Welcome to the continuing series Why You Should See a Pain Management Psychiatrist. This week we’ll look at how supportive therapy can be useful to you.
Supportive therapy consists of helping people cope with a difficult situation through listening and support, problem-solving, and instilling hope. Supportive therapy can be helpful in many ways to patients with pain.
1. Telling your story
Chronic pain is, for many, a life-changing situation. Research by Viederman and others has shown that telling your story to someone who listens, cares and responds is important. In addition to concrete help, exploring how a life-changing situation fits in with your life story is beneficial. “Life Narrative” work has been done with patients with cancer and is very positive.
As well, sometimes your friends and family give the message that they don’t want to continue hearing about pain and its consequences. Having a place to talk about and make sense of your experiences is necessary, and can happen in supportive therapy.
2. Ongoing adjustment
With chronic pain, you don’t adjust to 1 situation and then go about your life. Chronic pain usually requires on-going adjustment, as your condition changes. As well, other things in your life change, and your pain will impact your life differently at different points.
For example, when you have little kids, not being able to do some activities with them can be discouraging and require creativity to work around. In contrast, when your kids are older, they may require less physical interaction. But then, perhaps, the financial stress of not working may affect your family more. Having a place to work through some of these issues is important.
3. Family support
As you know, your pain affects not just you, but your family and friends too. Having your family get support during difficult times is useful, too. In my practice, I often see not just the person with pain, but a spouse or family, too. A good resource for families is: Surviving a Loved One’s Chronic Pain.
Readers, in what ways have you found supportive therapy helpful?
Other articles in this series:
- Why comprehensive treatment works better
- Benefits of a psychiatric evaluation
- Treatment of psychiatric symptoms
- Using psychiatric medications for pain
- Learning psychological skills
- Making positive behavioral changes
- Making positive psychological changes
- Benefits of supportive therapy
- Benefits of a pain support group
- New brain-based treatments
Cartoon from European Federation for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the Public Sector.
4 responses so far ↓
terry // Jun 28, 2010 at 8:37 am
You are so right when you say that friends and even family don’t want to hear about your pain and it’s consequences after a while. Especially if one has been in pain for years.
My therapist not only helped me through what I call my crisis period (accepting that I have chronic pain, not an injury that can be rehabbed/that my joint replacement surgery was not successful/ that it took over 2 years for my GP to refer me to a rheumatologist) but also in recognizing some acute stressors and how they contributed to my pain.
Now that I am getting some moderate gains in pain control (after a year of combined treatment and talk therapy) I need her help in understanding that some days I don’t need the behaviors of a sick person. After three and a half years of daily debilitating pain, it’s challenging for me to adapt on those days I have less pain and quit acting like a “sick person”. Bearing in mind I will never be the person I was before all this, my therapist is trying to help me shape a future with the understanding it won’t be “what I had planned for myself at this age(56)
.
She has also helped me cope with the side effects of various meds and treatments, especially the ones that did not work.
There is a great deal of value in having a partnership for an hour a week, as opposed to a 20 minute office visit once a month. And it relieves the pressure on my husband to have a professional advising and assisting us in this journey.
Terry
How to Cope with Pain // Jun 28, 2010 at 10:30 am
Thanks, Terry. That’s a helpful explanation of how you’ve worked with your therapist.
Mary // Jun 28, 2010 at 10:32 pm
Great topic. It takes courage to share about your pain. You may risk isolation or rejection. But suffering without support is isolating in itself. Being able to accept your circumstances and ask for assistance serves not only us, who have the pain, but helps others understand where we are coming from. The old line “you look to good to be ill” is what others are forced to think unless we take time to educate them regarding what is really going on inside our bodies. And I have found that keeping secrets serves noone.
Mary
http://www.bluestarmoon.wordpress.com
Egrace // Jul 7, 2010 at 5:08 pm
I absolutely love the cartoon!! Sometimes a benefit of having supportive therapy for pain is that I can remember the person who knows my story, has listened to me and has coached me. That person is here with me in my memory no matter what I think I hear anyone else say.
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