Chronic Pain and Illness? Here’s How Therapy Can Help.
If you live with chronic pain and illness, you know all too well the impact of your symptoms on your day-to-day life. Add to that the difficult task of explaining the impact to your friends, family members, and work (can you say stressful?). This added stress and the full-time job that is symptom management, medication, and doctor appointments can take a toll on your mental health and even contribute to more flare-ups and symptoms. So how can psychotherapy help with chronic pain and illness? Let’s take a look!
Living with Chronic Pain and Chronic Illness
According to Statistics Canada, 45.1% of Canadians lived with at least one major chronic disease in 2021. Pain Canada reports that roughly 8 million Canadians live with chronic pain. These numbers put chronic pain and illness at epidemic levels in Canada (with similar levels of impact in other countries, including the US). One of the big issues with this is that chronic pain and illness are often invisible, meaning those living with the conditions often “pass” as “normal and healthy” and can face difficulty accessing support, healthcare, and more.
Everyone living with chronic pain and illness will be impacted differently and require different adjustments to their daily lives in order to thrive. Unfortunately, this often goes unnoticed and unaccommodated (at least without a fight), leading to negative impacts on work, relationships, hobbies, and their general quality of life. This takes a significant toll on mental health, and so begins the pain cycle.
How Chronic Pain and Illness Impact Mental Health
Have you ever gotten really nervous for a presentation? So nervous that you felt nauseous or even found yourself throwing up? If you’ve ever experienced this or something similar, you know there’s no denying the mind-body connection. As you get to know your chronic pain or illness, you learn to recognize how your physical symptoms are impacted by your mental well being. This is just one way chronic pain and illness impact your mental health. If you live with chronic pain and illness, you may also find that you struggle with:
- Feelings of depression and/or anxiety – Constantly dealing with pain and/or troublesome physical symptoms can be incredibly overwhelming and may limit, if not stop, you from engaging in all the things you love to do. It’s no wonder depression and anxiety are common among those living with chronic pain and illness!
- Loneliness and isolation – It can be hard for your loved ones to get it. Especially if they don’t have lived experience with chronic pain and illness themselves. This, combined with depression, anxiety, and physical symptoms, may lead to you withdrawing from social activities and relationships. It’s easy to feel like no one gets it, and you’re alone in what you’re dealing with.
- Anger, frustration, and helplessness – Especially when you first get diagnosed or are chasing support and diagnosis from your doctor these difficult feelings can pop up. This is totally normal and valid. Dealing with chronic pain and illness isn’t fair, and it can change the whole plan or idea you had for what your life would look like, and that’s scary!
- Sleep issues – Pain and many other physical symptoms can severely impact your ability to sleep. We all know how important sleep is to not only your physical health but also your mental wellbeing. The less sleep you’re getting, the more likely you are to notice the impact on your emotional health.
- Overall reduction in quality of life – It can become quite difficult to try to maintain your quality of life when you live with constant pain and physical symptoms. Not to mention the impact on work and relationships. Understandably, this, combined with all the other changes that come with chronic pain and illness, can lead to lower quality of life, self-esteem, and self-worth.
How Can Therapy Help with Chronic Pain and Illness?
While you may not immediately think, “Hey, I should find a therapist!” after being diagnosed with chronic pain or illness; there’s a lot that a psychotherapist can support you with. And I get it; you already have to juggle medication, doctor appointments, tests, and everything else you need to do each day just to be a functioning human. Where are you going to fit in therapy?! While therapy may be something else to add to your list of appointments, there’s a lot your therapist can help you with that may make things feel just a little bit less overwhelming.
Symptom Management
Yes, your doctor and specialists are always going to be the best first point of contact for learning to manage your symptoms with medication and other treatments. However, a therapist can be a great support in helping you recognize the impact of your emotional well being on your symptoms. Chances are your doctor has talked about limiting stress, but maybe they didn’t provide you with many actionable ways to do that. A therapist can be a great place to start understanding your stress better and find techniques that help you manage it.
The longer you live with chronic pain and illness, the more you may fall into a routine of avoidance or negotiation. This means avoiding doing one thing (often something you want to do) in order to do something you have to do, like travel to a doctor’s appointment or go to work. While this may be necessary, a therapist can help you learn to gauge your limits and support you in finding ways to schedule your life that allow you time and energy (and spoons!) to do some of the things you love as well.
Acceptance
Don’t roll your eyes just yet! Acceptance in the context of therapy does not mean accepting your suffering and symptoms and giving in to the “fate” of living life this way. Acceptance, a concept that comes from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), helps you focus on living life in line with your values, accepting the parts of life you cannot change, and using that to create a meaningful life.
For many, the onset of symptoms and the diagnosis of chronic pain or illness cause a big upheaval in everything they had planned for their lives. While some things may need to be adjusted and, in some cases, reimagined, that doesn’t mean that you can’t continue to work towards goals and live in line with your values within these new limitations. Therapy can be a great way to discover your values, set goals, and gain support as you move forward with your new life or plan.
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Emotional Support
Chronic pain and illness are exhausting. Sometimes (probably most of the time, if we’re being honest) you just want to vent, cry, scream, or whatever your preferred method of getting your emotions out is (singing loudly to emo music you loved in high school, anyone?). While there are ways you can process your feelings alone, the support of someone else is invaluable. Sometimes that may be your partner, family, or friends, but maybe you don’t want to constantly vent your frustrations over the healthcare system to the same person, or maybe your friends are a great support, like 90% of the time, but they don’t have experience living with chronic conditions. A therapist, like Stacey at Good Thanks Therapy, who has lived experience with chronic pain and illness, can be a great support and non-judgmental place to get out your feelings and thoughts without needing to over explain or edit yourself for others to understand.
Stress Reduction and Coping Skills
Chronic pain and illness can exacerbate stress, and often stress needs to be managed in order to minimize the impact on your physical symptoms. So, how the heck do you do that? Therapy can help you identify any additional major stressors, process emotions, and guide you through strategies that help reduce stress, such as mindfulness.
Similarly, therapy can help you learn more about your window of tolerance and find ways of coping with stress, big emotions, and life events that may decrease their impact on your symptoms and improve emotional regulation.
Identity Exploration
An often overlooked part of living with chronic pain and illness is the impact it has on your identity. The reality is that many of us had a different idea of who we were and how our lives would look before we were diagnosed with chronic pain or illness. Whether you have lived with your chronic condition for most of your life or it’s a recent discovery, the ways in which your symptoms have changed these aspects of your sense of self and life plans can sometimes be destabilizing.
The easiest comparison is the shift that many feel after ending a long-term relationship—that sense of trying to figure out who you are without your ex. Many people who live with chronic conditions may find themselves feeling stuck, unfulfilled, or resigned, and sometimes this has to do with not quite understanding who they are now that they have these symptoms or diagnoses. Therapy is a safe space for identity exploration, whatever that may look like for you. A therapist can support you in identifying your values, finding hobbies or interests and goals that align with them, and working towards building that new sense of self and your life moving forward.
Is your mental health impacted by chronic pain or chronic illness?
The fact is, living with chronic pain and illness can be tough, but life doesn’t need to stop just because you have this new information about your health (even though it may feel like it sometimes). In working with a therapist, specifically one that focuses on chronic pain and illness, you can process your emotions, learn coping skills, and maybe even discover new things about who you are now and the life you want moving forward, and that’s exciting!
Looking for a therapist with lived experience of chronic pain and illness? We offer virtual therapy in Ontario, Book a FREE 20-minute consult with Stacey!
