I want to discuss something I had to resolve for myself early on in my own recovery because for a time I was suffering with my chronic pain. Now I always ask the patients I work with and the clinicians I train to ask their patients to consider this question: Are you willing to make peace with your pain or do you want to continue to suffer? And this Comment: Pain is Inevitable But Suffering is Optional!

Not only have I been working as a therapist and trainer in the field of chronic pain and coexisting disorders for more than 25 years, I have been living with my own chronic pain condition for over 27 years. I still have periodic episodes of pain flare ups where I need to put into practice all that I’ve learned and like everyone living with a chronic pain condition some days are better than others. But even on the bad days, one thing is certain—pain does not control my life.

In essence what I’m asking is: Are you willing to do what is necessary to make pain your friend and move on with your life? As you might imagine, and perhaps you’re thinking this yourself, they looked at me like I’ve lost my mind; and they’ve told me so in no uncertain terms! Nevertheless these types of questions open up the door for a deeper level of healing to begin.

When you are willing to consider that your pain can be more of an ally than an enemy; the next step is to develop an effective chronic pain management plan. This entails learning all you can about your pain and how to intervene in an appropriate way that continually improves the quality of your life.

Many people believe that: I shouldn’t have pain! Or Because I have pain and I’m having trouble managing my pain, there must be something wrong with me. A big step toward effective pain management occurs when you can reduce your level of suffering by identifying and changing your thinking and beliefs about the pain, which in turn can decrease your stress and overall suffering. Because of the two parts—pain and suffering—pain management must also have two components: physical and psychological. The way people sense or experience pain—its intensity and duration—will affect how well they are able to manage it.

Anticipation of an expected pain level (i.e., anticipatory pain) can influence the degree to which pain is experienced. In some cases, when the anticipatory level of pain expectation is lowered, the brain responds by influencing special neurons. This renders the brain less responsive to an incoming pain signal. Herein lays the rationale to include biofeedback, positive self-talk, meditation, and relaxation response training as part of your pain management treatment plan.

To learn more about dealing with the psychological component of chronic pain please check out my article Coping with Anticipatory 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 working with people in chronic pain or living with chronic pain yourself and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing the pain and coexisting psychological disorders including depression or 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.

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 listen 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.