Alan Gordon: The Therapist Who Created Pain Reprocessing Therapy

Who is Alan Gordon?

Alan Gordon is a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist who created Pain Reprocessing Therapy, a treatment for chronic pain that teaches the brain to switch off pain that has become a false alarm. He founded the Pain Psychology Center in Los Angeles, one of the largest clinics in the country focused on chronic pain, and he wrote the 2021 book The Way Out with Alon Ziv.

If you found this page because you're checking whether he's the real deal before you trust the method, here's the short answer. Yes. He's a credentialed clinician, his approach was tested in a peer-reviewed trial published in a major medical journal, and he teaches it openly. Your pain is real, and the method he built treats it as real. The rest of this page is the detail behind that.

How he got here

Gordon didn't start in a research lab. He started as a graduate student in his own years of unexplained chronic pain. He saw doctor after doctor, collected diagnoses, and nothing helped. His mother handed him one of Dr. John Sarno's books, and the idea that pain could be a learned brain pattern rather than ongoing damage gave him a thread to pull.

He recovered. Then he spent years turning that loose idea into something a therapist could actually teach, session by session, and testing it. That's the part that matters. Plenty of people have a recovery story. Gordon built his into a protocol and then helped put it through a controlled trial.

What he created: Pain Reprocessing Therapy

Pain Reprocessing Therapy, or PRT, treats most chronic pain as a false alarm. The brain learns a danger signal, fear keeps it switched on, and the pain keeps firing long after any injury has healed. PRT teaches the brain that the signal is safe, mostly through a technique called somatic tracking, where you turn toward the sensation with calm curiosity instead of dread.

We cover the method in depth on our pain reprocessing therapy page, and the core technique step by step on our somatic tracking guide. The Way Out is Gordon's own book version of the same approach.

Alan Gordon's credentials

Here's the factual record. Gordon is a licensed clinical social worker. He founded and runs the Pain Psychology Center in Los Angeles, which has a staff of roughly two dozen therapists treating chronic pain. He's an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Southern California. He developed Pain Reprocessing Therapy and co-authored the 2022 Boulder study published in JAMA Psychiatry, one of the most cited chronic-pain treatment trials of recent years. He wrote The Way Out with Alon Ziv, published by Penguin in 2021, and he has been featured on national television discussing brain-based pain treatment.

Is Alan Gordon legit?

By the measures that matter for a chronic-pain method, yes. The treatment he created has randomized-trial evidence in a top journal, which is more than most self-help pain approaches can claim. He's a licensed clinician, not an anonymous coach, and he points to the research rather than asking you to take it on faith.

The honest caveats, because both sides matter. He's a therapist and author, not a physician, so his work sits alongside medical care, not instead of it. PRT is not a cure-all. The Boulder trial was in chronic back pain, and roughly a third of people in it did not reach pain-free. And like any method, reading the book or believing the idea isn't the same as doing the daily practice, which is where most people actually get stuck. None of that makes him less credible. It just means the method is a tool, not magic.