Living with a body in pain – between acceptance and denial

Abstract

The aetiology of nonspecific musculoskeletal pain is considered to be multi-factorial. Long-standing pain not only has a negative impact on the individual's general health but also changes the individual's experience of him/her self and his/her world. The aim of this study was to describe how individuals with long-standing musculoskeletal pain, in a bodily existential perspective, relate to their aching body. Semi-structured interviews with 20 patients were analysed using mainly a phenomenological-hermeneutic method. From the analysis, four main categories reflect the meaning contents of the interviews: the body as an aspect of identity; body reliance; body awareness; ways of understanding pain. From these categories, four distinct typologies were inferred: surrendering to ones fate; accepting by an active process of change; balancing between hope and resignation; rejecting the body. The result indicates that patients with long-standing pain are to be found along a spectrum from accepting to rejecting the aching body. Body awareness and body reliance seem to have importance in the process of acceptance of the body as well as life situation as a whole, which we regard as interesting hypotheses for further inquiry.

A meta-ethnography of patients’ experience of chronic non-malignant musculoskeletal pain

“…Afrell 2007: 372 acceptance typologies -active process of change Pro-active decision to make adaptations. 'a change from an earlier, more or less, total lack of body awareness to a relation where the body is looked upon as a speaking partner and a teacher.…”

The development of the Dutch version of the Fremantle Back Awareness Questionnaire

“…Researchers have consistently observed cortical reorganisation (Flor et al, 1997;Tsao et al, 2008;Tsao et al, 2011;Schabrun et al, 2015;Hotz-Boendermaker et al, 2016), morphological changes (Schmidt-Wilcke et al, 2006;Baliki et al, 2011;Baliki et al, 2012;Kong et al, 2013;Mao et al, 2013;Ung et al, 2014) and biochemical changes (Sharma et al, 2012) in brain areas thought to subserve body perception. Furthermore, individuals with chronic LBP perceive their back as fragile and vulnerable (Bunzli et al, 2015;Darlow et al, 2015), feel a sense of exclusion, alienation, and rejection of the back (Afrell et al, 2007;Crowe et al, 2009) and represent the back differently when asked to draw how the back feels to them (Nishigami et al, 2015).…”

The essence of the experience of chronic pain – a phenomenological study

“…Life was organized by pain, according to its effects and consequences, and participants lived their lives on the conditions of pain. The participants felt themselves distressed, depressed, and hopeless under the dominance of pain when pain controlled their thoughts, making life itself painful, as was also found in the studies by Afrell et al (2007) and Robinson et al (2013). In the analysis, it seemed that the participants' lives repeated themselves with misery and despair without hope of remission, as a vicious circle without an exit.…”