Transforming Your Pain
Everyone experiences pain from time to time in their lives. But about 20% of people experience persisting pain. A lot of the conditions associated with chronic pain can’t be healed and have no effective or lasting treatment.
That’s the depressing bit. And unfortunately, having chronic pain is associated with depression.
In research done over the last decade or two, it was found that improving your knowledge about pain helps to reduce catastrophising, improves pain, reduces disability and improves the quality of life for people with chronic pain.
That’s what this programme is about. It helps you understand your pain, and the type of things that influence the level of pain that you’re feeling, when you’re getting a flare up and the frequency with which you experience it.
Step 1 What is Pain Anyway?
You learn that pain has a lot more to it than just that idea we have that it’s a linear thing between tissue damage and the feeling of pain.
That your pain is always real, and what it’s trying to tell you. And that understanding your pain can actually help ease some of it.
How the bio-psycho-social model applies to pain as well as other diseases and conditions, and what this might mean for you.
How it helps to have a vision for what your life might look like when you are no longer limited by your pain. And, some of the things that you need to look out for to make your vision effective for you.
Step 2 The Emergent Nature of Pain
You’ve always been taught to think of pain as having a direct connection between tissue damage and the sensation of pain, but it’s actually a little more complex than that. You learn some ways to make sense of that complexity to help you understand the nature of it.
Your brain decides whether you need to feel pain or not, and how your brain makes that decision.
Your brain lights up like a Christmas tree when you think of something, when you feel something, when you do something.
The wonderful things your brain does, and how it sometimes be tricked. It is helpful to understand this, as you can use it to your advantage when it comes to retraining your brain.
Understanding how being aware of your feelings and needs can help you manage your pain.
Step 3 Your Brain is Protecting You
Whenever you hurt yourself, your brain makes a note of it and learns something from that experience. That way, your brain learns how to protect you and keep you safe.
The problem is that the more you hurt yourself, the more efficient your brain becomes at protecting you, and sometimes might even start becoming over-protective.
You want to look for some of the things that your brain interprets as dangerous, for this you’ll start looking at some of the self-limiting beliefs that may have been affecting your pain.
You also start to investigate what is really true about these self-limiting beliefs, and how starting to live into these truths can allow you to show up in different ways in life and gain more compassion for yourself.
Understanding how what your scans and your diagnosis might be contributing to your pain, and how you might shift your perspective around them.
Step 4 Pain is Context Related
You learn how pain is changeable, and how no one is in pain all the time.
It’s quite common to see the body part that’s hurting as separate from you. It’s a management tool. But you can also be curious about our pain, and what it’s trying to tell you.
Sometimes, it’s important to shift your perspective about some of the conditions that you might have been diagnosed with. This can help you feel less hopeless about your condition, which can have a positive effect on your pain.
Negative emotions such as fear, resentment and frustration can aggravate your pain. By dealing with these negative emotions and leaning into what you can be grateful for in your life, helps to reduce the danger messages and increase the safety messages to your brain.
Step 5 The Brain Lights Up Like a Christmas Tree
Each experience has an individual way of lighting up your brain in a unique way. Your pain has its own unique way of lighting up your brain.
Stress has a particular way of influencing your body in many different ways, and as such is a powerful influence on your pain.
Fear is one way to create a stress response in the body. And fear also often holds you back from moving forward, even though it’s trying to protect you, just like your pain is trying to protect you.
Step 6 Changing Your Perspective
Shifting your attention away from what we don’t have in life, and instead focus on what you’re still able to do, rewires your brain to be more open to receiving things in life.
You can also shift your perspective on the pain itself, by looking in what ways the pain may have given you things, such as deepened one or more of your relationships.
Many of you become afraid of certain movements or activities, or sometimes of any movement at all. However, your muscles and ligaments love a bit of movement, it helps them function better.
When you have an injury, your brain may become highly protective and lower your pain threshold in order to keep you safe. The result is that you do less and feel more pain. The good thing to know is that this process is reversible because the brain is constantly learning and adapting how to stay safe.
Step 7 Graded exposure
When your brain is over enthusiastic in keeping you safe, sometimes just thinking about moving can become painful. This is actually more common than you’d think.
One of the ways the brain adjusts in response to being in pain, is that over a period of time, the area in the brain affected by the pain becomes less precise, less clear. This means that your ability to distinguish between left and right becomes affected.
When you’re in chronic pain, you be angry, frustrated, sad at what you’ve lost. Learning how to forgive yourself, especially if you feel that you’ve created your pain yourself by not looking after yourself properly is very important.
For a lot of people, forgiving your body can also be essential. It’s easy to feel like your body has let your down, and in order to heal properly, you need to heal your relationship with your body.
Step 8 Imagining pain free movement
In order to forgive yourself or your body, you need to decide to see things differently. Being willing to see things from a different point of view or perspective, allows you be to more compassionate.
As part of getting to a point where you can move more and with more ease, it’s often helpful to specifically think about a certain movement and what it would be like to do that movement or activity with ease.
Sometimes, it feels difficult to imagine moving the part of the body that hurts. There are exercises where you can practice this becoming easier as a step to being able to do the actual movement again with ease.
Step 9 Mirror neurons and how they can help
You may have experienced having pain in one knee, sometimes for quite some time, and then it starts to move into the other knee as well. This is because you have mirror neurons in your brain that become affected.
Even if you’ve heard about mirror neurons, or mirror pains before, you might not realise that these mirror neurons can be used for healing as well. In certain types of physical rehabilitation, the mirror neurons have been used to regain movement in injured joints and muscles.
At this stage, you also want to learn to lean into your intuition. You will know what’s right for you a lot of the time, even if it’s not logical. The problem is that you may have lost touch with your intuition, or you don’t feel you can trust your intuition anymore.
You want to rebuild that relationship with your inner knowing. This will help you in knowing how to pace your recovery better.
Step 10 Nerves slide and glide
The nerves sit in between other tissues that move. As such they need to ability to cope with a bit of compression, stretching, and they need to be able to bend, slide and glide in between the tissues.
Nerves can also become a bit sticky, and movement helps to improve the blood flow to the nerve. This is another way to movement can help you feel better.
Muscles often develop sensitive spots where waste products build up. These are known as trigger points. What many people don’t realise is that those sensitive points in the muscle communicate with the spine and the brain and can result in changes happening there.
Treating these trigger points with that in mind can help the treatment be a lot more effective.
If you want to learn more about what it’s like to do the ‘Transforming Your Pain’ programme with me as a coach, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
Life and Relationship Coaching 