Emotional Awareness Therapy for Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain
Chronic pain conditions appear to fall into two categories: those that accompany identifiable illnesses like rheumatoid arthritis, neuropathy, and tumors, and those viewed as central sensitization or augmentation syndromes such as fibromyalgia and some other musculoskeletal pain conditions, pelvic pain, and some headaches. Neurons that conduct pain impulses to the central nervous system (peripheral nociceptive afferent processes) play a major role in the identifiable conditions. For fibromyalgia and other puzzling types of chronic pain, the central nervous system (CNS) appears to be the primary player: “Psychological stress or trauma, emotion dysregulation, interpersonal conflict, and learning processes such as conditioning, expectations, and attributions appear to play a primary role in predisposing, precipitating, and perpetuating pain.” Unlike patients with an identifiable pain-causing pathology, these patients do not response to cognitive behavior therapy that teaches people how to manage pain with relaxation training, goal setting, activity pacing, and other tactics.
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