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.

This past week we were in Houston Texas for a 20 Hour Addiction-Free Pain Management® (APM) Certification Training.  The training was one of four sponsored by the Institute of Chemical Dependency Studies (ICDS) and the Gorski-CEANPS® Corporation and this event was held at the Prevention and Recovery Center (PaRC) Memorial Hermann Hospital.

We had a multidisciplinary audience in attendance who were able to network and learn from each other as well as the APM™ training presentation.  The participants shared that people in chronic pain and coexisting addictive disorders is on the rise in their area and were grateful to learn some new and valuable tools to help better serve this population.

We have two more APM™ Trainings scheduled in November—one in Tampa Florida and the final one this year in Dallas Texas.  It’s not to late for people to sign up and in fact by mentioning this November 2, 2008 Blog I will make sure you get a discount from the $395 fee to only $325.  To get this discount you must call Anne at ICDS at 866-523-2669 and ask her for the discount.

To learn more about multidisciplinary treatment for chronic pain and coexisting disorders including addiction please check out my article The Need for Multidisciplinary 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 are working with people in chronic pain and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing their pain and coexisting psychological disorders including addiction effectively please go to our Publications page and check out my book the Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders: Using the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System. To purchase this book please Click Here.

We have a full training schedule this month and the first week in December 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.

The following information was adapted from the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide© and is used with permission—The TFUAR concept is part of the Gorski-CENAPS® Model.  Below are some basic principles that can help you to better understand how the TFUAR (thinking, feelings, urges, actions, and reactions of and to others) process works.  Understanding this process can help you to develop more effective chronic pain management.  The premise is:

1. Thoughts cause Feelings.  Whenever we think about something we automatically react by having a feeling or an emotion. 
2. Thoughts and Feelings work together to cause Urges.  Your way of thinking causes you to feel certain feelings.  These feelings, in turn, reinforce the way that you are thinking.  These thoughts and feelings work together to create an urge, or impulse, to do something.  An urge is a desire that may be rational or irrational.  Sometimes the irrational urge is to isolate and give into your depression.  At other times you might be tempted to use inappropriate pain medication, including alcohol or other drugs, even though you know that it will hurt you, which is also called craving.  Other times you want to use self-defeating behaviors that at some level you know will not be good for you and could worsen your depression. 
3. Urges plus decisions cause Actions.  A decision is a choice.  A choice is specific way of thinking that causes you to commit to one way of doing things while refusing to do anything else.  The space between the urge and the action is always filled with a decision.  This decision may be an automatic and unconscious choice that you have learned to make without having to think about it, or this decision can be based upon a conscious choice that result from carefully reflecting upon the situation and the options available for dealing with it.
4. Actions cause reactions from other people.  Your actions affect other people and cause them to react to you.  It is helpful to think about your behavior like invitations that you give to other people to treat you in certain ways.  Some behaviors invite people to be nice to you and to treat you with respect.  Other behaviors invite people to argue and fight with you or to put you down.  In every social situation you share a part of the responsibility for what happens because you are constantly inviting people to respond to you by the actions you take and how you react to what other people do.  Sometimes these reactions help you manage your pain more effectively, but at other times it leads to increased stress levels that cause you to making poor decisions.

To learn more about effective chronic pain management check out my article The Right to Quality 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 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.