One trend I’ve seen over the past 25 year of working with people with chronic pain is how challenging it can be for them to describe what they’re going through.  I also know this from a position of living with my own chronic pain for the past 27 years.  I can still remember early in my pain recovery when I couldn’t find a way to articulate what I was going through.

Over the years I have helped many patients develop what I call a pain vocabulary and gain a more effective way to communicate with their healthcare providers and significant other how they’re really doing with their pain management.  In addition to a pain vocabulary some people find the using artistic interpreations of their pain can assist their healing and/or pain management process.
 
I still remember about fifteen years ago I asked one of my patients to make an artistic interpretation of her pain on a bad pain day to bring to our next sesssion.  She came back with the most ferocious and scary black and red dragon that I had ever seen.  It had long claws and fangs with blood dripping from them.  On our final session she brought me a gift.  She was a very good artist and what she brought me was a picture she made of her relationsihp to her pain as a result of all her hard work and healing.  I still keep this in my office.  It was a picure of a cartoon-like friendly dragon with a silly grin who was playing with a little boy who had a toy wooden sword.  The caption on the drawing showed the dragon touching the tip of the sword and saying “Och! That’s sharp.”  What a transition.

Unfortunately, not all of my patients have been able to make such a dramatic change in their relationship with their pain but the more successful ones all have made peace (friends) with their pain.  One thing that really helps is when people are able to separate out the physical components from the psychological components of their pain.  Two of my publications have an exercise that assists people to do just that.  It’s also a very good pain vocabulary building tool.  If you want to read more please go to our website www.addiction-free.com and go to the Publications page and check out APM Module One or the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Workbook.

If you want to learn more about the psychological component of chronic pain management please check out our website at www.addiction-free.com and go to our Ariticles page to check out all of my articles and obtain a free download of my article The Psychological Components of Pain.