Chronic Pain Management Must Address Resistance And Denial
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.
