Unravelling the Negative Impact of Pain Problems on Recovering from Psychological Trauma

Background: Pain problems can act as a barrier to individuals recovering from psychological trauma following receiving appropriate psychological therapy. Therefore, it would be prudent of therapists to treat pain problems in clients prior to embarking on trauma informed therapy to increase the chances of therapy being more clinically and cost effective. Objective: This article aims to provide practice-based evidence to demonstrate how a client’s pain problems were affecting her recovery from severe psychological trauma following a serious accident, and how psychological pain management work prior to her starting trauma informed therapy assisted her to overcome the barrier of pain to her recovery. Method: The client was offered psychological pain management intervention based on the gate theory of pain prior to embarking on trauma focussed cognitive behavioural therapy to treat her post trauma symptoms following a serious accident. The gate theory argues that psychological factors have potential to open a gate to the pain system causing an increase in pain perception. According to this model, once these factors are addressed it will lead to improvement in pain perception. Result: Guided imagery techniques were utilised to assist the client to resolve emotional factors in connection with her pain which resulted in further recovery of her pain perception. Following recovery in this the client was able to experience increase emotional capacity as well as mobility to receive trauma focussed cognitive behavioural therapy to reduce her psychological trauma symptoms. Conclusion: This case study was able to demonstrate that treating clients pain problems prior to treating psychological trauma has potential to be clinically and cost effective. It is recommended that further research be done in this area