Dealing with chronic pain
There is a tremendous fear, fear that no matter what, anything you do is going to make the pain worse so you just don’t do anything. You don’t make plans; you become more and more inactive. You isolate yourself.
Chronic pain can alter a person’s life and every part of it, but if you or someone you love suffers from chronic pain, there is hope and help. Chronic pain is not a disease, but might be a symptom of a disease, the effect of a disease or cancer-related, or the residual of an accident. It can be brought on in many different ways and for many reasons. These include lower back problems, arthritis, cancer, repetitive stress injuries, headaches or fibromyalgia.
Chronic pain can also include nerve injury from diabetes, shingles, infections, operations, amputation or other neurological conditions.
In fact, chronic pain is the primary cause of adult disability in the United States, according to Partners for Understanding Pain, a consortium of more than 50 organizations that have an interest in pain treatment.
Chronic pain doctors and therapists will tell you that pain can overtake a person’s life and future. It can even affect identity because the pain changes an individual’s personality and outlook. Every day can become a test instead of a joy.
What Is Chronic Pain ?
Pain that lasts longer than six months is considered as
chronic. The pain may come and go, or it might be present
every day. Chronic pain is occasionally invisible to
others, but it absorbs a person’s ability to function.
Sometimes called persistent pain, it can be stressful for
both the body and the soul and requires careful, ongoing
attention to be appropriately treated. Chronic pain is
often intractable, as sometimes the cause of the pain
cannot be removed or treated.
But the physical impact is just one area pain affects.
Chronic pain can affect every area of a person’s life.
When individuals wake up every day in pain, live every day
in pain and go to sleep every day in pain, it becomes very
frustrating and can become very depressing.
Losing Your Life
Frustration and depression are the biggest obstacles
victims of chronic pain must contend with. Aspects of
chronic pain can take over a person’s focus of
consciousness.
Chronic pain tends to narrow one’s focus of activities. It
pervades a person’s daily life activities, social
interaction and productive hours. It has powerful
psychological and social consequences, much of which is
due to a great number of brain areas that are activated by
chronic structural problems. Some of the same areas are
what the brain tissues use to focus upon interests,
motivation, sense of well-being, pleasure and even focus
of attention.
Further, pain can affect a patient socially, spiritually
and financially.
“It can lead to depression and withdrawal, they don’t
want to be around other people and they can lose their
job. Spiritually, it can make them disheartened, they can
lose faith.”
Although chronic pain can threaten your hopes, pain
management techniques can offer hope.
Pain management techniques
For people who are victims of chronic pain, the management
of their affliction becomes a lifestyle. Coping with pain
is not only about with holistic alternatives it is about
lifestyle choices. By looking for a way to make pain
tolerable it is easier to create an atmosphere
of acceptance, to devise coping strategies, and to evolve
a lifestyle that revolves around the notion of planning
the defense against the first drink or drug. Of course it
is also more than this.... it is also about making the
quality of sobriety or abstinence from drugs or other
addictions pleasurable. A high quality and lasting
recovery is well planned, manageable and enjoyable.
These are some of the characteristic ways people attend to the program of recovery:
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To have a support group | |
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To have a daily plan | |
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To have a way to ease the pain | |
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Meditation | |
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Acceptance | |
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Exercise | |
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Self care | |
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Understanding the causes of pain | |
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Taking sensible precautions against allowing it to become even worse | |
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Seeking out balanced reliable medical treatment if needed | |
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Trying strategies and varieties of strategies until settling upon a program which is right for you. | |
When someone who suffers from pain has made
the decision to put recovery first the time has come to
develop a relapse prevention strategy. This might mean that
you or your loved one needs support groups. This may also
mean that he or she may need more than one. If the choice is
to go to AA for example and the person suffers from
chronic
pain and a pain killer addiction than just AA may not be
sufficient. Someone who suffers from Alcoholism alone may
simply not understand what it is like to be in constant pain
and of course the related problems like lack of sleep, worry
born of fatigue, and other conditions which come about
because of the ongoing, droning nature of the affliction. It
is advisable to extensively search out the kind of support
available to you in your town. Making sure that the group
you settle for does in fact deal with your affliction, don't
just be attracted to people you like or meetings that are
fun. Ask your self ...is this really helping me deal with my
problem? Which is pain? A good place to start would be by
looking up 'pain management' in your city phone directory or
do internet searches on that topic.
A daily plan must start and end with management of pain.
Unless the victim is aware of its effects and the risks it
poses to sobriety, side effects can creep up on slowly with
out warning.
Don't fall into the trap of just accepting the discomfort of
pain. There are new techniques for pain management being
discovered, invented and created every day. Keep up with
them. Try them all.
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Warning: if you have
moderate depression or suicidal tendencies please
seek the advice of a doctor/ therapist or dial
9-1-1.
