Whenever you experience pain, it is always important to ask: “What is my pain trying to tell me?” Remember, pain is trying to tell you that something is wrong, that you should find out exactly what it is, and find a way to address it—not mask it.

Our pain system is a crucial component of our makeup and essential to our ongoing survival.  Could you imagine how bad it could get if we didn’t have pain receptors and kept putting ourselves in situations that could seriously damage our body?  Imagine that you’re in the kitchen talking on the phone and you put your hand down on a hot burner.  Without pain receptors your first indication that something was wrong would be your flesh burning.

Impaired Pain System Can Lead to Chronic Pain

As with any sensory system, pain receptors and circuits can become impaired, resulting in chronic pain that cannot be attributed to any identifiable physical problem. The greatest challenge with regard to understanding the biological aspects of pain is not knowing why the pain sometimes continues even after a painful stimulus has been removed.

Recurrent Acute Pain

There is also another classification of pain that is called acute recurrent pain which is when the individual suffers from pain episodes with pain free periods in between. The pain episodes are usually brief (e.g., lasting from minutes to an hour or so) and are often associated with an identifiable physical process (such as migraine headaches, sickle cell anemia, back sprain, etc).

Anticipatory Pain

When you live with chronic pain you hurt.  Doing certain things can make you hurt worse. So you come to believe that these things will always cause you to hurt. In other words, you associate those things with your pain. You believe that every time you do those things, you will have pain. 

Because you believe that you are going to hurt, you can activate the physiological pain system just by thinking about doing something that you believe will cause you to hurt. This is called anticipatory pain.  You anticipate that something will make you hurt, which in turn activates your physiological pain system. You often start hurting even before you begin doing whatever it is that you believe will cause you to hurt. All you have to do is to start thinking about doing that thing. This process is what often leads to suffering.

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 an unpleasant 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 these two components—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. It may be an unrealistic goal to become totally pain free but I can promise that if you are willing to follow through and complete the work required—you will never have to “suffer” with your chronic pain again. 

To learn more about pain and suffering for more effectivce chronic pain management please check out my article Pain versus Suffering that you can download for free on our Article page. In addition, please take a look at a more recent article along similar lines Moving Beyond Anticipatory Pain for Effective Chronic Pain Management that you can also download for free.

If you’d like to receive training for helping people with relapse prevention, I’m very excited to announce that the Gorski-CENAPS Corporation is presenting The Relapse Prevention Therapy44 Hour Certification Training in Ft. Lauderdale October 18-22, 2010. To learn more about this 5 day 44 hour training 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 or a loved one is undergoing chronic pain management, especially if you’re in recovery or believe you may have a medication or other mental health problem and you want to learn more effective chronic pain management tools, please go to our Publications page and check out my books; especially the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. To purchase this book please Click Here.

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