MIND over PAIN | Finding BALANCE and ACCEPTANCE in Dealing with Chronic Pain
Channel: Starts With Me
Date: 2023-07-20

Explore the intersection of chronic pain, mindfulness, and self-discovery in this thought-provoking podcast. Don Hunter, a psychotherapist with 40 years of experience, shares his personal story, emphasizing the importance of acceptance, meditation, and breaking free from the cycle of suffering.

Purchase Don’s Book “Chronic Pain” My Journey Here - https://bit.ly/3r90nP0

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So how do you distinguish between sharing that you're kind of having a hard time or something like that and you do kind of write it a little bit in the book, but when you do acknowledge to the people around you that you're having a difficult moment because of the pain, so to speak. Is that different for you? Can can you share a little bit about the struggle without kind of burdening them, or is it kind of more one way or the other for you?  I think that I think people learn to, ah, to see it. So people that I'm close with can tell what happened that day and, and they just give me space. So I can go and do whatever I need to do to sort of take care of it as best I can. So whether that's going, it's usually going to a bedroom and turning the lights out and putting my self hypnosis recording on. So I have recordings for sleep, for Pain, for all sorts of stuff. And and that sort of helps me to drop into that meditative state and I doodle. I spend a fair bit of time in trance one. Can you describe, I guess, your process of dealing with it? So you did the detox thing and then you kind of had to find some way to deal with all this. So can you sort of start tell us a bit like how that all evolved? Well, I think that complicating factors is that in 2014, I had low back issues, so I was diagnosed with spinal stenosis. And so that became daily pain added to my headaches. So it was like, what the f is going on now? And I had to figure out how to sort of manage that. So I went to physio ditches. You exercises every day. I started doing yoga every morning, at least for 15 or 20 minutes, and that was a little helpful. But once again, it didn't take the pain away completely. But I stayed away from any narcotics, so I was taking, you know, extra strength Tylenol and Advil. One of the things they told me when I left the Camp medical withdrawal unit was to combine add bone and Tylenol at the same time because they act on different centers in the brain.