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SPIEGEL WISSEN has developed an eight-week pain coaching program that will help you to better understand your pain and become more competent with it. This is the first part. The other parts can be found here in the following weeks.

In this coaching, you can learn to deal with pain, maybe even relieve it. Attention: The eight practice sessions do not refer to acute, short-term complaints, but recurrent ones. Only with such pain, it makes sense to try out the exercises presented here and get a better access to your own suffering.

"Another important factor is that the pain is ultimately based no explanatory organ findings," says psychotherapist and painter Hanne Seemann, who has developed this coaching together with SPIEGEL WISSEN.

As a first exercise, read the following short checklist and see if you are dealing with this kind of pain in your everyday life - or not.

Important: You can probably only answer the following questions if you have already clarified your symptoms to a general practitioner or specialist. Before you can not diagnose yourself what kind of pain you suffer. So if you have never been to the doctor with your pain, you need to get it. Only then can you find a way to deal with them - and to exclude that other illnesses are behind it.

Check: What are chronic pain?

  • I have persistent or recurrent pains in the head, stomach, joints, muscles, face, or anywhere in the body for which there is no physical cause, according to a doctor.
  • Despite medical examinations and diagnostics with specialists there is no disease that can really explain my pain.
  • The pains have become independent, they are sometimes very strong or seem to lead a life of their own.
  • With stress and strain the pain often gets worse.
  • I have had one of the following diagnoses: migraine, fibromyalgia, tension-type headache, somatoform pain disorder, idiopathic back pain.

If one or more of these five points apply to you, then you are probably dealing with chronic and sometimes mental pain. "Psychic" in this context does not mean that you have a mental illness. What it means is that the pain you feel ultimately has a psychological function as well - it is a kind of complaint or emergency call from the body.

"Pain therapists explain to their clients that the body expresses itself through pain, saying that something is wrong, even though as a human being living in the body, right from the start, you do not know what it means," says Hanne Sailor. When you start to pay attention to when and how the body reacts with pain in the head, back or stomach, you often recognize the underlying pattern. And get first ideas, what the body wants to express, what it is about and what could be good for you. To train this attention for your symptoms, you now get another task:

Where is it good?

Now think about the chronic pain they are dealing with. Think further: In which situation, in which places, in which times of their lives (also in the past) or with which people does the pain NOT appear? When and where are you absolutely sure that you are free of complaints? Keep one or two answers.

Then go a step further and ask yourself what is different in the pain-free situations than usual. What do you feel that you do not feel otherwise? What do you experience that you do not experience otherwise? What do you think, what else you do not think? What do you get, what else you do not get? Search here with some time for answers.

Over the course of the week, keep thinking about what makes you feel pain free. If you have spontaneous access to this approach, you can start experimenting a bit and wondering where else to experience the quality you feel in painless situations.

If you find the whole exercise rather difficult, just keep paying attention to where and when there are moments when you are free of pain - and try to actively bring about these situations as well.

We hope you have the courage and strength to explore your pains in the next few weeks - and many healing insights.

Your SPIEGEL KNOW-TEAM team

For each issue, SPIEGEL WISSEN offers a practical, easy-to-use everyday online coaching suitable for their particular issue.

Each coaching lasts eight weeks. During this time, you will always receive a tutorial by e-mail on Fridays that can help you to make your life better. Order the newsletter here:

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