about the feelings that come up as you review this list.
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Many Have Difficulty Telling the Difference between Physical and Emotional Pain
If you identify with some of the features listed, your life is probably damaged significantly by chronic pain. Chances are your family has been gravely affected as well. Pain has invaded your life, and life has become drudgery. Depression can result and even lead to hopeless or suicidal feelings. The suffering that accompanies chronic pain (your emotional responses) is often much greater than the pain itself.
Furthermore, often your responses to the pain exacerbate the pain itself. You judge it (negatively of course), resist it, get angry at it, and try to get away from it, and the pain gets worse. In fact, much worse. Resisting the pain causes the pain to get worse.
Pain is not right or wrong, good or bad. Pain simply exists in your life. You can change your experience of pain and your attitude toward it.
{ exercise 1.6 }
Developing a New Awareness _______________
Let’s try an experiment. Identify a source of pain in your body right at this moment. Get mad at it—tighten the muscles in the area—worry about how much worse it is getting—throw hatred and loathing right into the pain—feel the despair because this is the way it is and will always be. Hold these negative feelings for a few moments…
Now relax for a minute. Just take a deep, slow breath. If you are having any angry or despairing thoughts, try to set them aside for a moment. Just breathe. And breathe again. Try to loosen the muscles that you just tightened. Think about something positive—a memory, a favorite place, a song, a loved one. And relax. Keep breathing.
Write below about any emotions, thoughts, and spiritual or physical experiences that came up for you. Did you feel the pain get worse as you tightened your body and mind? Were you able to relax, and as you did, did the pain lessen? If not, what got in the way?
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If you are caught in the negative spiral of chronic pain, it may seem like there is no way out, but that’s not the truth. You now have some clues to your experience of pain and some potential ways out. As the simple exercise above demonstrates, when you tighten your muscles and send negative energy toward the pain, the pain gets worse.
It’s as straightforward as that. If you successfully reduced your muscle tension, stopped judging the experience as negative, and paid attention to your responses, the pain diminished, even if only a little. Always take notice of small improvements, for those add up. If you noticed your pain increase and then decrease with this exercise, you have just seen that you have the beginning of the answer to chronic pain. Please don’t underestimate the significance of this!
A lot of the work you will be doing in this book will be to help you notice your pain, but notice it in a very different way. It will require that you be open to changing the experience, and you will be amazed at the differences in how your pain “feels.”
These techniques cannot help but help—a little for some, a remarkable amount for others—and a lot depends on your openness, willingness, and tenacity in applying yourself to these ways of changing your thinking about your pain.
RECOMMENDED READING
A Day without Pain by Mel Pohl, MD, FASAM; Central Recovery Press.
2 Chronic Pain and Addiction: Double Trouble
According to a 2006 study, 90 percent of all people in the US receiving treatment for pain management receive prescriptions for opioid medication. These medications carry with them a risk of dependency and addiction. For those with chronic pain who become addicted when they take opioids for pain relief, the two conditions exacerbate each other, making both worse than either would be alone. Many professionals believe the benefits of opioid treatment far outweigh the risk of developing addiction, but people who do become addicted find themselves in a conundrum: They need opioids to treat pain, but when they take them, they experience horrible consequences.
Given the complex and multifaceted nature of chronic pain and addiction, it is essential to address all the aspects of the condition—the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual components—in order for the individual to recover. First, let’s look at addiction in some detail.
Addiction Explained
Addiction is a complex brain disease. The symptoms of addiction include physical, emotional, spiritual, and thought disturbances with manifestations that affect behaviors and relationships. Use of drugs over time induces changes in the structure and function of the brain that can be long-lasting and produce a host of harmful effects. Studies have shown that in drug-addicted individuals, the areas of the brain that undergo physical changes are critical to judgment, decision making, emotion, memory, and behavior control. This may help explain the destructive behaviors of addiction. As the disease progresses, a person becomes increasingly unable to control his or her drug seeking and use even in the face of terrible consequences.
There is no way to predict with certainty whether a person will become addicted to drugs, but there are several known risk factors. These include:
