This book and interview with the author came across my news. It seems like a subject I need to study more, since it looks the it will be with me more than I expected.
In some ways I feel like I’m still waiting for my treatment to be invented. I guess physical therapy has helped me, and understanding pain has helped because it’s given me a framework to evaluate the success of my treatments. Making the psychological shift that I don’t have to be pain-free in order to be happy was huge as well. I thought at the beginning that I have to have my pain cured in order to be happy and now I feel like as long as it’s modulated and moderated, that that is OK.
In the West in modern times we don’t expect to be in any physical pain. It’s not part of our sense of life, although it has been for most of history, and so therefore to have pain feels wrong, it feels outrageous, it feels upsetting because it seems like a violation of what we think of as a normal life. So I think changing that sense itself helped me.
All that said, I would still love to be cured.
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