For most people the upcoming Holiday Season is a time of hope and celebration.  For others it is a dreaded time of year because they don’t enjoy a life-style that matches the media hype regarding this season.  For People in recovery from any addictive disorder it can be a major high risk situation for a relapse.  For people in recovery from eating addiction the holiday season is even more problematic.

Earlier this year I wanted to address the entire spectrum of “Eating Addiction” and asked Dr. Shari Stillman-Corbitt, the Clinical Director of Sierra Tucson to co-author The Eating Addiction Relapse Prevention Workbook. Dr. Corbitt brought a long history of working with eating disordered patients to our project and we believe it is now a much better instrument to help people with eating addictions to get and stay in a true recovery process.

The Eating Addiction Relapse Prevention Workbook is designed to increase patients’ knowledge and understanding of the nature of eating addiction. Some people may be a normal weight, if their metabolism is such that they don’t gain weight, or some of them may purge calories through excessive exercise. However, many of them will probably be overweight, or “see-sawing” up and down, as they try first one magic pill, diet or program, and then another. Some of them may be obese, the definition of which means that they are more than 20 percent over the weight suggested by actuarial tables. These people may know that they are destroying and distorting their body, but be unable to stop eating compulsively.

This workbook is for compulsive overeaters, food addicts and binge eaters. These terms describe people who use eating and food to manage feelings and cope with life. Although the primary purpose of this workbook is to help patients develop a relapse prevention plan and create a schedule of activities to assist in that goal, we believe they must first develop a definition of abstinence that works for them and an effective recovery plan that is life enhancing which we refer to in this workbook as a Healthy Living Plan.

With the Holidays on us it’s crucial to learn to manage high risk situations for using food to copy or escape instead of food.  The last five exercises in the Eating Addiction Workbook help people identify and manage high risk situations that could set them up for relapse despite their commitment to their Healthy Living Plan (recovery) and develop an effective recovery plan designed to help them manage those high risk situations.

To read more about the workbook please go to my article Eating Addiction Needs a Strategic Relapse Prevention Protocol that you can download for free on our Articles page. To purchase this book or the Eating Addiction High Risk Situation List Pamphlet 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.

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.

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. 

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.