Jennifer Grant & Cath Grey Tuesdays 6pm—7.30pm starting August 24th — concluding October 12th 2021 Living with chronic pain is hard! Unlike the pain from a stubbed toe or a fracture or childbirth, it doesn’t go away. It changes – morphs, shifts, intensifies, fades and intensifies again. And you can’t know when or if it will go away. As well as making activities of daily living really difficult and challenging your closest relationships, chronic pain can stop you doing the things that bring you joy, satisfaction, the things that make you “you”. The neuroscience of pain shows that “everything is connected”. Your experience of pain is influenced by not just the original injury but by the environment around you and inside you, as well as what you think, remember, feel, do. When it comes to pain context matters. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT, pronounced “act” the word not the initials) is a modern psychological therapy developed out of scientific research & understanding how humans are, in context. Our “ACT for Pain” group program takes the principles of ACT, adds in learnings from new pain science together with a dash of compassion focussed therapy to aim for 3 goals: 1. Pain becomes less intrusive on daily life 2. Anxiety, low mood/ depression alleviated 3. Sleep and quality of life improves Change is not only possible but inevitable. The thousands of sensors along your nerve cells are incredibly sensitive – some open up in response to stress chemicals, others to changes in temperature or pressure, others open up when you stretch. They sense the world for you, they look out for danger and they report to the brain. But these sensors are like butterflies - they only live for a few days, so your sensitivity is continually adjusting to your environment, So if you are really sensitive now, don’t worry - these sensors can change very, very quickly. You can help this process by changing the context within which pain arises. This is learning. Learning is both conscious and unconscious, both deliberate and unintentional. In our program you’ll learn how to change that which might be helpful to change, eg, • the ways you do what you do, • the ways you respond to your internal world (sensations, thoughts, memories, hopes, fears, arousal, mood), • the ways you influence your internal world (how you breathe, what you put in your body, how you treat your body, what your body is exposed to); • the ways you interact with your external world (people, things & the weather!) A few nuggets from the neuroscience of pain, to give a sense of the knowledge base we’re working from...