Change

This is just a quick ponder on the words we use in pain management.  Quite often we talk about ‘goals’ and ‘prioritising’ and ‘planning’ and ’skills’ - as if it’s an event that will come to an end.
‘Oh I’ve done my planning, and achieved my goals’.
The team I work with has started to consider whether [...]

Positive psychology - Polyanna or Promising?

I was hoping to post on positive psychology and chronic pain, but have failed to find any specific references using these two headings - I then had a brain-wave and without waiting for someone reading this to locate something for me… I remembered the body of research in contextual cognitive behavioural therapy - mainly by [...]

Motivating people to make changes (iii)

The third of a series about using values and empathy to help people make choices
The previous two installments in this series have introduced the concepts of stages of readiness for change, rapport and empathy and appreciating that the people we work with have their own values influencing the choices they make. This paper introduces [...]

Motivating people to make changes (ii)

The second of a series about using values and empathy to help people make choices
The first installment in this series looked at why people might not be doing what we think they ‘should’ and how they might show this. This installment looks at developing rapport and reviews the essential interpersonal skills that are needed.
Rapport [...]

Motivating people to make changes (i)

The first of a series about using values and empathy to help people make choices
Most of our training in health care provision assumes that:

the people we will be working with are ready to receive our knowledge/expertise
we know more than they do (about what they should [...]

The gift of Fibromyalgia - one woman’s view

A quick link to a wonderful post by Moonbeammcqueen on her blog ‘FibromyOWgia’. I loved her representation of the opportunities that something like chronic pain can give - depending on one’s view of it. From adversity comes change and triumph and discovery. Not a bad way to view life I think. [...]

Welcome to the first post! Values

You can talk to Merrolee about this blog, it was seeing hers that ‘inspired’ me to get around to starting this blog. An idea that had, I must admit, been kicking around in my brain for quite a wee while…
Finally I got around to it…
This will be a ‘from time to time’ blog, just [...]