Practise creating your own Pain Stories to illustrate Target Concepts – the key ideas helpful for everyone to understand pain. Here’s one that we prepared earlier!
I’ll never eat prawns again!
Target concepts:
- Pain is normal, personal and always real
- Pain and tissue damage rarely relate
- Pain relies on context
Consider a time you’ve experienced food poisoning. Perhaps just remembering an episode makes you feel a little queasy! The sight or smell of the food that you associate with that episode takes you back to that experience of feeling and/or being sick and you do your best to avoid it.
Some pain experiences can have the same effect. Remembering the injury, visiting the place that it occurred or even certain smells or sounds may be painful, make you feel queasy or bring back vivid experiences associated with that time.
It makes sense that, just as you avoid the food that made you sick, you might want to avoid those places, people, sights or sounds that you associate with your pain. But do you really want to avoid prawns for the rest of your life?
-Tim Beames and the Noigroup Europe team
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