I recently read this monologue below, written by someone else with widespread pain and thought it might provide you with another idea about how to approach your situation. It is authentic to the person, but the words are easily relatable.

See if you find it helpful, and keep smiling as you watch the ice melt!

Many people ask me if their pain is a sign of damage, and I've included one such question as the subject of this post. See if the threads within this question relate to you or your pain and explore whether you can consider aspects of the answer to your situation.

After chatting with someone online, I was impressed with her level of knowledge on pain. The circumstances of her pain related to persistent pain following an attack of shingles. She’d had several episodes over the years, and this one had been the worst and left her with residual pain that she found difficult to get rid of despite what she had studied and read. But, of course, this doesn’t always guarantee success as quickly as someone wants because pain is an unconscious process.

How can someone overcome pain which has been present for 21 years?

Surely after being there for that long, it will be there for good?

Not so.

Pain relates to a moment in time. For example, a moment or period of trauma and persistent pain is the unconscious organism responding to a constant stream of messages filtered through a conscious mind seeing only fear and frustration at its predicament.

Have you ever been asked if you speak a particular language? French, Spanish or Mandarin, maybe. That could have happened, but I bet you haven't been asked if you speak pain. Pain has a language of its own, and if you experience persistent pain, then there is an excellent chance that you don’t speak pain. Now is the time to learn because you can choose whether the pain you feel should stay or go once you understand.

I know many of your feel frustrated with pain. My thoughts are that pain can become the voice of someone who feels so frustrated with a situation that the pain starts to speak for them.

It said no to more physical tasks.

It said no to more emotional loads.

It said no to more psychological effort.

And the role it took in the moment the pain started was a protective one because that person may have found it so hard or not had the choice to do anything other than keep going.

Think of that very stressful time in your life (projects and high-pressure deadlines at work/house move/new puppy etc.) – anything that pushes your coping capabilities. That can include uncertainty that we ask for and like, e.g., work, sport, challenges we enjoy achieving and overcoming; and then there’s uncertainty we didn’t ask for, e.g. more work and more deadlines than we’d prefer, losing out on six new houses and the puppy doing a poo on the kitchen floor every morning!!!!)

Swearing was just one of this man's habits of getting out of bed every morning after playing golf. So I asked him to look at a few more, and he listed five that involved him, his wife and his workmates.

Think of that very stressful time in your life (projects and high-pressure deadlines at work/house move/new puppy etc.) – anything that pushes your coping capabilities.

That can include uncertainty that we ask for and like, e.g., work, sport, challenges we enjoy achieving and overcoming; and then there’s uncertainty we didn’t ask for, e.g. more work and more deadlines than we’d prefer, losing out on six new houses and the puppy doing a poo on the kitchen floor every morning!!!!)

In these stressful situations, we use the skills to deal with fighting these fires that have proved successful to use in the past.

Interactions with medical practitioners are pivotal in determining how that medical problem will progress. For example, it doesn't matter what treatment occurs if the relationship between the patient and therapist is not grounded in trust, compassion and a sense of safety. In this post, I describe one such interaction between and patient and a spinal consultant where the scenario involved the patient receiving news regarding a recent MRI scan.

Pain is a danger signal. It's a message for you to attend to yourself and investigate why you have a painful experience. First, you must determine if you need to change those circumstances or continue with the perceived risk. The unconscious system senses and manifests that process to your conscious reality as pain.

There are times when pain is less in someone's life. Holiday time is one of these moments when someone who suffers from persistent pain sees a change in their pain pattern. It is puzzling to them, so to reconcile that phenomenon, they have to gain some understanding of what is happening to them.

It is funny how the memory of pain can be exact and yet blurred. Dave presents his story about his low back pain, which he felt had been an issue for five years when we first discussed it.

You might have heard many people describe how their pain worsens at different times of the year or relates to various weather conditions. For example, it is common for people to say how their arthritis is terrible in the winter or their pain is worse when it is cold. There are many variations of this, and for the person experiencing their symptoms, the changes are genuine.

Here is an exercise that you can use whether you are in pain or working with people experiencing pain. It gives evidence to the individual experiencing pain. It is fascinating to use in a clinical setting when you’re looking for a way to start to help people interpret the foundation of their pain and get buy-in when looking to reverse the process.

When we feel pain or have to assess patients with pain, there is a default mechanism to search out damage, injury or pathology. It is sometimes a prejudice that blights western medical practice, and it is a viewpoint that I have been guilty of over the years.

An extinction burst is a common experience when someone is starting to recover from persistent pain, but what is it? This is when there is a ‘flare’ in someone's pain without a significant noticeable trigger that the patient recognises. Often it appears when the person has a gap in their symptoms and feels like they are doing well.

Jennie tells her story and recollects decades of pain. The story has a happy ending with her description of how she learned to recognise the cues to her pain and the route of reversing it. It is liberating to hear and can inspire others on their own journey and recovery from pain.

Pain or fatigue is contextual. It affects the system overloaded through the stress response or the system neglected during the stress response. Warnings appear before pain or fatigue, but our focus is so intent on what we are stressed about that we miss, ignore, push past, or fight the earlier sensations.

Heather describes a double whammy of persistent pain with it affecting her shoulder and her wrist. She meets people along the way who inspire her to see that recovery can be possible. In this case, it was her physiotherapist and she inspired her so much that Heather now coaches others on their recovery from pain. A great story of an amazing recovery.