Gareth Kelly
Gareth Kelly is the co-owner of Rewire Neuro Performance Therapy. Their mission is to help chronic pain & anxiety sufferers manage and reduce their symptoms by eliminating sensory ...
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Who are you?
Hi, my name's Garth. I'm one of the founders of Rewire Neuro Performance Therapy. Feel free to come and ask me anything about nervous system regulation and how that relates to treatment for anxiety, A DHD, chronic pain, and also focus, concentration and balance issues.
What is your background?
So this is an interesting one. My background is, how could I put it? I was a circus performer, so in acrobat I would specialise in flying trapeze and a thing called banking where I lift and throw people. That was my job, not a bouncer, but I joined the circus. I went through a circus university in London, and after that I went on tour internationally. When I came home, I was practising one day and had to catch somebody. I ended up getting severely injured, which led to probably 18 months to two years of a recovery journey, which did not heal until I accidentally found out about nervous system training and sensory aggression work. Thankfully, once I found out about that three months, and I was back doing everything that I used to do, so I've had experience in a rehab setting with nervous system training and a performance setting with nervous system training. So I've done the whole gauntlet of things with it, and now I have just focused my whole intention on getting this more widely known and into more clinical settings because so many more people could benefit from it like I did when I really needed it.
What is pain?
So do you understand what pain is? We need to know what the definition of pain is, and this is the official definition of pain. Pain is an unpleasant experience, so it's a sensory experience or emotional experience to threat or perceived threat. So pain is a protective system. Your brain generates to make sure you pay attention to something because it's damaged or because it might be damaged. And the key is there doesn't have to be damage further there to be pain on the sliding scale of safety and I'm going to be fine, or Oh God, I'm going to die. Your brain usually thinks it's safer to go to, oh God, I'm going to die. And if it thinks that the first thing it will do is generate that protective sensation, which is pain to make sure you don't then possibly further injure a limb or your head or something like that. If it can avoid it, because all the brain cares about is survival and the way to get you to pay attention is to make something hurt.