Denial Management for Effective Pain Management
We’ve just spent the last several days at Sierra Tucson training their clinical pain management team in Denial Management Counseling for the chronic pain population. This is such an important process when dealing with people living with chronic pain who have other coexisting disorders such as addiction, depression, trauma, sleep etc.
The Sierra Tucson team was really into this training which makes my job as a trainer/teacher so much easier. It was exciting for me to watch them practice and really get that they now will be able to intervene and help their patients at a much deeper level and move them much quicker through the treatment process. The big hit many of the participants got was how important it is to de-pathologize denial and help normalize it and let their patients know that denial is a normal human defense mechanism and we all have it.
My life partner, business partner and wife, Ellen Gruber-Grinstead and I also presented a workshop for about 80-90 of Sierra Tucson’s patients on Overcoming the Inner Saboteur (AKA Denial Management) and it was exciting to see many of them really get into it. Many of the patients shared that they had been in treatment several times before but relapsed and now they got to see how some of the 12 denial patterns started their relapse slide.
Many of the patients are using my book The Denial Management Counseling for Effective Pain Management Workbook and came up to say how much they were getting out of it once they stopped being angry about having to look at their denial. If you want to learn more about this please click here to go to my article on this topic or go to the publications page to check out the book.
