Welcome
…in this Blog lies understanding and hope for pain sufferers.
Welcome to the Unfurl Wellness Blog. After nearly 20 years of working with patients with chronic pain I believe that understanding pain just might be the key to unlocking true health and wellness. Please read on to learn how this blog might be helpful to many people, not just chronic pain sufferers.
Do you struggle with physical or emotional pain? Do you feel like the healthcare system is failing you? Are you running from provider to provider getting no answers while your life continues to shrink, and gets harder and harder to manage? Do you feel like you are in an endless downward spiral with no one sending you a lifeline?
Or maybe you are just toughing it out. Pain persists, but you are getting on, plowing through and accepting the pain and the ways it has changed your life, the activities you avoid. It’s good enough. But if only……
Or are you a healthcare practitioner who is frustrated by patients with chronic pain? Do you feel that you lack the tools to properly treat them? Do you wonder why none of the specialists you are sending them to are finding the answer? Are these the patients you wish you could wipe off your schedule?
Perhaps you are a trainer or a coach. You are feeling helpless when it comes to addressing your clients’ struggles with physical or emotional pain. You are used to telling clients they should ‘get that x-rayed,’ ‘have it looked at,’ because you fear that something serious could be wrong with your clients who complain about pain. How can you help and still stay in your lane?
Maybe you are an educator. You want to see your students excel and avoid the pitfalls of drugs, alcohol, over-eating, under-eating, etc. But even with all of the education and tools provided, some kids still fall through the cracks. You might be missing an understanding of what drives these behaviors in the first place…physical or emotional pain.
Or maybe you are just curious to learn more about pain. You have a loved on who is struggling and you don’t know what to say anymore. Nothing that worked for you has worked for them so you are giving up, distancing yourself. Trying to stop them from talking about it because you think it’s feeding into their problem.
Maybe you don’t have chronic pain, but you want to understand your body and mind better. You will learn not just about chronic pain, but about all pain and why understanding how it works and how you respond to it is essential to your health and well-being.
Then you are in the right place. Chronic pain is frustrating and overwhelms not just the pain sufferer, but their loved ones, caretakers, educators and providers. You are not alone. In the US alone nearly 25% of the population is dealing with chronic pain, and that doesn’t include emotional pain!
Thankfully pain research has been exploding over recent years. Over the course of reading this blog you are going to understand pain and yourself like never before. You are going to hear my nearly 20 years of experiences as a practitioner who loves working with this patient population. I will share with you the pain neuroscience that I have learned as a Therapeutic Pain Specialist, the connection between mind and body, what works and why, what happens to your brain, nerves and tissues when pain is chronic, and how we can address those changes. We will even discuss how pain is impacting the world around us, where we see it in books, song, and media, and how we can use our relationship with pain to improve ourselves and our communities. You will be in awe of your amazing body and mind and learn to work with them in better and more effective ways. I will share the evidence based tools that I have used to get patients back to living, so you can put them to use for yourself.
Let’s start with some basic Tenets of Pain.
These are essential understandings we have about pain that we all must accept in order to have a healthy relationship with pain, our bodies, minds, and each other. Be aware of how you react to them as it will provide insight into your relationship with pain. Simmer on them. In future posts we will dig deeper into many of these and explore how they impact our lives.
Pain is a universal and essential part of life.
We need pain to live, survive, and thrive.
Accept that pain serves a purpose and any expectations or attempts to live a pain free life are not only futile, but damaging.
Pain is always alerting us to something that we need to address.
It is our alarm system.
The key to properly addressing pain is understanding what we are being asked to address.
This is sometimes complex work (see pain neuromatrix to start to understand why)
It is what I love about helping people with pain.
Pain can be physical, pain can be emotional, mostly it is both.
Any pain experience will involve a physical and an emotional component to varying degrees.
There is no direct correlation between the severity/intensity of a pain experience and the degree to which someone is injured.
This means you should not be afraid of your pain experience.
Curious - yes, fearful - no.
Comparing pain is worthless.
The healthcare community knows this well. We can compare pain levels across time for one patient (this is helpful). But we have NO WAY to objectively compare my pain to your pain. We will definitely dig into this one in a future post.
Lastly, I want you to understand the break down and purpose of this blog. Each post will include a photo of something beautiful. Take a moment to appreciate it. This is a key to healing and will be discussed in a future post.
Each post will include a quote about pain or a related subject. This is to remind you that pain is universal. It is being talked about everywhere and has been for centuries. You are not alone. My hope is that the quotes will give you impactful and memorable take aways that you can carry with you until the next post.
While this blog is intended to help you with your pain journey, it is not intended to replace physical or mental healthcare. I encourage you to use the posts as discussion points with family members, friends, spiritual guides, and healthcare practitioners. Reflect and use the information and see how it shifts your life. But please, don’t use it and ignore something that needs to be addressed. Successful treatment of pain often requires the guidance of a skilled professional (or two).
I not only hope to teach you, but to continue to learn from you. I welcome any respectful feedback, questions, stories, and nuggets of wisdom that you would like to share. They may inspire a future post! I too am learning. What I know about pain today is nothing like what was taught to me in PT school 20 years ago. The next few years will continue to reveal more knowledge. This is why we say that we are ‘practicing the art of medicine.’ It is ever evolving, full of nuance, and very individualized. The words in this blog reflect my experiences, not all experiences. One of the greatest reasons I want to create this blog is to continue to widen my knowledge while changing the way we think and address pain in today’s world.
Lastly, I hope each post will be positive or end on a positive note. There is so much negative in what is placed in front of us. We will discuss why this is, and how it is negatively impacting our health in a future post as well. My aim is to provide something different, something hopeful.
Until next week. (Or not) I will do my best to keep the posts regular and steady, but like you, my life is busy. I am not generating these with Artificial Intelligence, but with my own. Sometimes life interrupts my plans for excellence. Please don’t fret if I miss a week or post a day or two late. This way I can enjoy whatever popped up to shift my schedule and you can enjoy whatever fills yours.
With compassion,
