health alternative blog

Loss and Acceptance ” Part Two

It is easy to talk about acceptance but it is difficult to put into practice. Accepting our recent inability to perform an important function that we feel we really should be able to do easily is hard for anyone to do. A chronic pain problem has no outward manifestation of its difficulties so other people typically assume there is no appreciable level of disability and expect us to perform normally. It is hard to accept functional loss and cope with the beliefs and attitudes of others about our ability and worth. Despite these problems there is no future in continuing with the conflict and we need to move towards acceptance of the reality of the case.

There are many examples of how we must accept the present situation and the reality of how we are. Making changes to our ways of doing things can be a very useful strategy to move us closer to our desired goals. Often however people get stuck with a particular situation and have no other choices than acceptance or conflict. There are undesirable effects from fighting against the pain and we can release ourselves from the conflict by developing our ability to accept parts of our present state. We can then finally start to apply positive strategies to our problems and increase our chances of a good result.

If the reality of the situation is not recognised then the conflict continues and along with that we are unable to pursue suggested alternatives. No-one will see why they should change the way they do things or accept poorer standards if they don’t want to give in to the pain or feel responsible for doing things for others. These feelings can obstruct the way forward towards making suitable alterations and so impede the progress which could be made. By accepting the situation to a degree by saying The present situation is my reality and I have to start from this point change can start.

We all have internal scripts which we have constructed to describe what we want to do and what we feel we are able to. These are typically not conscious but are often quite specific descriptions of what we think is going on. A good script to be able to say would be I am well and fit and able to do all the things I need to and want to in my life. However, a person with low back pain or a disabling pain syndrome would be unable to say this and their internal words might be closer to I am stuck with this pain problem for ever and it’s going to stop me doing pretty much everything. This would be quite a resigned interpretation and would have repercussions.

A negative automatic thought can repeatedly go round and round in our minds, and is one of the ways we can become depressed. New scripts can be deliberately written to replace the ones which typically recur naturally and cause negative feelings. We could say My pain condition does limit my activities to a degree but if I realistically manage and plan my life I can do most of the things that I wish to. This is a more realistic approach as situations are rarely entirely negative, allowing us to avail ourselves of the opportunities which might present themselves to try new avenues of changing for the better.

Realistic scripts have the benefit of being more positive than the typical negative ones although they should not really be positive as such as if we look through rose-tinted spectacles we will be disappointed pretty quickly when we really see where we are. A more positive approach allows us to participate in the management of our condition, perhaps with the help of a health professional, when previously any new ideas would have met with resistance.

So if we can accept the situation to some extent it is much more likely we will adopt adaptive measures to improve our condition. The typical behaviour we adopt when we have a chronic pain problem, to push through the pain until the job’s done can be altered.