No Need to Suffer During Chronic Pain Management
I can’t tell you for sure how many people I’ve worked with over the past 27 years have said to me something like “Please help me I’m tired of suffering.” Many people undergoing chronic pain management are in fact “suffering” and it is so unnecessary. In fact, I tell the people that if—and only if—they are willing to learn and practice some new chronic pain management tools that I guarantee that they will never have to suffer again. I do tell them, however, that does NOT mean they will never have pain again—pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.
Many people irrationally believe that: “I shouldn’t have pain!” or “Because I have pain and I’m having trouble managing my chronic pain, there must be something wrong with me.” A big step toward effective chronic pain management occurs when people can reduce their level of suffering by identifying and changing their irrational thinking and beliefs about the pain, which in turn decreases stress and overall suffering.
The anticipation of an expected pain level can influence the degree to which someone experiences pain. I call this anticipatory pain. When the self-talk is saying, “this is horrible, awful, terrible,” the brain tends to amplify the pain signals. When this occurs, the level of distress increases—people suffer, remaining a victim to their pain.
But people can learn how to change the anticipatory response to pain. They can lower the amount of pain that they anticipate by changing what they believe will happen when they start to hurt. They can also change the thinking—the self-talk—and learn how to better manage emotions. I know people can learn new ways of responding to old situations that cause or intensify pain.
As someone comes to believe that they really can do things that will make the pain sensations bearable and manageable, the brain responds by influencing special neurons that reduce the intensity or perception of the pain. The brain becomes less responsive to an incoming pain signal. This indeed can be the difference between pain and suffering.
In 2007 I wrote an article titled Coping with Anticipatory Pain that is on our Article Archive. This month I decided to publish a new article titled Moving Beyond Anticipatory Pain for Effective Chronic Pain Management, 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 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.
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.
To learn about my upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page. To listen to a radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods for her program One Hour at a Time please Click Here to go to this interview.
