Pain psychology

The pain psychology team is made up of clinical psychologists, CBT therapists, and regular trainee clinical psychologists.

Why is psychology an important part of our pain service?

Chronic pain is a complex experience that impacts on most areas of life, not just your physical body. Pain psychology supports individuals in managing various aspects of this experience. This includes developing skills to manage the impact on mood, on relationships, and looking at ways to come to terms with the chronic nature of these experiences whilst also supporting you to increase quality of life.

How can our pain psychology service help?

The majority of pain psychology time is directed into joint multidisciplinary or group work within the wider chronic pain service. This includes:

• The delivery of the 12 session pain management programme, aiming to help people develop self-management pain approaches.
• The assessments for spinal cord stimulators, and supporting the associated spinal cord stimulator pain management group programme.
• Joint working on a weekly basis with other members of the pain management team, including nursing, occupational therapy or physiotherapy colleagues within the complex pain clinic. This includes a monthly complex pelvic pain clinic.
• Consultation, teaching and training to colleagues with the aim of integrating psychological approaches to pain management.

Each clinician also offers some individual assessment and therapy sessions. We typically offer up to two assessment sessions. In these sessions, the therapist would explore your needs and if suitable give options for therapeutic work based on their background and training. Within our team this includes cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), compassion focussed therapy (CFT), and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). We also have a limited capacity to offer eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) in relation to chronic pain.

Following assessment, the therapist will briefly describe how these models might apply to a person's own experiences. Our offer of individual therapy sessions tends to be short term, and focussed around the impact of pain. We may signpost to another more suitable service if longer term support would be more beneficial.