How Our Feelings Affect Pain And Addiction
354 views · Published 1 December 2016 · 5:57 · Indexed 21 October 2026
Channel: Life The Basic Manual · 2016 · Education
In this video, Dan Mager continues his exploration of the ways in which chronic pain and addiction affect us, and how developing conscious awareness of our distressing, painful emotions and building the ability to tolerate them, can help free us from their grip. As a person in long-term recovery from both chronic pain and addiction with two decades worth of post-Masters clinical experience, Dan is an expert in this field. Following on from his discussion of how habitual patterns of negative thinking can be a significant factor in chronic pain and addiction, he further unfolds the importance of the mind-body connection. Over the course of the last thirty years, empirical research has increasing demonstrated the direct relationship between mind and body—how our emotions affect our physical health, and how physical discomfort impacts our feeling states. It’s now clear that to speak of mind and body as two separate entities is a dualistic perspective that fails to recognize the integral unity of both. As Dan so eloquently explains, emotional distress in the forms of anxiety, depression, anger, fear, and shame can have somatic results. Equally, physical illness or pain can have a wide variety of effects on our thinking and emotions. This complex, and as yet imperfectly understood, set of relationships can provide a self-reinforcing mechanism that ultimately worsens underlying conditions. One of the most common reactions to emotional or physical pain is the desire to escape, numb, or avoid it. Mood- and mind-altering substances (including opioid pain medications) can achieve this result on a short-term basis, but their effects are explicitly temporary and after they wear off the pain returns with greater vengeance. This dynamic, in combination with the brain and body development of increasing tolerance for the substance, means that successively greater doses are required to generate the same effects, and this leads to abuse and addiction. Once addiction is established, micro and macro withdrawal become the norm—the former being the discomfort felt as soon as the current dose begins to wear off, and the latter the broader experience of withdrawal as a whole. Dan suggests that one of the most important ways that we can free ourselves from the vicious cycle in which distressing thoughts and painful feelings exacerbate each other and drive higher levels of physical pain, is to bring our conscious awareness to our thinking and feeling so that these no longer automatically and reflexively drive our internal experience, as well as our actions. The next clip addresses further how to facilitate this awareness. Dan’s book, Some Assembly Required: A Balanced Approach to Addiction and Chronic Pain, is available for purchase via the links below. Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Some-Assembly-Required-Balanced-Addiction/dp/1937612252/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1478464321&sr=1-3&keywords=some+assembly+required Central Recovery Press: https://shop.centralrecoverypress.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=3319 SUBSCRIBE FOR MORE VIDEOS https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAjyGSt8ZTQlpMyW0VuABig?sub_confirmation=1 FIND LIFE THE BASIC MANUAL HERE http://lifethebasicmanual.com http://www.facebook.com/lifethebasicmanual http://instagram.com/lifethebasicmanual http://twitter.com/BasicManual
