January 31, W Sussex
1048 words of encouragement
What do you get if you put flour, eggs, milk and baking powder in a bowl, mix it up, pour it into a baking tin, and place it in the oven?
Yes.
A cake.
You don’t get chicken pie.
‘Fixing’
The common way to think about chronic pain, or an injury or disease or when you are simple not feeling well, is there is something wrong.
Something needs fixing.
Someone will fix you. Or perhaps a sense you need to fix yourself.
Because there is something wrong with your body or with you.
If you are not right, you must be wrong.
Our system works like this.
You have ‘something wrong’, so you go and seek help.
The help you receive varies depending on who you see…
For instance, is the person you have gone to see the right person to help you?
Brief guide to professional helpers for chronic pain:
professionally qualified
trained to help people with chronic pain — this is specific and specialist training
their approach and spirit puts you and your needs at the centre — you feel care for, heard and validated
they have experience helping and guiding people suffering chronic pain
they collaborate with you and you work together to meet your needs and work towards your picture of success
if in doubt ask about their background and experience — chronic pain is a specialist field
Treatments and interventions are designed to fix you.
Something is done to you, or you take something.
You feel better and you are fixed.
This is how it can feel and some people have this experience and hence believe this is how it works.
Indeed, sometimes people do get better in this fashion.
By things being done to them. Passive rather than active.
But not all. Many don’t.
Many experience this and feel disempowered. Especially when the treatment doesn’t work as expected.
This is common, and one of the reasons chronic pain is the biggest global health burden. In numbers, it out-does cancer, diabetes and heart disease if you put them all together.
Essentially this means the approach is not adequate.
We need an approach that can help everyone.
That is what we strive for.
Another way to look at it
You don’t need fixing because there is nothing wrong with you.
Uh?
But I am in pain, you say.
I have …….. (a diagnosis), so yes I do have something wrong.
The ‘something wrong’ bit is a judgement. An opinion.
You can come at it from another angle.
One which I would argue is empowering and insightful, resulting in positive action to get better.
To get cake, you need certain conditions as described above.
If you create those conditions described, you will get cake.
You will not get chicken pie when you open the oven.
To get chicken pie, you need to create different conditions.
When you feel pain, there are certain conditions. There is not something wrong.
There are conditions meaning pain is the experience to explain those conditions.
To ease your pain means changing the conditions.
Change the conditions and you change your experience.
Another way to think about it, is changing state.
When you change state, you feel different, you think different, you act different, the world appears different.
Pain is there for a reason. It is a message from your body and body systems that there is a need to be met.
The needs are always about you as a whole person and not just where you feel the pain — it is real, it is there, it is felt in your body. But as regular readers know, the pain is not generated where you feel it.
Understanding your needs them is important because then you can create a strategy to meet them.
When you are increasingly meeting your needs, there is less and less reason for your body systems to generate pain.
This includes:
healing from an injury
reducing inflammation that comes from injury, diagnosed conditions, stress, loneliness
connection
acceptance from yourself and others
purpose
meaning
clear life goals
healthy food
sleep
movement
exercise
letting go
being present
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