Chronic pain is a type of health disorder in which the pain lasts for a long time (months or years), or even never goes away. In turn, the persistence of this unpleasant sensation is capable of generating the appearance of other forms of discomfort and health problems; especially, anxiety and mood disorders.
In this article we will know The fundamental characteristics of chronic pain and its associated psychological treatment that is, what psychologists do to limit the discomfort generated by this alteration.
Pain can be classified into two main categories. On the one hand, there is acute pain, which informs us that damage has recently occurred in one or more tissues of the body, and that disappears over the course of days or weeks.
On the other hand, there is chronic pain, which persists most of the time for periods greater than 3 months
This last form of discomfort, in turn, can be divided into chronic neuropathic pain, in which there is no problem beyond the nervous system that can explain the pain, and chronic nociceptive pain, in which it is known. a mechanism by which painful stimulus receptor cells are activated, but these persistent processes cannot be stopped and are likely to never completely disappear.
Thus, chronic pain is a type of pain that goes from being a symptom to being a disorder in itself, because although in most cases pain has the adaptive function of warning us that something is wrong in our body, in this case the drawbacks far outweigh the possible biological usefulness (sometimes non-existent, as in the case of neuropathic pain) that provides this warning signal.
One of the characteristics of chronic pain that makes it a very complex phenomenon is that Its causes can be very variable, and it is possible to attribute the problem to alterations of the nerves, the spinal cord or even the brain. That is, its appearance can be due to dysfunctions in almost any section of the pain perception pathway, from the nociceptors to the integration of pain perception in the brain.
What is clear is that chronic pain often occurs in the absence of damaged body tissue so it is not a warning signal that is useful for the body, as it is not evidence that there is something wrong beyond the pain itself.
In other cases, chronic pain It arises as a consequence of a chronic disease or whose main cause is not completely eliminated because it is not possible with the available technology or it is too risky. The latter is what often happens with certain types of tumors.
Psychologists and the psychological treatment of chronic pain
These are some of the strategies most used in patients with chronic pain, when they go to the psychologist.
1. Cognitive-behavioral therapy
When offering psychological treatment for cases of chronic pain, we must not only address the way in which pain is perceived in the here and now; We must also deal with the fact that this health alteration can favor the appearance of psychological disorders linked to anxiety and depression.
The professionals of Psychode Psychology Institute with a presence in Madrid and Alicante, point out that the adoption of bad lifestyle habits triggered by poor management of these emotions by patients can increase the intensity and duration of pain, and that consequently the problem must be prevented. It gets worse by training the person to live with this type of stimuli.
For example, chronic pain has been found to be associated with a somewhat higher rate of heart disease, possibly a consequence of the challenge of dealing with high amounts of stress and the lifestyles to which this anxiety or distress can lead (binge eating). , sedentary life, etc.).
Thus, at Psicode they point out that it is important to make patients adopt behavioral patterns and ways of perceiving chronic pain that do not lead to a loss of control about one’s own health.
To do this, we work with patients’ ideas through cognitive restructuring, questioning those ideas that are not realistic and encouraging the emergence of more constructive ones. Furthermore, with regard to the behavioral part, the maintenance of interaction routines with the environment that are stimulating and absorbing is encouraged, so that not all of the subject’s subjective experience revolves around pain.
2. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Pain is not a phenomenon that we perceive as passive subjects, but rather part of its qualities as a subjective experience are given by the ideas that we associate with these stimuli
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, by focusing on the idea that we do not have to eliminate everything imperfect from our lives but in many cases you have to accept a certain level of imperfection, helps integrate pain into consciousness, limiting its harmful potential. At Psicode they remind us that, although it may seem paradoxical, giving great importance to not feeling any type of discomfort in the here and now is, in cases of chronic pain, part of the problem.
In psychological therapy there is a series of tools aimed at training patients in managing your attentional focus And the level of pain when faced with the same stimulus that arrives through a nerve can vary greatly depending on what we do with our attentional processes.
Mindfulness is one of the most used resources at the Psicode Institute of Psychology, and helps ensure that pain is not an obsessive source of attention that leads the person to “get hooked” on that discomfort. In this way, it is possible to value more other elements that are also present in conscious experience and that are of a much more neutral or positively stimulating character.
