Pain, A Loss to be Grieved

Overview

Grief counselling may be the most neglected aspect of pain care within modern pain management programs.

We lose so much when pain persists.

Given the power of grief, and that anything able to drive the hypervigilance of the individual and the nervous systems can maintain pain, understanding grief and pain is vital.

In this online course, Antonio will discuss loss, grief, and pain, their relationships and similarities, and how they affect one another. Specific ideas and practices of yoga to work with loss, grief, and pain through this lens will be offered.

What you will learn can be effectively applied via virtual and in-person consults.

Given that pain has a strong subjective component, by learning new ways to connect with it, and practicing new ways of addressing it, an individual can become much more suited to manage it.

Empowering individuals to take matters into their own hands increases self-efficacy and is effective in turning around the often confrontational and hostile inner dialogue with pain. Thus an individual can tap into the ‘call to reconnect’ meta-message that pain entails.

It is often recognized that while pain is unavoidable, suffering – resulting from the mental and emotional responses to pain - is.

Reducing suffering is key to both pain management and grief work and, at the same time, one of the core goals of Yoga.”

In Yoga and Science in Pain Care - Chapter 13, Sausys expresses that:

“pain disrupts the balanced state of health and, at the same time, signals the need to return to it.  It can be associated with tissue damage, resulting in physical pain, or derived from the damage caused to the connective psychic matrix that ensures the integrity of the self, resulting in psychological pain."

In any case, the balance of physical or psychological health we are attached to for normal functioning is ruptured or lost.

Then pain, as a primary loss, elicits the appearance of several secondary losses such as loss of functionality, income, status, quality of life, self-image, body, and psychological identity amongst others.

Pain and grief are intimately related basic human experiences that enter into a particular feedback loop that perpetuates each other’s appearance. For that reason, it is important to understand how these two processes are related and the implications of their interconnection.

Join Antonio Sausys, Neil Pearson, Shelly Prosko, and Marlysa Sullivan for Yoga and Science in Pain Care Chapter 13: Pain, A Loss to be Grieved.

Learning objectives

In this online course, we will:

• Identify pain as a loss to be grieved
• Explain the interconnectedness of both processes
• Explore possible meta-communications of pain
• Expose how an individual’s self-involvement through practice can enhance efficacy in pain management
• Guide three techniques to balance emotional reactivity to pain, cognitively reframe the experience of pain, and deidentify oneself from painful experiences
• Answer to emerging comments and questions

Audience

This course and the entire Yoga and Science in Pain Care series is intended for:

• Practitioners including yoga therapists and healthcare practitioners interested in integrating yoga with their persistent pain population to expand their approaches in clinical practice
• Yoga teachers interested in understanding aspects of the science behind yoga and pain
• Medical/healthcare professionals who want to better understand pain or want to integrate yoga and mind/body practices
• Mind/body contemplative practitioners/researchers/clinicians who want to better understand the science around pain and how yoga as a mind/body practice works with people in pain
• Yoga practitioners or integrative health consumers who want an in-depth read with practical knowledge in this field.
• Yoga therapist programs and medical university/college programs that require online course study in pain care
• Schools that have online mind/body programs as stand-alone modules or as part of medical programs and other mind-body institutions.
• People suffering from pain, particularly those keen about learning some practices to help with pain self-care and who want to learn more about the value of integrating pain science and yoga

We also hope that this series will help bring together yoga therapists and health professionals. There is value in blending science and yoga therapy in pain care – for the person in pain, for the health professional, and for the yoga professional.