Mental health and pain - acceptance and a great analogy

I did a course at a local college on "Pain - The Role of acceptance" that I found very helpful. What I learnt:

There are two types of pain primary and secondary pain. Primary is the actual pain you are experiencing and secondary pain are all the unhelpful thoughts that go through your head while having it such as will I ever recover? my life is not the same etc. I remember the course facilitator saying a lot of pain that you experience is actually as secondary pain. So if you can reduce that through meditations, distractions, thinking differently etc that can help your overall suffering.

They also showed a great video (linked below) that got me thinking on how to view pain. A lady showed an orange play-doh ball representing her. When she started dealing with pain more and more bits of blue play-doh would attach to the orange ball. It became unrecognisable from what she once was. She went to doctors and they couldn't fix it therefore what she did was "add more to her life" and add bits that have nothing to do with pain like all the things she does with people that she loves and and things that she loves doing. This was shown as adding different coloured play-doh to her ball. It wasn't as bright as it once was, but it's bigger. The video is shown below and I viewed it as very helpful in thinking about pain.



Adding things to my life to make my ball bigger is what helped me as I talked about in my passions and hobbies page, An example given on this course was a lady that use to do horse riding (which was her main passion in life) injured her back. As a result she couldn't do what she once enjoyed and was in pain as well so her mental health deteriorated. However, she then was suggested to get a dog and start walking the dog. While it wasn't the same life she was having before. She was able to be with an animal, be outdoors in nature and walking is actually helpful for bad backs. Finding new things that can give you enjoyment which were similar if you can no longer do your previous passion because of pain can be very helpful to your mental health.

As I spoke about in my "passions and hobbies page", with me I stopped and found it difficult for a while to go on long adventures after sciatica and knee pain. This limited my way of coping with my mental health due to having a lot of secondary pain and not being able to do what I use to. It's through adding new interests and things that I liked doing to my ball that I started coping better. As well as doing CBT to address secondary pain.