Stronger Than Chronic Pain: Week 4

Contents

You’ve made it to week 4!

You have done so much work in these past 3 weeks learning about chronic pain, exploring and releasing your repressed emotions, and shifting your relationship with your body and your pain.

This week, we will continue to do this work, and we will also start looking forward towards the life you are wanting to live, and start taking steps to actually start living it!

Week 4 Meeting Recording

Week 4 Exercises:

Brain training

1. Things You Would Like to Do

Look back to your list of things you would do if you didn’t have chronic pain. Find something on the list that feels doable within a week’s time. Maybe it’s taking a dance class, or doing a light workout.

What resources do you need, or steps do you need to take to make this happen? Do you need to go on your computer and find some local dance classes in your area? Do you need to get a trial membership at a gym, or buy a set of dumbbells? Figure out the actions you need to take to make this goal happen this week. 

Now, do whatever steps you can have identified that you can do in the next 20 minutes. Find a dance class that works for your schedule, put it on your planner or calendar, and sign up for the class. Find a gym you would like to do a free trial at, and sign up online to get started. Order a set of dumbbells online. 

Finally, if you have not already completed this step, look at your schedule and pick a time to do the actual thing, and write it into your schedule. Consider it an appointment with yourself. 

When the time comes to do this thing, it’s very normal to feel nervous or even scared. Tell yourself it’s okay to be nervous or scared, and tell your brain you are going to be brave and do it anyway. Leading up to the time you do the thing, and while doing the thing, use the Brain Training exercise “When You Encounter Triggers” from Week 1.

2. Facing Fears and Choosing a New Life

For this exercise, you will need a sheet of paper. Draw a vertical line down the middle, spitting the page into two long columns. 

At the top of the left column, write “Fearful Thoughts” and at the top of the right column, write, “New Thoughts.”

In the left column, write some of the fearful thoughts and ideas you have about yourself, your life, and your pain. Examples might be: “I will be in pain forever,” “My body is broken,” and “I hate my life.” 

Then, in the right column, write your thoughts and arguments against the fearful thoughts. Ideas for the examples above are, “I will recover from this pain,” “My brain has learned painful neural pathways, but my body is not broken. I am learning to build new pathways and heal my pain,” and “my life has been challenging, but I am capable of finding ways to overcome those challenges.”

Once you complete this list, I recommend that you read over it from time to time, maybe even once a day for the next week.

Writing Exercise

Dialogues Towards Understanding

In this exercise, you will write a dialogue with a person, body part, part of your subconscious mind (like internal parent or child), personality trait, yourself at an earlier age, or your future self. This is an opportunity to say whatever you need to say. You can have your conversation partner respond however you think they would respond, or you can have them respond the way you would want them to respond, which makes this exercise a practice of trauma renegotiation. 

I recommend writing the name or initials of the speaker preceding what they say, as if you were writing a script. 

Then, once you have completed writing the conversation, you are going to reflect on what you have learned from this exercise, what you gained from interaction (if anything), and the ways you have grown as a result of this relationship. 

  1. Write your conversation, script style, saying whatever you need to express, and allowing the other party to respond either how you think they would respond, or how you want them to respond. 

  2. Write the following phrase three times: “It is helpful to explore my relationship with _____.” If this feels corny or silly, remember that we are working with the subconscious, and the subconscious needs lots of repetition to integrate new information.

  3. Write a letter to yourself reflecting on the dialogue, what you have gained from this person, interaction, trait, part of yourself, etc (even if there are very negative aspects). How have you been able to deal with these topics, and how do you plan on dealing going forward?

Meditations

Dialogue with Subconscious Parts

Parts Work is a general therapeutic lens that assumes that each individual has different “parts” of our minds and psyches. In this meditation, we will communicate with two different parts of our subconscious, the inner-child-mind and the inner-parent-mind, and attempt to have a dialogue with them. If they are not able to communicate with you at this time, that is totally normal and fine. You can still communicate important things to them and trust that they are hearing you.

Working with Chronic Pain Factors

This meditation is one of my favorites as it allows some of the things we’ve been writing about to integrate and sink deeper into the subconscious. You will be picking a past hurt, a current stressor, and a coping mechanism to work with in this meditation. Don’t worry about picking them before you begin, I will talk you through the process as we go. 

Resources