Persistant or Chronic Pain
The impact:
Chronic, sometimes called persistent pain, wrecks lives. The most common cause for people suffering with long term pain is of course back pain, but the list of pains that disable people is endless, from migraine and headaches to irritable bowel and period pain with every muscle and joint pain somewhere in the middle.
Pain can vary from day to day, often without obvious reasons. It can go from bad to worse in no time at all, or a better day can be followed by a disaster of a day.
Because pain can be unpredictable, pain leaves people feeling anxious, not only about very bad pain and it’s disabling effect happening, but also about the impact this might have on other people, missing work and letting colleagues down, ducking out of social events, avoiding intimacy, not being able to look after people the way you want, giving up on previously pleasurable activities. As a result, other difficult emotions turn up, like shame, guilt or just feeling plain miserable.
A very common thing to happen is that people with persistent pain end up on a kind of medical roundabout, being sent to one specialist after another and commonly being left feeling like they think it’s all in your head. Often people end up on lots of medication suffering the side effects with only marginal gain.
It can be really hard to know what to do or where to turn. Commit Psychology may be able to help
Some things that might help:
You may be surprised to learn that there are some Psychological Therapies that can be very helpful for Chronic or persistent pain and NO that doesn’t mean that the pain is all in your head! Generally speaking people report better mood, less anxiety, better functioning and lower pain. For chronic back pain there is a new and exciting therapy that in clinical trials has shown very high rates of complete cure. Read on for more information
Learning about how the Pain System actually works can be very helpful for people who have pain. There is compelling evidence that helping people to understand how the body and the nervous system work together, (it’s called neurobiology and neurophysiology) can have a positive effect on peoples pain and disability (Reference here) Your Commit Psychology Clinical Psychologist can help you gain this understanding.
Pain Self Management Training can be really helpful for people with persistent pain. There are a range of strategies, including pacing activities, breathing techniques, meditation practises, communication training and behavioural techniques that can help ease pain and reduce its impact on day to day living. Wrapped around this training might be some form of Psychological Therapy, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, to help with the challenges of accepting and adapting to persistent pain. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy has, over recent years been used to deliver Pain Self Management Training with good outcomes. (A rather complicated discussion here) Your Commit Psychology Clinical Psychologist is an ACT practitioner.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) is a new way of treating persistent back pain. You can read about it here. We are all born to believe that where there is pain there must be damage and that the more pain that is experience the more harm there is. It turns out that this is not always true and that helping people “reconceptualize their pain as due to nondangerous brain activity” can be very helpful. In the trial of PRT one third of people were pain free or nearly so after four weeks of intense psychological therapy. Importantly the trial has yet to be replicated. The nuts and bolts of PRT are not new although the way the therapy is put together is. Your Commit Psychology Clinical Psychologist has the ability to work with you in this way, subject to full assessment and in the full knowledge that this intervention can not be guaranteed.