Having persistent pain and not being able to find a way to escape from it can be really demoralizing, and can lead to feelings of helplessness. Researchers have been interested for a long time in trying to understand how people with chronic pain experience helplessness, and how feeling helpless affects their experience of pain.
Many people with chronic pain find the pain difficult to escape. Repeated unsuccessful attempts to be without pain can give rise to feelings of helplessness. Feeling helpless in the face of chronic pain is in turn associated with increased pain levels, functional disability and depression.
Let’s look at what helplessness can mean to people with chronic pain, what gives rise to it, and how it affects their experience of pain.
What is helplessness like for people with chronic pain?
We can experience helplessness when we feel like we can’t do anything to change our situation.
Feeling helpless can be associated with these kinds of thoughts:
- “My pain limits me in everything that is important to me”
- “My pain controls my life”
- “Because of my pain, I miss the things I like to do most”
- “My pain prevents me from doing what I would really like to do”
- “My pain makes me feel useless at times” (Samwel et al., 2006)
Why do people with chronic pain feel helpless?
Pain is something we naturally want to escape from.
Chronic pain can be challenging to treat, and oftentimes people with go through repeated unsuccessful attempts to fully control it.
Not having the ability to escape from the pain can result in feeling helpless. It can cause people to believe that their pain is uncontrollable.
A study in 2022 explains that ‘learned helplessness’ can happen when people with chronic diseases are exposed to an uncontrolled health stressor on a daily basis.
They relate helplessness with how much control a person thinks they have over the pain, and their level of faith in their ability to cope with it.
How does helplessness affect how people experience chronic pain?
Researchers in 2006 measured levels of helplessness in people with chronic pain, by asking them to rate how much they agreed with the thoughts shown in the bullet points earlier in this post.
They found that the level of self-reported helplessness was associated with a person’s level of pain and disability.
Other researchers in the same year looked at how feeling helpless affects people with chronic pain.
They found correlations between helplessness and depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts in people with chronic pain.
The 2022 study on learned helplessness with chronic conditions explains that helplessness makes it harder for people with chronic pain to learn new techniques for controlling and coping with the pain symptoms.
People can start to feel disempowered after being worn down by pain day after day. They can become less motivated to try different solutions, after repeatedly trying unsuccessfully to escape the pain.
People can pin their hopes on a variety of medical treatments, only to have those hopes dashed when treatments are unable to fully remove pain.
It can make them feel like they have no control, and so they may come to the conclusion that there’s nothing they can do to feel better. They can believe that they are not able to affect any outcome at all.
How do you deal with feelings of helplessness with chronic pain?
It can be tough to find a way out of the state of demoralization. Helplessness, by its nature reduces our belief in our own power to change anything.
But with chronic pain, we do still have power.
If you’re feeling helpless right now, chances are you may not believe that.
How would it be to just spend a few minutes sitting with the idea that it’s possible for you to discover new ways of coping?
It is possible for you to find ways to help you cope with the ways that chronic pain has affected your life.
There are other ways in to dealing with the pain.
At first, we tend to keep attempting to attack the pain head on, and repeatedly not getting the results we’d hoped for.
But pain research over the years has shown us that pain is also affected by how we feel, think and act. Even our relationships with others can influence our experience of chronic pain.
This is what this Piloting Pain blog is about.
You can affect change in those things.
You have the ability to reacquaint yourself with you. You have the ability to find ways to follow a direction in life with the pain – a direction in line with your personal values and goals.
You can find ways to connect or reconnect with supportive others.
You have your own unique strengths, and you can use them to find ways of managing physically, mentally and emotionally.
You have many inner resources, and other resources available to you. You are resourceful.
When you give some attention to the things you can influence, you can plan and take steps towards making changes in your life with the pain.
Those things in turn affect how you experience the pain itself.
When you start to reassemble all of the other things that make you who you are, the pain becomes a smaller part of you.
It starts to feel less looming.
I know it’s sometimes hard to believe in having any power in your life when you feel helpless and demoralized.
If that’s where you are just now, how was it just trying to imagine the possibility of you being able for those few minutes?
If you’re really struggling to hold that hope right now, connect with people for support. I know it can sometimes feel like a hard thing to do, but it can help just to have others help to carry that hope for you until you are holding it for yourself again.
References
Samwel, H. J. A.,* Evers, A. W. M., Crul, B. J. P., Kraaimaat, & Floris W. (2006). The Role of Helplessness, Fear of Pain, and Passive Pain-Coping in Chronic Pain Patients. The Clinical Journal of Pain, Volume 22, Issue 3, p 245-251.
Tang, N., & Crane, C. (2006). Suicidality in chronic pain: A review of the prevalence, risk factors and psychological links. Psychological Medicine, 36(5), 575-586.
Yessick, L. R., & Salomons, T., V. (2022). The chronic disease helplessness survey: developing and validating a better measure of helplessness for chronic conditions. Pain Rep, 7(2):e991.