THE MILESTONES OF OVERCOMING PAIN
As the fear drops, the pain intensity drops too. Living well, with pain or a distressing concern, is a process that can illuminate your plan for overcoming pain.
When all seems hopeless (you’re not doomed to live life like this forever) seeing a strategy where you’ve already reached various milestones on your own journey is like taking a breath of air after holding your breath for years.
Pain and psychology are tightly weaved together. When Dr. Bronnie Lennox Thompson began her PhD, she was curious about understanding why some living a life in pain are able to live a fulfilling life despite the pain, and why there are those who were not able to, through evidence-based approaches.
Here are the exciting milestones that Dr. Bronnie shared with us during our chat. Note down the ones you’ve already reached and which ones are awaiting you in your future:
Milestone 1 🎉
Receiving your diagnosis.
You fear what you don’t know. Finally making sense of what’s going on inside of you zaps that fear. Your concern is no longer mysterious when you can put a name to it, point at it, and say “this is exactly what’s happening.”
With a diagnosis, you understand what’s involved, and how you can understand what it means. You can take ownership of it, take a look under the hood, and get your tools out. Just like running a car, taming your pain requires maintenance (a little love and care), but with the right guidance, you’ll learn skills that will help you for life.
Milestone 2 🎉
Make sense of what’s happening.
Living well with pain is a process of acknowledging that you have pain, knowing that you’re not harming yourself, and being able to pick up where you left off to continue doing the things that are important to you.
Predictability, being able to understand what you can do tomorrow, or next week, allows you to take what might seem like an infinite black hole and shift the perspective away from feelings of impending doom.
Milestone 3 🎉
Put the ‘I’ back in pain.
During an appointment, your health professional might ask you about your mental health:
Are you anxious?
Are you depressed?
Able to go to work?
Able to do the things you love?
These yes or no questions paint your life like a paint by numbers painting where you only use white, black, and grey paints to follow a preset design.
Your quality of life, your beliefs and values, your dreams, and what matters to you in life are all the things that paint your life in vibrant colors. Making sense of what’s happening from your perspective gives you ownership of what your diagnosis means to you.
Take time to jot down some thoughts about this question: what are the things that are worth it to be willing to let your pain do what it does in order to do something really important to you?
You’ll build the time you need for recovery around the things that are important to you. Understanding what your pain means to you allows you to pick the moments that are ‘worth it.’
Milestone 4 🎉
Find a team of health professionals that you trust and who believe in you.
Healthcare is a collaborative process. Your expertise matters. Whoever you choose to help you, needs to respect your experiences, past and future concerns, your future dreams, and your health values.
When looking for a health professional to collaborate with, look for someone who takes the time to validate you, and listen. Someone who tailors your treatment strategy to your values follows up with you and remembers exactly who you are when you see them again.
Most importantly, find that person who understands that being human is messy and values person-centered, humanistic care.
Milestone 5 🎉
Roll up your sleeves, get your mini trowel and rake, and play in the sandbox.
The truth is: health professionals don’t have all the answers. What works for one fella won’t necessarily work for you.
We’re the lighthouse along a treacherous shoreline: there to guide you, recognize red flags, and collaborate on your personal plan, but you are the one in control of where your ship sails.
(This is also why following some fella’s ‘master plan’ on a Reddit thread might not have worked for you, even though he swears it worked for him.)
In the sandbox, you’ll learn strategies that will help you to get back to doing the things you want to do. Even if the way you do those things might look a little different than how you did them in the past.
Dr. Bronnie shared with us some skills you can play with at home, right now—
Notice. Pain is very inconsistent and it changes minute-by-minute. We’re familiar with mindfulness as a means to quiet the mind, but mindfulness is also about being compassionately curious. When something feels weird or painful, we start poking and prodding it, we can pay a lot of attention to that area, and we can be afraid of it. What happens when you start to feel sensations in your body from a perspective of curiosity?
Exposure therapy is a technique to feel the fear of pain and be willing to approach, be with, and experience the pain, in order to alter the feeling of pain. One of the ways Dr. Bronnie uses this technique is with various images of activities and ranking how you feel about those activities and sensations that arise on a scale of ‘least scary’ to ‘freaks me out’.
Milestone 6 🎉
Take charge of your future.
Flare-ups are going to happen. Having a plan that works for you makes these moments manageable, not all-consuming. Because that’s all that a moment is: a snapshot in time, and time is never static, it passes.
Your plan for the future can be as simple as recognizing the times you’re more likely to have a setback or experience an increase in pain and know the things that help you to regroup, feel better, and start getting back to doing the things you regularly do and love.
Dr. Bronnie Lennox Thompson is the Academic Leader Postgraduate Programmes in Pain & Pain Management in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery & Musculoskeletal Medicine, at the University of Otago, Christchurch. She has taught postgraduate courses in pain and pain management since 2002, while also working clinically in persistent pain management as an occupational therapist.
Her research interests are in clinical reasoning in persistent pain; daily coping processes used by people living with persistent pain; and the effect of postgraduate education on attitudes and practice of clinicians working in pain and pain management.
This information is not intended to substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a healthcare professional with any questions you may have regarding treatment, medications/supplements, or any medical diagnoses. This information is intended for educational purposes only and is in no way to substitute the advice of a licensed healthcare professional.
