A Swedish study of whiplash injury patients demonstrates the power of positive thinking. The patients who said they expected to get better were the ones most likely to make a full recovery within six months of their injury, according to the findings published in the online journal PLoS Medicine.

Another good reason why positive thinking is important is the phenomenon of anticipatory pain. The anticipation of an expected pain level can influence the degree to which you experience pain. When your self-talk is saying, “this is horrible, awful, terrible,” the brain tends to amplify the pain signal. When this occurs, your level of distress increases—you suffer, remaining a victim to your pain.

The anticipation of an expected pain level can also influence the degree to which pain is experienced in a positive manner. In some cases, when the anticipatory level of pain expectation is lowered, the brain responds by influencing special neurons. This renders the brain less responsive to an incoming pain signal. Herein lies the rationale for biofeedback and meditation as pain control methods. In any event, both ascending (pain signals coming from the point of injury to the brain) and descending nerve pathways (signals from the brain to the point of injury) will influence or modify the effects on the body.  To learn more about this concept you can go to our website www.addiction-free.com and download my free article Coping with Anticipatory Pain.

If you want to learn more about chronic pain management please check out our website at www.addiction-free.com and go to our Ariticles page to download other free information as well as checking out our Publications page to review my new book Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders.

My wife Ellen and I had a commitment to be in Palm Springs for an AA meeting on May 11th where a walking miricale friend of ours celebrated one year of being clean and sober and working an effective pain management program.  I’m mentioning this here on my Addiction-Free Pain Management® Blog because this gentleman is living with chronic pain and is doing it in an addiction-free way.  He also has Hepatitus C and has undergone Interferon treatment this past year and despite all of his challenges he remains positive and a great role-modle for others.

I love visiting this area as we lived here for the past two and a half years before moving home to Sacramento.  It was great seeing all of our friends and enjoying healing in the desert.  We leave tomorrow for Sierra Tucson for the next step on their Addiction-Free Pain Management® Center of Excellence designation process.  I plan to tell them about our friend in Palm Springs and share  his story with their current pain patients.  If everyone living with chronic pain and coexisting problems were half as proactive and positive as our friend their pain management process would be so much better and the outcomes awesome.
 
If you want to learn more about chronic pain management please check out our website at www.addiction-free.com. and go to our Ariticles page to download free information as well as checking out our Publications page to learn about my Addiction-Free Pain Management® books—especially my latest book Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders.

Yesterday as I was flying to Tampa I started working on my latest book, the Denial Management Counseling Recovery Guide. As I was looking over what I accomplished in six hours that the flight took I decided I wanted to add a portion of it to my Blog today. I have worked for years to de-pathologize denial while at the same time help people living with chronic pain see that sometimes their denial about ineffective pain management including prescription medication or other drug problems were hurting them. Denial is part of the human condition and it can help us or hurt us.

Denial is related to our need to search for the truth about what is happening to us in spite of our tendency to make mistakes. Whether we like to admit it or not, we all can be easily hurt when we make mistakes. When we do make mistakes, our fear of being hurt creates the tendency to lie to ourselves in order to avoid pain, guilt, and shame. We are all capable of convincing ourselves that the lies that we tell ourselves are, in fact, true. Once we start believing our own lies, we tend to start lying to others whether we mean to or not.

Denial is a normal and natural response
to experiencing serious life problems.

Even though most people try to be honest, we all having the human tendency to make mistakes. Once we make a mistake, the fear of experiencing pain, guilt, and shame creates a tendency to lie to ourselves and others about the mistakes.
 
This can lead to the habitual use of denial to avoid experiencing the pain, guilt, and shame. This means that denial is the natural tendency to avoid the pain, guilt, and shame that is caused by thinking and talking about serious problems. Denial is a set of automatic and unconscious thoughts, feelings, and actions that keep us from thinking and talking about our problems in order to avoid pain, guilt, and shame.
 
If you want to see other chronic pain management information please check out our website at www.addiction-free.com and go to our Ariticles page to download free information.If you want to learn more about denial related to chronic pain you can check out my book Denial Management Counseling for Effective Pain Management on our Publications page.