Dr's Casebook column with Dr Keith Souter: Use your imagination to help cope with chronic pain
When you think about it, pain is hard to describe. It is not an actual entity itself. It is an experience that is unique to the individual who is having it.
You cannot, after all, ‘feel someone’s pain’. And you cannot bring a pain back to mind when it has gone. You can recall that it was unpleasant, perhaps extremely unpleasant, yet you cannot bring it back. It is a bit of an enigma. As a doctor I have spent much of my career thinking about how to help people with chronic pain.
A few years ago I attended an interesting and thought-provoking art exhibition at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. The theme was chronic pain. It was really a very clever idea, because of the difficulty people have in describing their pain. As I have mentioned before, it is a bit of an enigma.
The photographs in the exhibition were portrayals of people’s perceptions of their pain. One image was a concrete strait-jacket, illustrating one person’s experience and perception of their pain. To them it was a solid thing, a constricting and an isolating thing. And there is that isolation concept again. The concrete weighs you down.
Other photographs showed red-hot wires glowing in the dark, animal scratches on stone, and gloves full of crawling ants. You can imagine the types of pain those people were experiencing. It is really the quality of the pain that they are describing.
The imagery is fascinating, because this is something that is worth trying out right now. If you have pain try to imagine what your pain looks like in a symbolic manner like this. Try thinking about the quality of the pain.
If you can do that, then you can possibly modify it. For example, if you have a pain in your back like a tight band, or a taut rope, then close your eyes and visualise that rope with a great big tight knot in it. Focus hard and mentally try to loosen the knot.
Or you may feel a burning pain and you may imagine it as a smouldering cord. Picture it in your mind as it is soaked in water, being extinguished. Or think of it as a hot metal plate that you quench in cold water, like a blacksmith at his forge.
Or if you have imagined a cold pain as an icicle, imagine it being warmed up, gradually melting away.
If you get abdominal cramp pains you might think that they are like the purse strings of an old-fashioned bag. Just imagine that bag, and picture the relief as you opening it to release the tension.
It is worth letting your creativity conjure up the image of the symptom that you have. Sit or lie down and make yourself as comfortable as you can, somewhere that you will not be disturbed. Let your mind throw up images that seem right, and when you have the image that corresponds best with the pain, use your mind to reverse the effect. As you do this so you tell yourself that you are reducing it, lessening the discomfort until it goes.
Your mind is very powerful and it is worth making it work for you if you have chronic pain. It is all part of taking control. Try doing this every day for a week. You may be very surprised at the results.