How willing are you to have persistent pain? Can you accept pain without fighting against it? If you were told your pain was going to be there forever, would you avoid important activities or would you start to get back into life again?
Recently I reviewed about 200 questionnaires completed by people attending the Pain Management Centre where I work. I was looking especially at what they’d written down as goals for coming to the Centre, and unsurprisingly, most of them were to ‘reduce my pain’ – to tolerable levels, to manageable levels, or so the person could begin ‘living a normal life’. I hate to break it to you – even the most effective medication seems to only reduce pain by about 30%, and most people wanting pain reduction are after at least a 60% reduction.
What this means is there is quite a gap between what people expect – and what they get.
Along with all those goals of reducing pain were a huge number of everyday activities that people wanted to return to – provided that their pain reduced.
I haven’t asked people those questions at the top of this post. I must admit I’m a little wary of doing so – they’re not the sort of thing people really want to hear first off when coming to Pain Management! Yet, it looks like they’re the sort of thing we might need to ask people at some point in their search for pain reduction.
It’s not easy to think about accepting chronic pain. Most of the medical people I work with think it’s a horrific thing to consider – a life with pain. And so the search for something, anything, to take the pain away. In fact, one doctor said to me it is unethical to stop looking for pain relief, and in fact he wouldn’t dream of withdrawing something that apparently reduced pain – even if it didn’t change the person’s disability one bit.
A couple of definitions here might be helpful: pain is ‘an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage’; disability is the effect of pain on function, related to the amount of interference an individual experiences from pain on their activity. Pain interference is associated with depression and anxiety, amongst other factors.
Recent studies especially those from the Bath University research group of McCracken and Eccleston, are showing that acceptance of chronic pain is strongly associated with better outcomes especially in terms of activity engagement and reduced distress. Acceptance in this context is about being willing to experience pain without trying to avoid it, control it or reduce it. The degree of acceptance is associated with engaging in activities that the person values despite experiencing pain, and ‘disengaging from the struggle to limit contact with pain’ (Fish, McGuire, Hogan, Morrison & Stewart, 2010).
In my experience, there are few people who come to a Pain Management Centre who are willing to accept their chronic pain – in fact, when someone says to me ‘I’ve come to accept my pain’, I inwardly cringe because it so often means ‘I’m resisting any accommodation of my pain into my daily life’, or ‘I’m resigned to having pain forever and life is horrid’. Part of coming to a Pain Management Centre is an expression that life isn’t working out so well, so that something is needed to help the person cope better, feel better and start to live again.
Introducing the idea of acceptance is not always straightforward. My warped occupational therapy/psychology background means that I find it easier to begin with looking at important values and how these are expressed behaviourally in activity. Contextual cognitive behavioural therapy, or Acceptance & Commitment Therapy, or other variants of these two, often suggest starting with ‘cognitive defusion’, or the language that people use to describe themselves in which the ‘who’ they are is labelled directly alongside the ‘what’ they want to do. Difficult theoretical concepts such as relational frame theory underpin this type of therapy, in which the person is helped to slightly distance themselves from the content of their thoughts (particularly negative labels).
My take on starting the journey towards acceptance is to help the person look at what is important in their life, then look at how they’re demonstrating or enacting these values. For example, if being a good parent is important, how is the person demonstrating this?
If a mother is spending most of her time cleaning the house because this has been her usual way of showing that she cares for her family, but cleaning is demanding and she feels frustrated and irritated at herself and her family because of her pain, then maybe there can be another way to show her values. I might suggest to her that she list all the ways she can show her family that she cares, and choose one to start doing.
While she starts to explore this, and to consider loosening up her belief that ‘the only way to be a good mother is to have a clean home’, it’s possible to help her review her thoughts that ‘only bad mothers have untidy homes’, and maybe consider a more flexible thought that ‘mothers who care for their family spend time with them’. By doing this, and identifying an activity that she enjoys with her family, I can start to introduce the idea that she could do this activity – and bring her pain along with her.
At this point I can start to introduce the idea of mindful attention to the whole of the activity, rather than just her pain. And we are one step closer to helping her recognise that she doesn’t need to struggle against her pain, she can instead fill her life with good things, and the pain (and especially the negative emotions around pain) can become just another aspect of her experience.
A brief questionnaire that could be used to measure this is the Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire-8, an 8-item questionnaire that is derived from the 20-item CPAQ. While the study I’ve referred to is definitely a preliminary one, and there is more work to be done on it, both the 20 and 8 item CPAQ tap into some important dimensions that examine how willing a person is to get involved in important activities, and to experience pain at the same time.
There are times when all of us will willingly go through pain – having a flu jab, running or exercising further than we’ve gone before, carrying a child when it’s too tired to walk, standing on the sideline at a football game in the cold, or waiting in a queue to pick up tickets to a good concert. Because the end result is worth it – maybe one of our jobs as pain clinicians is to find out what’s ‘worth it’ to our patients, so they too, can start to live lives doing things that they value despite pain.
Fish, R., McGuire, B., Hogan, M., Morrison, T., & Stewart, I. (2010). Validation of the Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire (CPAQ) in an Internet sample and development and preliminary validation of the CPAQ-8 Pain DOI: 10.1016/j.pain.2009.12.016
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