May is Mental Health Awareness Month and in honor of this time I wanted to feature a new program I just learned about. I followed PelvicSense on Instagram and was given a synopsis by Evelyn Hecht, the creator. I want to share the details with all of you for anyone interested in checking it out for your own pelvic health needs!
Evelyn has 25 years of experience as a pelvic floor physical therapist in NYC (where she was the first to open a pelvic pain practice) and she has helped 15,000 women with pelvic pain. She is a scientific advisor for Curable, an educator of pelvic health for NYU and Stony Brook University Department of Physical Therapy, and a women's health researcher. Evelyn has studied neuroscience and the biopsychosocial healing approach which she used to create her streamlined program for chronic pain sufferers, PelvicSense. She spent two and a half years designing the website and program set up and had two women help beta test it before launching a year ago. Now PelvicSense is live and ready to be accessed by women the world over! Whether you are struggling with Vaginismus, Endometriosis, Fibromyalgia, Interstitial Cystitis, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Urinary Incontinence, or Pudendal Neuralgia, this program can help guide you to a pain free present and future.
The program is entirely online and the starting rate for the silver plan is $38/month for 3 months. The gold program is $92/month and has you meeting with her and others via Zoom once a month to discuss your pelvic pain issues amongst other sufferers, in addition to insight offered from Evelyn. This plan also includes an unlimited download of all of the audio guides for life. The final, and most expensive, platinum program is $477 and lets you keep access to everything. The concept of these programs is that you practice for 20 minutes a day 3 days a week, fixing both your tissues and your brain with step by step audio guides, gentle exercise videos, and educational reads on healing. Evelyn incorporates mindfulness, savoring the good, diaphragmatic breathing, pelvic relaxation, positive affirmations, and movement to lower chronic pain through improving your mind body connection. She aims to bring the "woowoo" in with the medical research so that people can use body and mind work simultaneously with a whole body mindset to cure what ails them. That's the same approach I've grown to take for fixing everything in my body so I fully support this concept and hope to explain it in better detail ahead.
The idea is that when your brain is sensitized you have to unlearn those patterns and actively engage in something pleasant to send calm to your system. This will send endorphins and anti-inflammatory responses to your body to retrain your mind and thus strengthen your neuronal patterns. This will decrease the threat messages going off from your fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response so that you learn to control your immune system and your brain can grow new brain cells. The end result is that you become a healthier person and who doesn't want that?
PelvicSense helps you find a repetitive sound that soothes you and offers ten min reads explaining the make up of the pelvis and other important educational articles on the body. I always emphasize with people that if you don't understand what is actually occurring in your body and why it is happening then you can't fix it. With Vaginismus in particular there are so many different root causes that trying to treat it the wrong way is a pretty common reason why women's conquering journey is often longer than expected (ie: taking muscle relaxers for a spasming vagina that is doing so as a trauma response isn't curing the problem, only masking it, if it works at all). Getting to the root cause isn't always simple, but that's why trying to treat the mind and body at the same time, and not alienating one or the other, can really help bring about positive results.
Once you have completed the three month program you may ask, how do I get back to regular activities? PelvicSense outlines for you the concept of pacing where you take 20% of the total time off a difficult activity and stick with it for a week, then add another 10% each week until you have reached your full comfort level and accomplished your end goal. Depending what your issue is, this could be related to walking a long distance, sitting a long period of time, or having sex. Remember that it's extremely important not to force yourself through something that is causing you pain since that will only lead to the barrage of danger signals from the nervous/immune system to the brain each time you partake in it. You must teach your body to feel safe and protected and accept that catastrophic thinking will only make matters worse.
"You can't push people who aren't ready," Evelyn states and this is true.
We all want instant gratification in this technology driven world and it's hard to be patient and put in the work to fix something, but chronic pain issues are not fixed overnight. I am living proof that it takes a lot of effort and due diligence to overcome them, but it is possible and so worth your time. You have to be willing to make the commitment to yourself that you deserve a pain free life and can accomplish what you set your mind to.
Evelyn also has two ebooks: re.lieve: Solutions for Chronic Pain and Heal Your Pelvic Pain with Science. Both can be purchased for a small fee on her website. The prior is full of patient stories and scientific evidence of how to return to your ideal pelvic function while the latter teaches you how to retrain your brain and has a tracking system to measure your progress. These books can be a great asset to your arsenal of pelvic pain tools. On the same page is a free pelvic relaxation audio download which is sure to be beneficial for use before a dilating session.
You can follow Evelyn's program Instagram profile at @pelvicsense. I hope some of you choose to take advantage of her PelvicSense program and please let me know if you do!