Chronic Pain Affects the Whole Person
You can generally receive effective medical care for acute pain; however, treatment for chronic pain can be a confusing process of misunderstanding as well as incorrect diagnoses and inadequate treatment plans.
What can you do when you are told that the pain is all in your head?
When you experience chronic pain and doctors are at a loss to define the exact nature of the problem, you might start to believe that you are going crazy. Often treatment professionals will support that mistaken belief because they find no observable or measurable reason for the symptoms. Nevertheless, chronic pain is real and often occurs for reasons that may not be identified easily. As explained earlier, chronic pain affects you physically, psychologically, socially and spiritually—body, mind, spirit.
- Physically, chronic pain raises stress and drains physical energy
- Psychologically, chronic pain affects your ability to think clearly, logically and rationally, to manage feelings and emotions effectively
- Socially chronic pain affects your ability to use consistently responsible behaviors, thus affecting others
- Spiritually, chronic pain can keep you separate from your inner self and/or Higher Power.
In addition, the way that you sense or experience pain—its intensity and duration—will affect how well you are able to manage it. This can lead to either pain or suffering. Pain is an unpleasant signal telling you that something is wrong with your body. Suffering results from the meaning or interpretation you assign to the pain. Learning more positive ways of thinking about your pain will lead to more effective pain management.
When you experience chronic pain it is usually accepted that something is physically wrong with your body. The symptoms of pain can range from mildly irritating, to somewhat annoying or uncomfortable, to moderately distressing, to severely horrible, to the worst possible excruciating suffering ever!
While you are affected biologically, other areas are also impacted. Your thought processes are impacted in several different ways. You might have difficulty thinking clearly or concentrating, which leads to being unable to solve problems that are normally easy for you. At times you may be unable to function very well in practically all areas of your life. Instead of thinking positively you may repress certain thoughts and blank out, or indulge in self-defeating, negative or depressive thinking.
Chronic pain can also lead to difficulty in managing emotions. You may be cut off from your emotions, feel numb or not know what you are feeling. At other times you may overreact to your emotions. The intensity of your feelings does not match the trigger situation. A third type of emotional dysfunction is when you experience artifact emotions—feelings that do not seem to have a clear cause or trigger; e.g., you cry, laugh, or even rage for no apparent reason.
Chronic Pain Often Leads to Depression
Many people with chronic pain frequently become depressed. When your thinking is irrational or dysfunctional and you are mismanaging your feelings, you may have urges to indulge in self-defeating, impulsive or compulsive behaviors to help cope with your distress. This in turn affects your relationships with others. You may become isolated and believe you can handle life without any help, or you may become overly dependent upon others to take care of you. This dysfunctional caretaking by others often enables you to continue ineffective behaviors that prolong a victim role.
Remember that pain is a biopsychosocial experience. As a result, you need to learn to make a distinction between the physical sensation of pain, your psychological interpretation of the pain, and how you use your pain in relationships with other people. Once you have this it’s time to develop an appropriate plan for all parts of yourself—biological, psychological, social, and spiritual.
To learn more about this topic please check out my article The BioPsychoSocial Components of Pain that you can download for free on our Article page.
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You can learn about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are working with people undergoing chronic pain management and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing their chronic pain and coexisting psychological disorders; including depression, addiction and other coexisting psychological disorders effectively; please consider my book Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders: Using the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System. To purchase this book please Click Here.
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