Many people understand how our thoughts and behavior create states of emotional suffering such as anxiety and depression. Fewer understand these same inputs create and maintain physical pain. As a result, we can misperceive ourselves as passive victims of pain, failing to see how and why we create this vital human experience.
In a recent class at Georgetown University’s Integrative Medicine program, my students and I looked at how and why body and mind work in concert to produce pain. Precisely the same stimulus or degree of tissue damage may or may not produce a pain experience. We examine how this is so, and at what we can do – cognitively and behaviorally – if we want to reduce or eliminate chronic pain states.
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