Getting Help

Meeting with a counsellor to address your life with chronic pain is a big step toward positive change. With an understanding of the physical and emotional consequences of your struggles, a counsellor can help you to redefine who you are, as you learn new skills to help you cope and adapt to a life with more meaning. When you put your valued activities on hold to engage in the relentless pursuit of reducing pain, more and more of your time is spent on often futile efforts and disappointing results.

For most people, putting our effort into social contact and relationships, professional work, community involvement, parenting, recreation, and exercise, gives meaning to life. When we lose touch with these, our emotional wellness suffers and depression is never far away. However, using a mindfulness-based approach with behavioural interventions, counselling can help you to change the direction of your life and put you back in the driver’s seat. It can help you to increase the sense of control you have over your own life – rather than pain controlling it for you. Counselling can also help to develop social relationships and a new sense of self-worth to help decrease isolation and pain-related depression.