From Ow to Wow!: Five Steps to Thriving with Pain

By Amber Rose Dullea

With the challenges of opioids that face our society, people with chronic pain often feel ostracized and stigmatized. This simple five step program guides you to discover many different ways of treating and managing your chronic pain so that you can go from suffering to thriving and create a life beyond chronic pain.
Amber Rose Dullea shar

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thriving with Pain Press
• Release date: Aug 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9780997921717

Amber Rose Dullea

C Amber Rose Dullea, MA, M.Div. is an inspiring, humorous coach and speaker. She brings an embodied compassion to her work due to living for over a decade with Fibromyalgia and chronic migraines. She combines compassion, humor, a whole system approach, her background as a Licensed Massage Therapist and nurturing coaching skills to support individuals who live with chronic pain to thrive again by finding and living their Wow! Her services include one-on-one coaching, powerful, interactive workshops, keynotes and group coaching programs that are tailor-made to meet the needs of each client.

Book preview

Step One: You are an Expert on You!

No one knows your experience of pain better than you.

Living a life of Wow is based in thriving. A thriver is empowered. A thriver is proactive. A thriver lives life with passion and purpose. The first step toward thriving is to develop expertise. Expertise on yourself and your experience. No one but you can know exactly what your experience of pain is, unless you are able to communicate it. To be an expert on yourself means that you are aware of your experience by noticing how pain and interventions affect you, what triggers increased pain and what makes it better. This expertise comes from being present in the moment, observing and tracking.

If you do not develop awareness, you cannot communicate your experience. Your healthcare practitioners are flying blind and missing a vital piece to the puzzle; your experience of pain. If you cannot trust your memory and your experience, you will be at the mercy of whatever preconceptions you and your health care practitioner have. You may even believe that you are going crazy when doctors tell you that you should be getting better or that they cannot find a reason for the pain.

Chronic pain is not a static experience. It changes day-today. Everyone I have ever spoken with who lives with chronic pain says they have good days and bad days. A good day may include significant pain or it might be little to no pain. Bad days might include more pain, fatigue, or fear and it affects different arenas and dimensions of your life. What affects you to have good and bad days is not always easy to discover. A delay between cause and effect can make it more difficult to make the connections. When you ask, What is different today? when you are in pain, may be the wrong question. The difference might be something that happened two or three days ago, or something that did not happen. Uncovering these patterns is essential for insight into what you can impact.

Pain is scary. It is meant to be. It says, Something is wrong! It is meant to get our attention because it may be pointing to tissue damage or a disease process. Your body deals with acute pain like a sprinter. It runs around like the robot from Lost in Space yelling Danger, danger Will Robinson! It gets all of the adrenaline and inflammatory responses going to take care of the injury. Chronic pain is not a 100-meter race, it is a marathon. Your body may still be reacting to the pain signals in the same way but instead of being helpful, it usually gets over-reactive and the pain signals increase. Imagine someone trying to run a marathon at the pace of a sprint. Not pretty! This can lead to its own problem that is not based on the tissue damage or the original disease process. It can lead to a new problem of chronic pain—a disease of the nervous system.

When the pain after my accident increased instead of resolving, I felt scared! I did not know what was happening. I just knew my body was telling me something was wrong. I was doing everything right. I rested, got adjustments, massages, did stretches and physical therapy. I did affirmations and believed at my very core that I was going to be fine. My body should have been recovering instead of getting worse. I felt betrayed by my body.

My fear was of the unknown, of being on the outside and out of control of my body. I wanted answers. I wanted to understand what was happening and I wanted it fixed! I wanted my old life/self back. I went to the experts, doctors, to get the answers. I felt disempowered because my body was betraying me and I did not understand what was happening. It hurt. I was suffering. I was in Ow! I was a victim of the pain. My fear increased my sense of impotence. I was doing everything that I knew in order to deal with the injuries including inner work and still the pain increased. It was relentless.

I began to question my experience. Was I really in pain or was I crazy? I thought, It shouldn’t hurt so much! It was when I began to develop an understanding of what was happening in my body that I began the first step toward surviving and away from suffering. Until then, I felt like a wounded animal that did not understand why it was in pain. The truth is that there are many people who end up with chronic pain from injuries. I did not do anything wrong. It happened. It is one of those things that we still do not fully understand the whys.

Knowledge equals power and self-knowledge equals self-empowerment. When I began to understand the process of chronic pain and what was happening in my body, the fear lessened. It is scary to be in a body that hurts without understanding why. Pain tells us something is wrong, that is its function. People who live with chronic pain tend to have high tolerance for pain. Living in a body that chronically says something is wrong can produce anxiety, stress, fear, and/or anger. We all deal with the pain in different ways. One danger of chronic pain is that you may ignore new pain that is a warning sign that might be pointing to tissue damage or a disease process because of your high tolerance of pain. It is like your body has called wolf too many times and you are tired of