Today I want to talk about something I had to resolve for myself early on in my own chronic pain recovery.  I always ask the patients I work with and the clinicians I train to consider this question – are you willing to make peace with your pain or continue to suffer?  In essence what I’m asking them is: are you willing to do what is necessary to make pain your friend and move on with your life?  As you might imagine and perhaps you’re thinking this yourself, they looked at me like I’ve lost my mind and have told me so in no uncertain terms!  Nevertheless this question opened up the door for a deeper level of healing to begin. 

When we’re willing to consider our pain more of an ally than an enemy, the next step to developing an effective chronic pain management plan is to learn all you can about your pain and how to intervene in an appropriate way that continually improves the quality of your life.

Our pain system is a crucial component of our make up and essential to our survival.  Can you imagine how bad it would get if we didn’t have pain receptors and we kept putting ourselves in situations that seriously damaged our body?  Picture this: you’re in the kitchen talking on the phone and you inadvertently put your hand down on a hot burner.  Without pain receptors your first indication that something was wrong would be the smell of cooked flesh—yours!

Let’s talk about how to define pain versus suffering.  The psychological meaning that you assign to a physical pain signal will determine whether you simply feel pain (“Ouch, this hurts!”) or experience suffering (“Because I hurt, something awful or terrible is happening!”).  Although pain and suffering are often used interchangeably, there is an important distinction that needs to be made.  Pain is a warning signal telling you that something is wrong with your body.  Suffering results from the meaning or interpretation your brain assigns to the pain signal.

Many people irrationally believe that: “I shouldn’t have pain!” or “Because I have pain and I’m having trouble managing my pain, there must be something wrong with me.” A big step toward effective pain management occurs when you can reduce your level of suffering by identifying and changing your irrational thinking and beliefs about the pain, which in turn decreases your stress and overall suffering.  Because of the two parts—pain and suffering—pain management must also have two components: physical and psychological.  The way people sense or experience pain—its intensity and duration—will affect how well they are able to manage it. 

Anticipation of an expected pain level (i.e., anticipatory pain) can influence the degree to which pain is experienced.  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 lays the rationale to include biofeedback, positive self-talk, meditation, and relaxation response training as part of your pain management treatment plan.

To learn more about dealing with the psychological component of chronic pain check out my article Coping with Anticipatory Pain that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are in recovery and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing your pain and medication effectively go to our Publications page and check out my book the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. 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.

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