Chronic Pain Management: The Role of Anticipatory Pain

Written By: Dr. Stephen F. Grinstead, LMFT, ACRPS, CADC-II Date: September 8th, 2009. Topic: Member Blogs.

When you live with chronic pain you hurt. Doing certain things can make you hurt worse. So you come to believe that these things will always cause you to hurt. In other words, you associate those things with pain and start expecting to hurt. You believe that every time you do those things, you will have pain.

Because you believe that you are going to hurt, you can activate the physical pain system just by thinking about doing something that you believe will cause you to hurt. This is called anticipatory pain. This is when you anticipate that something will make you hurt, which in turn activates the biological pain system. You start hurting even before you begin doing whatever it is that you believe will cause you to hurt. All you have to do is to start thinking about doing that thing.

Once the physical pain system is activated, the anticipatory pain reaction can actually make the pain symptoms worse. Whenever you feel the pain, you interpret it in a way that makes it worse. You start thinking about the pain in a way that actually makes it worse. You tell yourself that the pain is “awful and terrible,” and that “I can’t handle the pain.” You convince yourself that “it’s hopeless, I’ll always hurt, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

This way of thinking causes you to develop emotional reactions that further intensify or amplify the pain response. The increased perception of pain causes you to keep changing your behavior in ways that create even more unnecessary limitations and more emotional discomfort. This can make you feel trapped in a progressive cycle of disability.

Because of the two parts—biological (pain) and psychological (suffering)—chronic pain management must also have two components: physical and psychological. The way you sense or experience pain—its intensity and duration—will affect how well you are able to manage it.

In 2007 I wrote published an article titled Coping with Anticipatory Pain that is on our Article Archive. This past July 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.