Blog Post #39: Chronic Pain

A positive attitude and self-management skills can make it much easier to live with chronic pain. How much attention do you put on the pain? If you focus on the pain symptoms, you may simply make them worse. Distraction is a great strategy for dealing with chronic pain. Your friends are right when they say get out and do something. Stop thinking about the pain all the time, but I understand it is easier to stay away from people than to risk arguing with them about the way you are managing the pain or not managing it.

If you're in this situation, what skills and attitudes of resilience will you use? First off, we would encourage you to talk with others. You don't want to isolate. It only makes things worse; people often avoid talking with others about their situation. They are afraid they will upset the other person. But communication is important as it is being with other people. Again, do not isolate yourself from others. This only produces depression and unhappiness. One of the problems with pain medications is that they sometimes help people become more depressed. Maybe you are depressed. Talking about your feelings will help you find other ways to vent and discharge these feelings. Don't be so afraid of upsetting other people or boring them. Their presence will probably help you if you’re upset. At least it should.

And continue to take care of yourself. As we have said before. Use the breathing exercises and ask your doctor or therapist if you need to be moving around. Also, do something, even if it hurts. As I said earlier, distraction is a good strategy. Sitting at home and focusing on your pain is not going to make it any better. In fact, it will usually make it worse.

Again, problem solve, be flexible, and try to do some new things. Be patient with yourself. Don't overdo it. But in general, it's a good idea to do it.

Part of the problem-solving may be talking with a counselor or therapist about all the feelings that you have and finding out better ways of managing these feelings. You're probably angry about your situation, and probably should be. Find ways to express and vent these feelings so that you don't get more depressed and so you don't take them out on other people. There's a lot of good self-help material out there. Some of it is online. Some of it you will need to go to a bookstore to find. You may also need to find a coach, someone who can help you deal with your pain. Find a support group with other people dealing with chronic pain.

There are no easy answers or solutions to dealing with chronic pain. Medications may help. But there are many other nonpharmaceutical interventions that you can learn to use to help you manage the pain. Unfortunately, a lot of it is probably trial and error. You may find other people who have dealt with similar problems differently, and you may need to learn from them.

Ron Breazeale PhD

Building resilience.com.