Types of psychological therapy

What is Pain Psychology?

Living with long-term pain can be very difficult and have a significant impact on your emotional wellbeing. Science and research suggest that emotions and physical pain are closely linked and can influence one another. For example, persistent pain can lead to problems with emotional wellbeing, which can influence your ability to manage persistent pain.

Pain psychology cannot make your pain go away, but it can increase your understanding of the relationship between pain and mood. We aim to help you develop tools to manage difficult thoughts and feelings which you might experience when living with pain, and explore how you respond to the pain. We encourage you to work towards doing things which are important to you in life, alongside pain.

We know that people living with pain can sometimes experience emotions such as anxiety, low mood, frustration, anger, and guilt. We also know that sometimes our pain and emotions can be linked to difficult events which have happened in the past. We draw upon different therapy approaches which are tailored to your personal experience and circumstances. However, the two main approaches are:

• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and
• Trauma focused therapies including Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (TF-CBT) and Trauma-Focused ACT (TF-ACT).

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

ACT (pronounced as the word ‘act’) gets its name from one of its core messages: to develop ways to accept what is out of your personal control, while committing to take action that will improve your quality of life.

ACT takes the view that most psychological suffering is caused by avoidance, i.e. by attempting to avoid, escape, or get rid of unwanted internal experiences (such as unpleasant thoughts, feelings, sensations, urges and memories).

Our efforts to avoid might work in the short term, but not in the longer term, and in the process, they create more distress and take us further away from living life as we would like.

ACT helps people to change their relationship with painful thoughts and feelings (emotions and physical sensations) to develop awareness of their experiences and to live in the present, and take action, guided by what is important to them, to create a rich and meaningful life.

ACT does this by:

• Teaching psychological skills, such as present moment awareness skills, to deal with your painful thoughts and feelings in ways so they have much less impact and influence over you.