Rewiring Pain: The Neuroscience of Trauma, Stress, and the Power of Play
Co-Facilitated by: Camille France, OTR/L, Bennet Davis, MD, and Barbara Collier, LPC
Join us online for this transformative experience.
Is your client’s pain elusive—persistent, shifting, or resistant to treatment? Join us this June for Rewiring Pain, a groundbreaking 3-part live Zoom series that explores the intersection of neuroscience, trauma, and the transformative power of play. Designed for clinicians and healing professionals, this training reframes pain through a neurobiological lens—moving beyond tissue damage to explore how chronic pain is shaped by early adversity, stress, and emotional threat.
Led by a multidisciplinary team—Camille France, OTR/L; Bennet Davis, MD; and Barbara Collier, LPC—this experiential series dives into the latest brain science, offering evidence-based insights into central sensitization, neuroplasticity, and the role of joy and novelty in healing. Learn how play activates dopamine circuits, reduces inflammation, and supports co-regulation, offering a powerful, often overlooked, path to pain relief.
Whether you're a therapist, physician, bodyworker, or on your own healing journey, this course will equip you with somatic, trauma-informed strategies to help rewire the nervous system for safety, regulation, and lasting relief.
Pain is not just a signal—it’s a story. Let’s rewrite it together.
3-Part Live Zoom Series | June 7th, 8th, & 14th | 9:00am-10:30am PDT
90-minute sessions | Recording Included
Investment: $243
What You’ll Learn
This 3-part training will help you:
Understand pain as a protective response — not just a sign of tissue damage
Identify how early adversity, trauma, and stress shape the nervous system and pain perception
Discover how joy, novelty, and play can interrupt chronic pain cycles and support healing
Integrate science-backed, somatic strategies into your clinical or personal practice
Includes exploration of:
• Nociceptive Pain (tissue damage)
• Neuropathic Pain (nerve injury)
• Stress-related Pain (trauma, adversity, dysregulation)
Course Overview
Session 1: Understanding Pain Through a New Lens
Reimagining what’s already there.
In this first session, we explore the evolving neuroscience of pain — moving beyond a purely structural or tissue-damage model to include central sensitization, neuroplasticity, and learned threat responses. We’ll review the three primary types of pain (nociceptive, neuropathic, and nociplastic) and consider how chronic pain can persist even in the absence of ongoing injury.
At the same time, we’ll widen the lens to consider how pain lives in the nervous system not only as a signal of injury, but as a reflection of protection, history, and perception. This session offers both clinical framing and somatic reflection — inviting participants to feel how pain patterns arise in their own systems and to explore how context, attunement, and safety cues can shape the experience of pain in others.
We’ll explore:
How different types of pain are felt and metabolized
How play, joy, and early aliveness contrast with pain and reawaken possibility
What happens when clinicians, therapists, or caregivers shift long-held patterns of response
How small relational or physical adjustments can change the clinical field
This session blends science, somatics, and clinical experience — inviting you to consider what’s possible within the systems, roles, and constraints you work in.
Session 2: Mapping the Landscape of Pain and Trauma
How experience shapes perception and capacity.
This session explores how early adversity, chronic stress, and trauma shape the nervous system’s perception of pain — and its ability to heal. We’ll braid together medical neuroscience, trauma physiology, and somatic understanding to examine how protective patterns become embedded, even when injury has resolved.
Together, we’ll consider how pain becomes a learned threat response — shaped by autonomic conditioning, memory, and environmental cues — and how different disciplines can work within their roles to support regulation, reconnection, and repair.
We’ll explore:
How trauma and early stress recalibrate the nervous system toward protection
The role of implicit memory, bracing, and coupling dynamics in persistent pain
How small shifts in tone, rhythm, or presence can support recalibration
Practical ways to apply these insights across clinical and therapeutic settings
This session blends science, somatics, and clinical reflection — supporting practitioners in recognizing trauma-informed pain patterns and responding with clarity, care, and capacity.
Session 3: Rewiring Possibility — The Power of Play, Joy, and Co-Regulation
Working with aliveness as medicine.
In our final session, we turn toward the conditions that support healing: novelty, joy, imagination, and attuned relationship. These are not soft skills — they are forms of neuromodulation, capable of shifting entrenched pain patterns and reawakening flexibility in the nervous system.
We’ll draw from neuroscience, clinical models (like EMDR, Pain Reprocessing Therapy, and mindfulness), and disciplines like occupational therapy and somatic practice to explore how safety, surprise, and co-regulation influence pain. Together, we’ll consider how these elements can be woven into care — even within the limits of insurance-based medicine or structured settings.
We’ll explore:
How novelty, play, and joy engage neuroplasticity and disrupt pain loops
The neuroscience behind positive affect, imagination, and co-regulation
How evidence-based therapies rewire pain through perception and safety
Practical ways to bring lightness and flexibility into serious work
This session integrates rigor and relationality — offering a vision of care that includes joy and possibility as foundational to healing.
Why This Series?
Chronic pain isn’t just physical. Emerging neuroscience and trauma research show how stress, early adversity, and emotional threat can shape the nervous system, heighten pain sensitivity, and fuel long-term health issues — but they can also be reversed.
Play, joy, and novelty aren’t luxuries — they’re biological tools that regulate threat physiology, shift brain networks, and support healing from the inside out.
Who It’s For
Perfect for:
Physical & occupational therapists
Physicians, mental health professionals
Somatic practitioners & bodyworkers
Anyone interested in personal healing
Meet Your Facilitators
Camille France, OTR/L – Founder of Desert Quail Therapy, known for nature-based and movement-informed healing, with advanced training in adaptive therapies and nervous system regulation.
Bennet Davis, MD – Pain specialist integrating neuroscience and somatic awareness.
Barbara Collier, LPC – Licensed therapist with deep experience in trauma healing and psychosomatic integration.
Join us to reimagine what’s possible in pain care — grounded in science, guided by story, and uplifted by joy.
This innovative series offers a whole-person lens on chronic pain, integrating neuroscience, trauma-informed care, and the healing power of play.
3-Part Live Zoom Series | June 7th, 8th, & 14th | 9:00am-10:30am PDT
90-minute sessions | Recording Included
Investment: $243
*Please inquire if you are in need of financial support to attend
*All times listed in Pacific Time