For Jabez Allies, chronic lower back pain became more than just a physical burden—it transformed into an emotional prison that trapped her in cycles of frustration and despair. Like millions of chronic pain sufferers worldwide, Allies found herself caught between ineffective treatments that focused solely on the physical symptoms while ignoring the profound psychological impact of living with persistent pain.
Traditional approaches offered stretching exercises, hot-water bottles, and painkillers, but none addressed the overwhelming emotions that accompanied her condition. As her pain intensified over a decade, so did her feelings of hopelessness, creating a vicious cycle where depression interfered with her ability to maintain helpful routines, ultimately worsening her physical symptoms. This common experience highlights a critical gap in chronic pain treatment—one that groundbreaking Australian research has now begun to address through innovative emotional regulation therapy.
Breaking the Pain-Emotion Cycle Through Targeted Therapy
Researchers from the University of New South Wales and Neuroscience Research Australia have developed a revolutionary approach that treats chronic pain by focusing on emotional processing rather than just physical symptoms. Their clinical trial, involving 89 participants over 18 months, demonstrated that online dialectical behavioral therapy specifically adapted for chronic pain (iDBT-Pain) produces significant improvements in both emotional regulation and pain intensity.
The study revealed remarkable results: participants who completed the nine-week online program experienced a 10-point reduction in pain intensity on a 100-point scale, alongside substantial improvements in emotional regulation that persisted through six-month follow-ups. This represents not just statistical significance but meaningful changes that translate into real-world improvements in daily functioning and quality of life.
Professor Sylvia Gustin, who co-developed the treatment, emphasizes that chronic pain creates measurable changes in brain chemistry, specifically reducing GABA levels in the prefrontal cortex—the brain region responsible for emotional control. This neurochemical disruption leads to brain overactivity that intensifies both emotional distress and pain perception, creating the destructive cycles that patients like Allies experienced.
Comprehensive Skills Training for Pain Management
The innovative therapy program combines three core components designed to retrain the brain’s response to chronic pain. Mindfulness training helps participants develop present-moment awareness, breaking the tendency to catastrophize about future pain or ruminate on past limitations. Emotional regulation skills teach individuals to understand and modify their emotional responses to pain, while distress tolerance techniques provide practical tools for managing pain crises through breathing exercises, muscle relaxation, and self-soothing strategies.
Unlike traditional pain management approaches that often isolate patients, this program was delivered through group-based online sessions, creating community support while maintaining accessibility. Participants also received a companion app and handbook for self-directed learning, ensuring they could practice skills between sessions and maintain progress long-term.
The treatment’s effectiveness extended beyond pain reduction, with participants showing significant improvements in depression, anxiety, stress, and sleep quality at the nine-week mark. While some secondary benefits diminished by the 21-week follow-up, the core improvements in emotional regulation and pain intensity remained stable, suggesting lasting therapeutic benefits.
Transforming Lives Through Emotional Empowerment
For Allies, who completed the program over a year ago, the transformation has been profound and enduring. Rather than feeling like a “victim of the pain,” she now experiences greater control over her condition and has resumed activities she had abandoned, including pickleball and regular gym workouts. The skills she learned continue to prevent the emotional spirals that once compounded her physical symptoms.
This shift from passive suffering to active management represents a fundamental change in how chronic pain can be approached. Professor Lorimer Moseley from the University of South Australia notes that while psychological treatment helping chronic pain patients isn’t surprising, the possibility that treating emotional dysregulation can directly improve pain levels challenges traditional understanding of pain mechanisms.
The research team plans to expand their work with a larger trial involving over 300 participants in 2026, potentially making this treatment more widely available to the estimated millions of people living with chronic pain conditions. Their approach recognizes that chronic pain affects the whole person, not just the body, and that effective treatment must address both physical and emotional dimensions of the experience.
This breakthrough offers hope for chronic pain sufferers who have felt dismissed by healthcare systems that treat their emotional struggles as secondary concerns rather than integral components of their condition.