This is like mine, like body, a podcast about the surprising ways our thoughts and feelings impact our physical health.

I'm your host, Laura Sago, and each week I'll interview researchers, physicians, and ordinary

people who have incredible stories to tell about the power of the mind-body connection.

This podcast is brought to you by Curable, an app that helps you manage chronic pain symptoms.

You can download Curable on the Apple App Store, on Google Play, or visit our website at www.curable

health.com.

On today's episode, I am speaking with Dr. Jen Murphy.

Dr. Murphy is a pain psychologist who spent the bulk of her career scaling safe, effective ways to treat chronic pain at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, or the VA, as you'll hear us call it.

As the VA's master trainer, Dr. Murphy has helped to train over 500 healthcare practitioners

in a whole-person treatment approach. She also served as the lead author for the VA's

manual on cognitive behavioral therapy. Today, she'll give us a peek behind the curtain at how the

VA approaches chronic pain, what the private sector can learn from that, and how civilians can start to take advantage of some of the VA's most effective strategies from the comfort of their own homes.

Let's get to it.

Jen, thank you so much for joining us today. I am thrilled to dive into a little bit more about your background and what you have learned about chronic pain over the years. You have such an

interesting combination of things in your

background.

So I really want to start there.

You started out your career in a very traditional psych background and then eventually

found your way over to the VA.

Can you walk me through how that process unfolded?

Yes, absolutely. And thank you for having me. I really feel like everything just happened in a very

serendipitous way for me, and I feel very grateful about that. As you mentioned, I had more of a traditional kind of

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