Searching for meaning in chronic pain: acceptance dynamic

Abstract

Those who treat individuals with chronic pain are aware of the pervasive and often devastating affect this pain can have on individual lives including shaking the very foundations of a person’s being. Crises of meaning (defined by the authors as questions involving why and how) are frequent for people with chronic pain as they try to make sense of their lives in the face of significant challenges to functional abilities and comfort. Along with physical impairment chronic pain engenders a host of emotional, cognitive, spiritual, relational, and socioeconomic problems. While these difficulties seem insurmountable, perhaps the greatest challenge underlying these struggles is construing a new or modified worldview that includes the inescapability of pain. Reorienting one’s expectations, self-perception, and future possibilities is often a slow and arduous journey. This paper proposes that acceptance is a dynamic process catalyst whereby people with chronic pain incorporate new meanings of self, others and the world. Not only does acceptance promote positive adjustment and well-being, it stimulates hope, optimism, and self-efficacy in spite of troublesome realities.