What Is the Most Important Tool for Overcoming Pain?

  Alan Gordon, LCSW                 Alon Ziv

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This excerpt is taken from an episode of the "Tell Me About Your Pain" podcast. You can listen to the full episode below, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts

Every chronic pain sufferer is searching for the key that will finally unlock their recovery. In the final episode of Tell Me About Your Pain, callers from all over the world share the tools that have been most effective in reducing or eliminating their symptoms.

Alan and Alon also talk about the various techniques they’ve covered throughout the podcast, and Alan reveals the single concept that was most important in overcoming his own pain.

Alon: Our next set of clips are about the energy that people bring to these techniques.

Andre: I’ve had back pain since I was about twenty-five years old and even though I previously managed it relatively well, or so I thought, about six months ago I had an episode that was so intense that I was unable to keep working.

Over the following couple of weeks, my pain went from bad to worse and I entered this pain-fear-activity avoidance vortex that resulted in me essentially becoming relegated to my little apartment. I couldn’t sit down for more than a moment without pain, even going to the toilet was a struggle. I couldn’t walk to the end of the street. I certainly couldn’t make it to the supermarket, so I had to get my groceries delivered. I couldn’t clean my house, and even though my partner was very happy to come over and do the vacuum cleaning or clean the bathroom, to me it was like an admission that I had lost my independence. And at 41, it was really depressing and I felt hopeless.

A couple of months ago I started reading a bit more broadly and I had a paradigm shift. I think central to that paradigm shift was your book, “The Way Out” and also using the Curable app and listening to your podcast.

There were two things that were fundamental to my recovery. The single most important thing was getting over the fear and recognizing that the pain was not actually a message from my body that it was getting more and more damaged and would just lead to a lifetime of decripitude but rather that it was just my brain and my nerves sending me a mixed-up message of danger where there was none. Once I was able to understand that and I think more importantly once I was able to observe that in my body and prove that to myself, then that was half the journey and my pain started getting better from that point almost immediately.

The second thing that I found really effective was the somatic tracking. I've always really enjoyed meditation, even though I'm really bad at it, but I got to the point where I was actually looking forward to episodes of pain so that I could just try to observe them as playfully as possible and that's what I did. I tried to be as outcome independent as possible even though I was secretly outcome dependent because I really wanted the pain to go away. But yesterday I went for my first bike ride in six months. At the weekend I went for my first bush walk in 6 months. And a few days prior to that I sat through a three-hour film and I had no pain whatsoever.

So I wanted to thank you guys. I have got my life back. I tell everyone I meet about your system - it’s completely changed the way I feel about my life and it’s given me so much hope. And I’m deeply, deeply grateful. So thank you.