Why Go to Therapy for Chronic Pain?

It’s a fair question! I can easily imagine the frustration that comes over a person when a doctor suggests speaking to a mental health professional about very real, very debilitating physical pain. While there is increasing knowledge and research about the difficulty of managing day to day tasks with chronic pain, it is still something you do not “know” unless you have been there. You are the expert on your body, and you know when something isn’t right.

Managing chronic pain through therapy is about feeling understood and seen, as well as improving your quality of life. Over time, pain can lead to other conditions such as depression, anxiety, and sleep disturbance. Some of these can occur because fear of inducing more pain may lead to avoidance of certain activities that were once enjoyable. When social activities are missed, it is natural to feel left out. One can easily begin to question if things will get better when unable to spend time with friends and family. When avoiding physical activity, soreness can deepen and worsen already existing pain, which can also cause anxiety around starting new physical activities.

This can be a great place for group therapy to come in. As much as family and friends might want to help, they don’t always understand what the day to day struggles or limitations might be. Meeting some other people “who get it” can be the start of belonging and feeling understood. Building a community based on shared experience helps you realize that you are not alone. One on one therapy can also help by individualizing the approach to each person’s experience. Individual work could even be done alongside group therapy. One helpful framework that I look at chronic pain through is ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). ACT begins with the understanding that you have had painful experiences (in the case of chronic pain this is more literal), and wish to avoid exposing yourself to more pain in the future. From there, you can explore what matters to you most. What do you value? What experiences or people do you want to have in your life? Finding acceptance, and questioning what areas of your life you can make peace with, can be one of the hardest parts of ACT. This is different from being told to “let it go.” It is more like embracing your experience and truth, and committing to some action that allows you to grow closer to the life that you want to have. What that looks like for each person will be different.

There are many different therapies that can help with chronic pain. Beyond any one approach, the goal is to give you a place to grieve loss that you have experienced as a result of ongoing pain, to care for yourself with compassion, and find ways to make meaningful connections with who and what you love.