Pain Resolution Therapy

Cohort: 6 Months.
Certification window: 18 months.

One in four adults has chronic pain with no confirmed medical cause. You have seen these clients. They come in with a clean MRI, a stack of specialist referrals and years of treatments that changed nothing. Nobody in your training told you what to do with them.

PRT works with chronic psychosomatic pain by approaching it as a behavioral pattern the nervous system learned to maintain. When the function keeping the pain in place is identified and interrupted, the pain often releases. The framework is designed for focused, brief work.

The certification covers the full clinical picture: mechanism, assessment, session structure, intervention design and practice building. It is designed for active practitioners and AST certification graduates who want to add psychosomatic pain resolution as a clinical specialty.

Who this is for

Therapists and counselors

Clients whose pain has no medical explanation are among the most underserved in private practice. This certification gives you a structured methodology to work with them reliably.

Coaches

Working with clients whose physical symptoms have a behavioral or relational component. No clinical license required for most of the methodology.

Certified AST graduates

Add a clinical specialty to your strategic therapy practice. PRT applies the same framework to one of the largest underserved populations in healthcare.

Curriculum

You'll understand exactly why your client's pain is real and why it persists through every medical intervention they've tried. Central sensitization, the nervous system's learned pain response, and the precise reason why structural explanations fail while the PRT model succeeds. This is the foundation. Everything else depends on it.
The lineage behind PRT: Jay Haley, Milton Erickson, and the strategic brief therapy tradition. You'll understand what makes therapy strategic, why outcome rather than insight is the measure, and how to position yourself as the practitioner whose job is to resolve the problem, not explore it indefinitely.
This is where most practitioners have the shift. Every symptom has a function. This module teaches you the symptom-as-solution model: how pain forms, what it communicates, and what keeps it in place. You'll learn to work with the function directly, and cases that seemed permanently stuck will start to move.
You'll know exactly what to do in Session 1, Session 2, and across the full resolution arc. Running Haley's five stages with a pain client, reading the state live, designing and delivering the first directive, setting the PRT contract. You'll arrive at your first real case knowing what each session is for.
From intake to intervention design. The inner conflict engine, the pain-emotion-behavior loop, role conflicts and permissions. You'll build formulation skill on real case material and learn to identify when pain is the presenting symptom and a different structure is underneath.
The full PRT toolkit: education sequences, behavioral directives, kinesthetic pain analysis, ordeals, language patterns, biological levers. Real-time decision making in session, sequencing across sessions, and what to do when pain re-appears after it has resolved.
Some clients are more invested in the pain than they know. You'll learn to read the anatomy of a protection, recognize the five forms resistance takes in pain cases, and move cases that have stalled, using joining, utilization and the paradoxical position.
Your certification is the beginning. This module covers how to describe what you do, build referral relationships, filter your intake, set fees and session agreements, and build a practice where outcomes generate the next client, without advertising.

What you get as a student

Instant access to all course materials, all our books, and private practice tools.
A live weekly case study and Q&A. A closed group of up to six practitioners. Send questions in advance and the trainer addresses them on the call.
A free onboarding session with your assigned trainer. Fifty minutes, live, to map your starting point and discuss how the training applies to your situation.
Internationally valid certification issued by iAST, with your name and practice listed in our directory. We confirm your credentials to anyone who asks.
Your training year runs from enrollment. Pause anytime. Paused months don't count. Resume when you're ready.
A supportive community of students and graduates, where you can ask questions, share your experience and get encouragement and opinions from peers and a supervising trainer.

After your certification

A clinical specialty
One in four adults has chronic pain with no confirmed medical cause. We will train you to become a competent strategic practitioner that can help people resolve their chronic pain.
The full treatment protocol
Mechanism through resolution. You will know what to do in every session, from intake to case closure, and dealing with flare-ups and resistance.
Practice building
Imagine never getting to advertise your private practice, simply because you can't keep up with the referrals. That's what happens when your work produces visible results in cases other approaches haven't reached.
Credential and referral network
Formal PRT certification from iAST. Access to the practitioner network and referral channels for certified practitioners.

Pain Resolution Therapy

How to Get Started?