How Acceptance And Commitment Therapy Can Help Chronic Pain
Living with chronic pain can be a hard thing to accept. Acceptance and Commitment therapy is a form of cognitive behavioural therapy that can be used to help treat chronic pain. How does it work? Let’s learn the science!
ACT looks at problems by acknowledging social, verbal, emotional, and other sensory influences on behaviour. People living with chronic pain often spend a lot of time fighting their pain. They try anything and everything to change their pain experience. They get massages, physiotherapy, acupuncture. They take medications. They avoid exercise, or only do a small amount of movement that feels okay. They constantly check in with their body to see how activities made them feel, seek new information and obsess over the pain experience. Although in the short term these behaviours can be beneficial, and yes some can be beneficial in the long term as well, they all require a level of fighting against the pain, instead of acceptance.
ACT aims at helping you become psychologically flexible. Psychological flexibility is defined as “the capacity to persist or to change behavior, including conscious and open contact with discomfort and other discouraging experiences, guided by goals and values” (Feliu-Soler, A., Montesinos, F., Gutiérrez-Martínez, O., Scott, W., McCracken, L. M., & Luciano, J. V. (2018). Current status of acceptance and commitment therapy for chronic pain: a narrative review. Journal of Pain Research, 11, 2145–2159. https://doi.org/10.2147/JPR.S144631). ACT invites you to look at all the different things that you have tried in order to change your pain. How did they help in the short term? The long term? What have they cost you? In particular, ACT invites you to look at your values in your life and how you can live according to them, despite having pain.
In acceptance of pain, ACT invites you to embrace the entire pain experience. Just as you would give your child an umbrella in the rain and have yourself become wet, embracing what one would think is a negative and uncomfortable experience, you can do the same with your pain. This does not mean that you give up on your pain, but instead, you are willing to look at your pain in a different light. ACT helps you to look at how willing you are to experience your pain while living in accordance with your values. People often find that when living in alignment with their values, they are able to withstand more pain and distress as what they are doing aligns with what they want in their lives.
Studies have shown that these principles of ACT have helped pain by improving pain related anxiety, helping people work towards valued goals, and lower pain intensity and pain catastrophizing, among other things (https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-addiction-connection/202311/acceptance-and-commitment-therapy).
Are you interested in using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for your chronic pain? You can access my ACT for Chronic Pain course on Insight TImer HERE.
Live in British Columbia? You can work one on one with me by booking in HERE.