About a third of the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System includes cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) interventions.  To give you an overview of CBT for chronic pain management I want to include excerpts from a report by Shannon Erstad, MBA/MPH.  If you want to review her entire report that includes a great PDF Download on what to look for in a pain management provider please Click Here.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) teaches relaxation techniques, stress management, and other ways to help you cope with pain. Physical, psychological, and social factors all play a role in pain management.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy is based on the idea that thought and behavior patterns can affect symptoms and disability and may be obstacles to recovery. For example, when you feel a familiar type of pain starting or getting worse, you probably have a sense of how it will progress. If you are used to the pain being severe or long-lasting, you may expect the pain to become more intense. This thinking may make you feel out of control or helpless. A stress response like this can trigger physical changes in your body, such as a rise in blood pressure, the release of stress hormones, muscle tension, and more pain.

CBT can be helpful for chronic pain by changing the way you think about pain. It also teaches you how to become more active. This helps, because pain can also improve with appropriate physical activity, such as walking or swimming.

I believe it is crucial to learn how to change our thinking and manage our uncomfortable emotions in order to improve our pain management by reducing our perception of the original pain signal.  If we don’t, we’re at risk to go from ouch this hurts, to this is unbearable, terrible, awful; and that leads to our suffering.

To learn more about thinking and emotional management for chronic pain and coexisting disorders including addiction please check out my article The Psychological Components of Pain that you can download for free on our Article page.

You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are working with people in chronic pain and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing their pain and coexisting psychological disorders including depression or addiction effectively please go to our Publications page and check out my book the Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders: Using the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System. To purchase this book please Click Here.

To listen to a recent radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods for her program One Hour at a Time please Click Here to go to this interview.

To read the latest issue of Chronic Pain Solutions Newsletter please Click here. If you want to sign up for the newsletter, please Click here and input your name and email address. You will then recieve an autoresponse email that you need to reply to in order to finalize enrollment.