing.
Movement becomes more than exercise—it becomes a way of cultivating a kinder, more curious relationship with ourselves. You will leave with an embodied understanding of this approach and practical strategies to help you introduce somatic movement into your clinical work.


Learning Objectives:

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1.  Identify key principles of somatic movement
2. Apply these principles in your own experience of somatic movement
3. Develop practical strategies for integrating simple somatic movement into your clinical practice

Workshop Summary:

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Many people struggling with chronic pain and symptoms understand the theory of mind-body recovery but remain stuck when it comes to implementation. Likewise, practitioners often find themselves overwhelmed by complex explanations, competing approaches, and uncertainty about where to focus treatment.


This presentation offers a simple, practical framework for understanding and addressing chronic symptoms through the lens of perceived danger and safety.


Dan introduces the Foundation Four, the essential questions every person must resolve before meaningful recovery can occur:

1. What is causing my symptoms?
2. Does this explanation apply to me?
3. Is there a solution?
4. Am I capable of implementing that solution?
   
   

Once this foundation is established, recovery becomes less about endlessly searching for hidden causes and more about teaching the brain that it is safe.
Attendees will learn six core Safety Strategies that can help shift the nervous system out of protection mode:
• Emotional Safety – Learning that emotions themselves are not dangerous and can be experienced without fear or resistance.
• Physical Safety – Using physiology, breath, movement, and brief mindfulness practices to communicate safety to the nervous system.
• Mental Safety – Understanding that thoughts do not need to be controlled, fixed, or believed in order to recover.
• Safety with Self – Addressing self-criticism, perfectionism, and negative self-identity patterns that often reinforce danger signals.
• Response to Symptoms – Leveraging symptom responses as opportunities to teach the brain that sensations are not harmful or significant.
• Returning Focus to Life – Re-engaging with meaningful living rather than organizing life around symptom monitoring and recovery efforts.


Throughout the presentation, Dan emphasizes a central principle: while emotions may be one source of perceived danger, recovery is most effectively understood through the broader framework of reducing danger and increasing safety across all aspects of life. 


Attendees will leave with a clear, cohesive model that simplifies both the problem and the solution, making mind-body recovery easier to understand, teach, and apply.



Learning Objectives:

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By the end of this presentation, attendees will be able to:

1. Explain the Foundation Four framework and its role in establishing readiness for recovery.
2. Identify the difference between symptom-focused approaches and safety-focused approaches.
3. Apply six practical Safety Strategies that help reduce perceived danger and calm the nervous system.
4. Recognize how emotional, mental, physical, and self-related factors can contribute to danger signaling.
5. Help clients or patients shift their focus from symptom elimination to building a life centered on safety, confidence, and meaningful engagement.
6. Utilize a simplified, actionable framework that can improve communication, compliance, and outcomes in mind-body recovery work.

Key Takeaway
Recovery is not primarily about finding and fixing everything that may be wrong. Recovery is about helping the brain recognize safety. When people understand the problem clearly and consistently practice safety across multiple domains of life, symptom resolution often becomes a natural consequence.

Workshop Summary:

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I propose a new lens for understanding how neuroplastic symptoms are generated, perpetuated, and resolved. Because we require connection for survival from birth, the most salient source of danger is the lack of emotional safety within attachment relationships. Building on the definition of shame as “the fear of disconnection,” I argue that it is this specific relational fear that most often triggers the brain’s alarm mechanism. Repeated experiences of insufficient emotional attunement in early relationships prime neural networks toward sympathetic activation and habitual self-devaluation. This establishes sensitization to disconnection threat (i.e., shame) early in development and the compensatory, shame-avoidance strategies that promote neuroplastic symptoms in adulthood.

Learning Objectives:

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1. Define shame and explain its role as a core driver of neuroplastic symptoms and treatmentresistance.
2. Identify manifestations of shame and shame-avoidance in their own internal experience and in their patients.
3. Describe how shame-based neural networks are formed in early attachment relationships and maintained in adulthood.
4. Apply high-quality self-empathy and PRT-informed principles to the process of training out of persistent shame patterns. 
5. Recognize and effectively address shame dynamics within the clinical relationship.

Workshop Summary:

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This session explores how adolescent neurodevelopment shapes the expression of neuroplastic symptoms—including pain, dizziness, fatigue, and OCD related patterns—and how play and attachment based interventions can restore flexibility in threat driven systems. Participants will learn developmentally attuned, nonshaming ways to help teens understand the interplay between anxiety, OCD, and neuroplastic symptoms. The session also highlights strategies for partnering with parents to reduce accommodation, strengthen connection,


Learning Objectives:

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1. Neurodevelopment & Intervention Participants will be able to describe how adolescent neurodevelopment, coregulation, and attachment dynamics influence neuroplastic symptoms, and identify at least two playbased strategies that promote flexibility and safety.
2. The Neuroplastic–OCD Intersection Participants will be able to articulate developmentally attuned ways to help adolescents build observing capacity to recognize the interplay between anxiety, OCD patterns, and neuroplastic symptoms.
3. Partnering With Parents Participants will be able to coach parents in attachment based responses that reduce reinforcement of threat loops, strengthen connection, and support environments that foster safety and neuroplastic symptom change.

Workshop Summary:

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Loneliness and disconnection amplify threat physiology and can keep neuroplastic symptoms persistent. This session expands standard fear-reduction models by teaching connection as a trainable safety signal and strategic joy as a trainable recovery catalyst. We define joy not as “toxic positivity” but as a set of practical skills (e.g., connection-building, savoring, gratitude, kindness, strengths, attainable goals, positive reappraisal) that broaden attention, support approach behavior, and strengthen safety learning across neuroplastic symptom presentations.

Learning Objectives:

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At the conclusion of this session, attendees will be able to -

1. Sescribe how loneliness and social disconnection can function as a threat amplifier relevant to neuroplastic symptom persistence
2. Recognize common clinical presentations of loneliness/disconnection in patients/clients with persistent symptoms (life-narrowing, avoidance, shame, reduced co-regulation)
3. Experience connecting to own inner loving adult for a constant available resource
4. Integrate strategic joy skills into neuroplastic recovery work in a way that is capacity-matched and realistic—especially for patients/clients with pain flares, fatigue, fear of symptoms, or high levels of shame
5. Outline a practical strategy set that integrates feeling connected, connection-building, and joy skills to support neuroplastic recovery across varied presentations

Workshop Summary:

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It is clear that the skills and methods coming out of mind body medicine are transformative for those with neuroplastic symptoms. What is less acknowledged is the way in which our field can both help and learn from those with ongoing structural conditions.

Neuroplastic and structural are not the binary they have often been presented as. My personal and professional experience bears this out. A sizable portion of people have a complicated and nuanced mix of both. Even those with the most structural of conditions notice that neuroplastic factors can intensify or de-intensify their overall suffering.

After publicly sharing my own story of living with disabling structural pain for decades, my practice has attracted clients who also live with ongoing structural issues, including cancer, MS, ALS, post-stroke pain, tethered spinal cord, among other conditions. Almost to a person, these are individuals who have been turned away and turned off by the world of mind body medicine, having been given the implicit or explicit message that the persistence of their symptoms was somehow their fault. Many of these people in turn blamed themselves for “failing” to eliminate all of their symptoms, the shame of which caused them even more suffering. This is particularly sad given that mind body
practitioners on the whole are among the most compassionate people out there, and this disconnect could so easily be overcome with greater exposure to those clients whose bodies do not fit the neat neuroplastic mold.

Collectively, my clients and I have gained a lot of hard-earned wisdom that would greatly benefit the field. Not only can this work help us too — albeit in different ways and with different outcomes than for those with primarily neuroplastic issues — but also our experience has taught us a new and more empowering paradigm of healing.

In my practice, we focus not on “recovery” but on healing, which I define has empowering yourself to live a rich, meaningful, and connected life, regardless of symptoms. You can have one without the other. Recovery is something you can hope for, but healing is something you can do.

The traditional gold standard of “success” in this field— achieving a complete absence of symptoms— actually maintains a focus on symptoms, which contradicts one of the central tenets of this work. As such, I propose we define “success” not as the absence of symptoms but as the presence of healing. Releasing practitioners from the pressure
of bringing about fast and complete symptom relief for their clients would also no doubt free them up to be more fully present in their practice.

In the end, all humans are mortal beings, and if we have the privilege of living long enough, every last one of us will experience “structural” issues. A new paradigm of healing could equip everyone — clients and practitioners alike — with better skills to live a fuller life and to take power back from the symptoms.

As practitioners, we teach our clients about the promise of neuroplasticity. PRT, of course, is a therapeutic practice that hinges on the idea that we can learn new things. But the field would benefit from viewing itself as capable of learning and growing. We can learn a great deal from those for whom “recovery” is not be possible but “healing”
is. Expanding our umbrella in this way would significantly extend the reach, scope, and power of our work. I invite us all to embrace this opportunity.

Learning Objectives:

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At the conclusion of the session, attendees will learn:

1. New language for talking with clients about how many symptoms are not black or white, structural or neuroplastic, but a nuanced mix of structural & neuroplastic
2. A new perspective which views mixed neuroplastic/structural symptoms as nothing to fear, but as opportunities for learning and growth for clients and practitioners alike
3. A new paradigm of healing that empowers clients with the skills to live rich, meaningful, and connected lives, even in the absence of “recovery”
4. A new definition of “success” in this work not as the absence of symptoms but as the presence of healing