United Kingdom: BACP (The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy)

[Sly Saint]

Chronic pain - what therapy can help with

What is chronic pain?

The NHS defines chronic pain as pain that continues for longer than 12 weeks despite medication or treatment. Others say it's pain that’s experienced over a long period of time or beyond the expected period of recovery or healing.

Doctors may say it's caused by nerve damage or an over-reactive nervous system response, such as in healed injuries or stress-related conditions. Or it may be due to conditions such as fibromyalgia, endometriosis, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis or a spinal injury.

Long term pain is also a feature of many poorly understood, complex, chronic conditions, such as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) or chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). And it can develop as a side effect of a medical intervention, such as an operation, or damage from a disease, such as nerve damage from diabetes.

What type of therapy is best for chronic pain?

Your counselling needs to be individual to you and your unique experience of living with chronic pain. Different types of therapy can help in different ways:

• Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) encourages you to accept your thoughts and feelings. You commit to actions to embrace the challenges you face and not avoid them.
• Compassion-focused therapy (CFT) helps you to respond to your own inner negativity with kindness and compassion.
• Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) helps you to change the way you think and what you do, by focusing on current problems and practical solutions.
• Integrative therapy draws on different types of therapies to make the counselling specific to your needs.
• Mindfulness and pacing yourself can also be useful to help you be in the moment and transform the way you relate to and manage pain.

https://www.bacp.co.uk/about-therapy/what-therapy-can-help-with/chronic-pain/

 

[Sean]

Long term pain is also a feature of many poorly understood, complex, chronic conditions, such as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) or chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).

You keep saying that, but still acting like you do understand it.

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)
Compassion-focused therapy (CFT)
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)
Integrative therapy
Mindfulness

IOW, they got nothing. All this time and money and endless Very Important conferences and studies, and wasted patients lives, and they still got nothing.