Are you someone who suffers from chronic pain or chronic illness and also finds yourself struggling with depression or the effects of childhood trauma? Do you feel like you never got a break because of how rotten your early life was, only to be beleaguered by a chronic condition later on and feeling like things are never going to get better? They can, but it is important to connect the dots as part of the journey of recovery.
Chronic Pain and Chronic Illness are Major Problems in Our Society
Despite having such advanced modern life and such tremendous advances in healthcare in our world today, there are many, many people who suffer from chronic pain and chronic illness. While some of these individuals have become dependent on opioids in the effort to treat them, they have inevitably wound up causing so much more harm because of relying on a treatment that was never able to eradicate the problem. The unbelievable costs of this epidemic continue to rise in terms of healthcare dollars expended and lives ended because of overdose deaths. With such tremendous devastation it would help to know where things started to go wrong in these peoples’ lives.
Chronic Pain Often Starts with the ACE’s
Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE’s, are the source of so many of the woes of those who suffer from chronic pain and illness. These range from incidents of abuse by caregivers to witnessing abuse of family members, family mental illness, substance abuse and dependence, and incarceration of family members growing up. While having these experiences in your background don’t by themselves cause chronic pain and illness, they very often go hand in hand. The chronic pain can arise if the trauma from these events goes untreated for long enough, and your vulnerability factors to them lead to you contracting them. One good example is back pain, which is highly associated with depression.
What Helps Break the Cycle of Chronic Pain and Mental Illness
Believe it or not, along with good pain management techniques, therapy help from someone experienced in treating chronic pain and chronic illness can make a big difference in helping you recover from these and an associated mental illness, such as depression and PTSD. Treatment methods like EMDR can be excellent to treat both the chronic pain and the underlying mental illness, too. They help you focus on what helps treat the pain effectively without medications and also what helps treat the underlying trauma that helped give rise to it. Your brain and body are connected in so many ways that helping one almost always helps the other. Of course, it is important to treat the physical aspects of chronic pain and chronic health conditions, but at some point there needs to be attention given to the emotional aspects of the problem. These can range from the depression involved in having a condition like diabetes for your entire life to the effects of childhood abuse or neglect that somehow show up as physical pain. This is called somatization and it happens a lot, especially in certain cultures.
What I Can Do to Help Treat Chronic Pain and Chronic Illness
I’ve been working with people who suffer from chronic pain and chronic health conditions my entire social work career, and can attest to the improvements people can make in their lives by getting the right combination of treatment for these and for mental illnesses related to them. While there is almost no overnight remission with any of these conditions, life can become meaningful and enjoyable again. If you’re not sure if I can help you with your unique set of chronic conditions, feel free to reach out to me for a free 20-minute consultation by calling the number at the top of this page or filling out a form below. I will get back to you as soon as I can and we can schedule a time to talk so you can find out for yourself if I can help. Then it becomes a matter of your willingness to try different things that can help improve your mood and overall sense of well-being. Finding the right combination of practices and techniques can unlock a new sense of empowerment and agency in your life that can become the difference between just surviving and truly being on the road to recovery in every sense of the word!
Visit our page on depression therapy to learn more about how Scott can help you with chronic pain and chronic illness.
About the author: Scott Kampschaefer, LCSW is a private practice therapist in Frederick, Maryland. He has an extensive background in working with depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder at a clinic for older adults with these disorders in Austin. He now works with adults and adolescents 14 and up in private practice. His most recent book is titled The 5 Pillars of Addiction Recovery and is available for purchase on Amazon and in paperback on this website.