Freedom from Chronic Pain

The title of this piece is that of a course which I am just completing.  Even before Peak Health Coaching was conceived, Ollie and I were ‘cutting our coaching teeth’, supporting people living with chronic pain at our local pain service in Sheffield.  That was over 20 years ago and pain science has moved on a lot since then! 

As you’d expect, we have kept up to date and our current training in pain management is in alignment with the latest research and best practice and yes, it has coaching at it’s heart.

But there is more…

I think my main aim to this point has been to support people to live with their pain, not without it.

We have always taught people to use self-management skills to live well with pain. But we are now building in the possibility that people can learn to live without overwhelming pain.  Health Coaches are ideally placed to support their patients and clients in these skills, old and new.  For some, living well with pain is better than the misery that chronic pain often affords the people it afflicts. However, perhaps there is a way out[1] or at least, a bit more hope of one, than we have been offering up to this point.

The online 8-week, Freedom from Chronic Pain programme is hosted by an American physician Dr Howard Schubiner and an Australian Somatic Psychotherapist Hal Greenham.  It takes practitioners (a good mix of therapists, medical doctors, and people with lived experience) through the latest pain science, detailed assessment, including provocative testing and interventions such as Somatic Tracking and Emotional Awareness and Expression therapy (EAET) and even some Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS). This requires a careful process of ruling-out a structural problem before ruling-in a neuroplastic pain diagnosis. ‘Neuroplastic’ is a way of describing symptoms that are generated from within the nervous system itself. This is a key concept in the rapidly emerging mind-body medicine field.

The essential message is that chronic pain is generated by an over-protective brain – which we align with.  THIS IS NOT SAYING THAT PAIN IS ALL IN THE HEAD – far from it!  Pain is real and excruciating for many and is felt in many areas of the body – it’s just not where the issue is. Treatment for neuroplastic/mind-body pain is aimed at ‘reassuring the brain’ that it is safe and that the alarm signal of severe pain is no longer needed. 

This further explains why traditional treatments and surgeries that target painful body parts and many medications just do not work that well, if at all, for most people with chronic pain.  As Prof Cormac Ryan memorably illustrated at a presentation for Flippin Pain – “We are using the wrong fire extinguisher”.

Our lived-experience colleagues, Lee and Narinder, who co-facilitate our Pain Programme at Peak Health, are already familiar and skilled with many of these approaches, that they use personally.  We are so fortunate to have them share their experience on our programme.

We recognise the importance of continuous learning and updating our own understanding. We then judge how we need to update our courses as new evidence and techniques prove their worth. We are careful not to jump on trends and fads, but our impression is that the new field of mind-body medicine and the increasing awareness of neuroplastic symptoms, feels an important development. We continually build new evidence into our courses, and ensure we work with those experts that sit at the cutting edge of innovation and progress.

If you would value more information about the training we offer, please click here.

[1] The Way Out, by Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv