Living & coping with chronic pain [1 simple & effective tip]

How can you live and cope with chronic pain? In this article, we provide an option to test what happens to chronic pain if we use a simple, yet effective tip. Read along.

Foreword: Your doctor is qualified, not this tip for managing chronic pain

Chronic pain is a very tricky topic. This article is not intended to alleviate chronic pain, but it is only intended to give a little more space to the feelings and emotions that go with it. Make sure to at least seek help from your doctor, and not necessarily from this article.

Feel free to reject this article, but also feel free to test it out. The purpose of this exercise is only to bring the emotions into consciousness, instead of hiding them. You learn to pay attention to what the unconscious wants to say.

What is this technique based on?

The tip presented in the next section is based on the following ideas:

• Pain that lasts for a long time (more than 6-8 weeks) is the result of emotions that have not been addressed at the conscious level. They come from the unconscious level. So when you are in pain, you are not paying attention to anything you are feeling. You are avoiding it at all costs.
• If the pain has intensified, you have. That means that you are in charge. If you can strengthen the pain, you can also weaken it.
• This technique is also based on the mindfulness principle of paying attention to our feelings, instead of distracting ourselves.
• With this exercise, we begin to feel our emotions extremely associated .

Chronic pain? That took a lot of dissociation.

Thus, how does the exercise go for living and dealing with chronic pain?

With the exercise below, we will – to put it bluntly – ‘meditate away’ our pain by finally feeling our emotions. Start with a formal exercise. Take some time for yourself and sit down especially for this.

Important: the exercise below was developed by the Tad James Company.  On this page I am just making a small citation of the official work you can learn at the Tad James Company.

1. Check the Ecology: Is It Okay to Feel Emotions?
2. If you are currently in pain, how intense is the pain on a scale of 1 to 10?
3. ⇒ Which emotion do you feel now? Answer with, “I feel …”
   Really make sure you feel an emotion . Pain, for example, is not an emotion. Also, ‘Why does this have to happen to me so necessary’ is not an emotion. We only want real kinesthetic emotions. No dissociations and no intellectualizations.
4. Ask the question several times. It can safely be stated dozens of times. It may well be that the same emotion is mentioned several times in a row. If the answer isn’t emotion, ask the question again. It must be an emotion.
5. After asking the question from step 3 a number of times, ask, “At what level is your pain now (scale 1-10)?”

After you have done this exercise, continue to pay attention to your emotions for the rest of your life whenever the pain is a problem. Make this a habit. So you do the exercise every time you feel pain. It takes some time to build a new habit, but know that it is all about feeling your emotions . If it doesn’t work, it’s because you’re not feeling your emotions.

Extra tip: use the metamodel to get to the core of the pain

The client may label an emotion. By asking further questions (which is possible with the metamodel ), you can get deeper and deeper to the real emotion at stake.

Extra Mindfulness Tip for Pain: Breathe to the Pain

Breathe to where you experience tension or discomfort or pain. Exhale slowly.