Using tools of psychological flexibility to redefine your relationship with pain
Chronic pain often leads to fear, anxiety, and avoidance behaviors, or what is known as experiential avoidance. People stop engaging in activities that they associate with pain, often abandoning hobbies they enjoy. Unfortunately, behaviors that are intended to reduce pain can actually wind up causing them to focus on it even more. Spending more time trying to ‘solve’ pain than enjoying life can become a negative spiral where pain becomes the center subject and managing it becomes a full-time job. Ultimately, this results in even greater dissatisfaction with life, with equal or more pain.
Attempts to avoid pain can often cause more harm than good, both to your body and to your peace of mind.
A Different Path:
Approaches such as ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) aim to enable people to see how they can improve and enjoy their lives even with painful sensations.
The heart of this approach is called Psychological Flexibility which encourages people to approach unpleasant thoughts, emotions, memories, and sensations from a place of acceptance while consciously committing to behaviors that have valued ends.
In this workshop, we’ll explore these questions:
Are you running away from pain and consequently avoiding the life you really want?
Can you learn to walk with your pain in a chosen direction in order to live your life more fully?