According to researched published in Pain Physician Journal as recently as 2006, 90 percent of people in the US receiving treatment for pain management were prescribed opiate medication. Of that number 9 percent to 41 percent had opiate abuse/addiction problems. The research also stated that 16 percent of pain management patients experienced illicit drug use along with their prescribed medication, and as high as 34 percent in other research they reviewed. These numbers give a picture of the overall problem of chronic pain abuse/addiction problems in the general population. What is harder to quantify is the extent of this problem in the recovering community.

Whenever I asked the following question at trainings, “How many of you know someone in long-term recovery who has relapsed over chronic pain management issues?” most of the audience raises their hands. The reasons vary, but more often than not they either take the wrong medication or too much. Others try to tough the pain out and end up relapsing back to their original drug of choice.

Living with chronic pain is difficult for anyone, but especially for someone with coexisting abuse, addiction or other psychological disorders. They can become severely depressed and discouraged. Healthcare providers often become confused and frustrated when their chronic pain management treatment interventions are ineffective and frequently blame their patients.

The problem of managing chronic pain and medication in recovery continues to grow and healthcare professionals are left with the challenge of how to effective address it. Given the biopsychosocial nature of addiction and chronic pain, it is imperative to understand both conditions and implement a multidisciplinary treatment plan.

To learn how to develop an effective multidisciplinary treatment plan for more effective chronic pain management please go to my article Serving People with Chronic Pain and Coexisting Disorders that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.  This article gives you an overview of my book Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders.

If you would like to be skill trained in a treatment model that teaches how to implement a multidisciplinary chronic pain management treatment plan we have an Addiction-Free Pain Management® 20 Hour Certification Training scheduled this Spring at Valley Forge Medical Center and Hospital in Noristown PA on June 10-12, 2009. It’s not to late for people to sign up and in fact by mentioning this Blog I will make sure you get a $20 discount for this training. To get this discount you must call my partner Ellen at (916) 575-9961 and ask her for the discount. Also, for this and other upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page.

For over 26 years I’ve worked with patients living with chronic pain who also developed coexisting psychological disorders, including addiction, as a result of living with debilitating chronic pain. One of the tools that I was able to adapt was Terence T. Gorski’s Denial Management Counseling for Addictive Disorders. I modified his denial management system to work with other coexisting disorders including chronic pain.

In my early pain management recovery I often set myself up for setbacks.  I have the personality type of “more is better” and always pushed the envelope.  It took me a while to see how this was self-defeating behavior.  The first thing that often happened after my setback was a feeling of hopelessness and frustration—“I’m always going to be this way.”  This second self-defeating mindset is one of the 12 common denial patterns—Strategic Hopelessness; AKA Diagnosing Myself as Beyond Hope.

Unfortunately, unrecognized denial can lead to severe consequences. For example the population I work with is people with chronic pain and many of them have coexisting additive disorders but are in denial about what the addiction is doing to them and those they love.

My first publication in this area is the Denial Management Counseling for Effective Pain Management Workbook. This workbook was designed for people who have experienced significant problems related to living with chronic pain, but who honestly don’t believe—or don’t want to believe—that their self-defeating decisions and behaviors are undermining what could be an effective pain management plan. This process is an important component of the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System.

To learn more about chronic pain management and denial please check out my article From Denial to Effective Pain Management that you can download for free on our Article page.

If you would like to be skill trained in a treatment model that teaches how to implement a multidisciplinary chronic pain management treatment plan including coping with denial we have an Addiction-Free Pain Management® 20 Hour Certification Training scheduled this Spring at Valley Forge Medical Center and Hospital in Noristown PA on June 10-12, 2009. It’s not to late for people to sign up and in fact by mentioning this Blog I will make sure you get a $20 discount for this training. To get this discount you must call my partner Ellen at (916) 575-9961 and ask her for the discount. Also, for this and other upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar 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 or are living with chronic pain and have any resistance or denial and want to learn how to develop a plan for helping to identify and manage denial please go to our Publications page and check out my book the Denial Management Counseling for Effective Pain Management Workbook. To purchase this book please Click Here.

To listen to a radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods on the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System 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.

This week I’ve been privileged to present two workshops at the Annual Florida Addictions Institute Conference.  I co-presented one of these with Dr. Shari Corbitt the co-author of our Eating Addiction Relapse Prevention Workbook.

The other presentation was on my book Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders: Using the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System. Many of the participants attended both my presentations and were grateful for this timely topic.  I want to thank Keral Kronseder Vogt—the Executive Director of the Florida Addictions Institute for making this take place.

I want to take this opportunity to share a bit about the Eating Addiction Workbook material. To truly deal with the complex issue of eating addiction/compulsion, you must approach it with a personalized multilayered biopsychosocialspiritual recovery process. You can never forget the eating issues, but must keep in mind the many levels of addiction and recovery.

In eating addiction recovery, many have found it is critically important to abstain from addictive behaviors around eating. This means changing basic eating behaviors or eating patterns that support compulsive overeating, such as abstaining from gobbling, eating all the time rather than only at meal times, eating while driving, standing, etc. This is similar to alcoholics in recovery being told to stay away from drinking juice in a wineglass or nonalcoholic beers in a bar to avoid being “triggered” to drink alcohol. Likewise, some alcoholics in recovery have found the tinkling of ice in a glass can bring on urges for alcohol and are encouraged not to use ice in drinks to distract themselves from their recovery. These suggestions help addicts avoid the triggering of cravings and possible relapse.

Addictive behaviors around eating can also trigger relapse. This is why compulsive overeaters find it helpful to be mindful of not just what they eat (a healthy meal plan), but also how they eat (healthy eating patterns), when they eat (a healthy meal schedule), and how much they eat (healthy portion control). Getting clear on what, how, how much, and how often you eat will make your recovery process smoother with less cravings. It will also reduce your incidence and length of relapse. All of these components are included in an overall Healthy Living Plan.

As part of your Healthy Living Plan you need to choose a number of activities to deal with the various aspects of your eating compulsion/addiction. There are many possibilities in each of the biopsychosocialspiritual areas to support you in developing your personal plan. I strongly encourage you to not do this alone, but to seek help from qualified people such as certified nutritionists for meal planning and an exercise specialist working in collaboration with your doctor. Your plan will probably change or evolve over time, but it is important to make some decisions, commit to those decisions, and follow them through. Making a commitment to a plan, and then sticking to it, is a way to confront the ongoing onslaught of your addiction/compulsion. What are you willing to do—beginning now?

Last year I wanted to address the entire spectrum of “Eating Addiction” and asked Dr. Shari Stillman-Corbitt, the Executive Director of TouchStone Treatment 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.

The Eating Addiction 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.

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.

If you would like to be skill trained in a treatment model that teaches how to implement a multidisciplinary chronic pain management treatment plan we have an Addiction-Free Pain Management® 20 Hour Certification Training scheduled this Spring at Valley Forge Medical Center and Hospital in Noristown PA on June 10-12, 2009. It’s not to late for people to sign up and in fact by mentioning this Blog I will make sure you get a $20 discount for this training. To get this discount you must call my partner Ellen at (916) 575-9961 and ask her for the discount. Also, for this and other upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page.  

To listen to a radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods on the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System 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.