It’s Important to Learn How to Manage Thoughts and Feelings for More Effective Chronic Pain Management
When you live with chronic pain as I have for over 26 years it’s important to learn as much about effective pain management as possible. I did a blog with a similar theme last month and this one will take a different focus and recommend a different article that you can have for free.
The most important thing I’ve taught my patients over the past 25 years is how to learn as much as they can from their pain and to make pain their friend—instead of their hated enemy. I saw a recent TV show (House) where the patient they were trying to help was born without a working pain system and she never felt any pain. This constantly put her well being and even life at risk. We need our pain. Pain tells us something is wrong and needs attention.
It’s also important to recognize that there are different faces, or aspects, of pain. One is the physical signal that gets registered on our pain receptors and sends a signal to our brain. The second one is the psychological component (thinking and emotions) where the brain interprets that signal and sends a message to our frontal lobes and we have a cognitive, or thinking, response. Another signal goes to the limbic system that controls emotions and we have a feeling response. I call this the pain amplifier circuit. When we have troubling thoughts that lead to uncomfortable emotions we get suffering—not just pain.
I believe it is crucial to learn how to change our thinking and manage our uncomfortable emotions in order to improve our pain management by reducing our perception of the original pain signal. If we don’t we go from ouch this hurts, to this is unbearable, terrible, awful; and that leads to our suffering.
To learn more about thinking and emotional management for chronic pain and coexisting disorders including addiction please check out my article The Psychological Components of Chronic Pain that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.
You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are in recovery and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing your pain and medication effectively go to our Publications page and check out my book the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. To purchase this book please Click Here.
We have a busy fall schedule and some new postings for 2009 for upcoming trainings that you can check out on our Calendar page.
To listen to a recent radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods 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.
