excerpt from Living Beyond Your Pain by JoAnne Dahl, Ph.D., and Tobias Lundgren, MS

There’s a kind of dividing line between where pain ends and the suffering your pain causes you begins. This same line marks the difference between the aspects of your pain experience that you have control over and the ones you don’t. ACT draws this line between the physical pain you feel and the way pain is interrupting or inhibiting your life, understanding them as two different kinds of pain. We call the first one “clean pain.” It’s a simple, immediate, physical sensation that tells us something’s wrong. An aching back, the sore wrists of carpal tunnel syndrome, tender spots, an old ankle injury that flares up regularly—these things are all clean pain.

What we call “dirty pain” is something quite different. Dirty pain is all the reactions you have to your physical pain. Dirty pain is the things your mind tells you about your physical pain. It’s the epithets that run through your head when you do something that puts you in pain. It’s the avoidance behaviors you engage to keep yourself from feeling pain. Dirty pain is your attempts to relieve yourself of pain where relief may not be possible.

excerpt from Healing Yoga for Neck and Shoulder Pain by Carol Krucoff E-RYT

Just as postural habits, such as forward head, can contribute to neck and shoulder pain, our psychobiological habits, how we respond emotionally and physically to stress, may also play an important role. For example, when we’re faced with fear, anxiety, or other stressors, one of the most common reactions is to tighten muscles in the upper back, shoulders, and neck—in effect, lifting the shoulders up toward the ears. It’s almost as if we’re trying to protect our heads the way a turtle draws its head and limbs into its shell. Other common reactions to stress that involve the neck and shoulders include teeth grinding, lip pursing, and other facial grimaces, along with finger drumming, thumb twiddling, and various forms of fidgeting.

excerpt from The Holistic Baby Guide

It is unfortunate that your baby can easily develop recurrent and chronic ear problems. At about six months, babies lose the maternal antibodies that protected them from common viral and bacterial infections. After that age they become susceptible, and they need to develop their own antibodies to these pathogens. If one of these viruses or bacteria happens to cause an ear infection, then your pediatrician may prescribe antibiotics. This is often the beginning of recurrent ear problems. Continuing to treat the fluid that collects in the middle ear or repeated red eardrums with more antibiotics just exacerbates the problem. And sometimes babies will have these ear problems even if they don’t get antibiotics. In this chapter you will learn the reasons that these ear problems tend to plague babies and find out how to cure them.

excerpt from 10 Simple Solutions to Chronic Pain

Depression afflicts 50 percent of chronic pain patients (Fishbain et al. 986), and some have estimated the figure to be much higher (Romano and Turner 1985). Most experts agree that symptoms of depression occur following the onset of pain and are more likely to be present in people who are psychologically susceptible (Sullivan et al. 2001).

In addition, people with chronic pain seem to experience more problems with anxiety than the general population (Craig 1994). Fears of reinjury and pain, worries about future losses (especially of functional abilities and finances), and a sense of threat of psychological harm from the stress and strain of chronic pain are common (Rosensteil and Keefe 1983). Anxiety, when present, contributes to higher levels of distress and disability associated with chronic pain (Waddell et al. 1993).

Anger is also a frequent problem for many people with chronic pain (Fernandez and Turk 1995). Patients in our clinic often report feeling more irritable and angry after the onset of their pain. Anger, in turn, interferes with activities and increases pain intensity and symptoms of depression (Tearnan and Lewandowski 1992; Kerns, Rosenberg, and Jacob 1994), fueling a vicious cycle. Anger may also significantly interfere with motivation and acceptance of treatment goals in people with chronic pain (Gatchel 2005).

Depression, anxiety, and anger have another debilitating effect: They often make people believe they’ve changed into someone they don’t like—a person who is always angry and discontented, someone indecisive and lacking confidence, a shell of their former self. And in fact, it is difficult to feel or think like your former self when you’re depressed, anxious, or angry. However, you haven’t lost the things you cherish about yourself— your values and core beliefs. They still reside within you.

Before working on specific techniques to improve your mood, you need to understand the nature of depression, anxiety, and anger. This will help you recognize when you’re having problems. Also, bear in mind that negative emotions rarely exist in isolation. When people are angry, they’re often depressed and anxious. The suggestions and interventions in this chapter are effective in modifying all three negative emotions.

excerpt from The Chronic Pain Care Workbook

People react differently to pain. How you cope with your pain is largely based on how functional you are physically and psychologically. The more you are able to do the things you want, the easier it is to cope with pain. The more you are able to view your self as healthy, the more sound your ideas and thoughts about living with pain. Conversely, the more you see yourself as sick, injured, or damaged, mentally or physically, the harder it is to cope with life. In short, the higher your psychological and physical function, the better you do. Your thoughts and ideas about having pain can play a major role in determining how well or how poorly you cope with pain.

Ellis and Harper introduced an important way of looking at how thoughts and beliefs influence behavior in their work helping people with problems other than chronic pain. However, many pain management centers around the world have adapted this model to evaluate how people’s thoughts and beliefs shape the chronic pain experience.

excerpt from Trigger Point Therapy for Low Back Pain

We’ve often tried to account for the almost total lack of attention myofascial trigger points receive in the medical field—despite the fact that every day we perform therapy that relieves chronic pain in the great majority of people coming to us.

We’ve had many patients who were scheduled for surgery but after being treated with trigger point elimination techniques, chose not to go through with surgery because their pain was gone. We’ve also treated people who had already undergone surgery. Some of them qualified for the diagnosis of failed back surgery syndrome. Although pain relief is more difficult in such cases, we are usually able to help. Additionally, general anesthetic and surgical procedures sometimes activate latent trigger points, so we often treat painful conditions caused or exacerbated by surgery.