Everyone has experienced pain from an injury, or a surgery, or just because of normal wear and tear on the body. But what happens when pain is either chronic or it keeps coming back? For millions of people, pain, or the anticipation of pain, is a daily event. And it is natural and normal for those with pain to try and find the root cause of the pain and get someone to fix what’s broken. At the very least, we hope for medicines that will get rid of or reduce the agony. But persons suffering from chronic pain are often left feeling that the medical system has abandoned them. Feelings of anxiety, anger, depression and helplessness are all too common, and the mental world in which they live becomes a nightmare: as great a problem as the original source of pain.

Psychological treatment for chronic pain is now considered a mainstream part of an interdisciplinary treatment approach. Although it is still common for people to think that a psychologist only treats mental illness, the role for a psychologist in pain management goes well beyond working with someone’s emotional reactions to pain.  Typically, pain psychologists will offer some type of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), which is consider the “the gold standard” of psychological pain treatment. CBT works by helping you learn to recognize the importance of your thoughts, your emotions, and your behaviors in response to pain – and gives you the skills to do something about each of these reactions.

Can psychologists reverse the physical pathology that may have caused the pain in the first place?  No. But we can teach those suffering from pain a way to better manage it. Think of chronic pain as a chronic illness, like diabetes is a chronic illness. You don’t expect it to go away, you expect to manage it. Doing so improves mood, gets you out of bed, and lowers the ‘stress thermostat’, all of which reduce pain levels and help people regain lost function. The end result is that people are freed up to live their lives despite having a chronic pain condition.