We help you understand the nature of chronic pain. We help you understand how certain emotions, thoughts, and behaviors can increase pain signaling or decrease pain signaling.

Sometimes we have unhelpful thoughts about ourselves, others, or the world. We help you learn to change or disconnect from these thoughts.

We teach mindfulness and relaxation strategies that help you manage pain, anxiety, and improve your sleep. This may include mindfulness practice, deep breathing, body scans, guided imagery, progressive muscle relaxation, and grounding techniques. We teach cognitive and behavioral strategies to help improve your sleep quantity and quality.

We teach you anxiety coping skills.  We develop exposure goals to help you face your fears and reduce your fear response across time.  We start out with easier goals and then work up to harder goals.

We help you understand how the trauma has affected your beliefs and influenced your emotions and behaviors. We have you write or talk about your trauma and its effects on you.  We help your learn to cope with the difficult thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations associated with your trauma.

If you have fears of MRIs, injections, procedures, or surgeries, we help you come up with an anxiety management plan and make appropriate goals that balance your anxiety with your medical needs.

We help you activate and create meaning in your life to improve depression. This may involve getting out of the house more, socializing, setting up enjoyable activities, exercising, creating things/expressing yourself, or doing more around your house.

We help you work towards acceptance of very difficult emotions and situations in your life. We help you figure out when to problem solve a fixable problem and when to accept and actively cope with a situation in which you have limited control.

We help you figure out what you want next in your life, if you need to change careers or employers or if you are navigating relationship changes related to injury/illness. We will help you connect with your values and make life goals.

We help you understand how your injury has affected your identity and important roles and pursuits in your life (e.g., a job, marriage, parenting/grandparenting, sports/exercise, hobbies, etc.).  We discuss your losses.  We discuss any positive meaning that has come from your injury (e.g., feeling closer in certain relationships, greater appreciation, more understanding and empathy, a positive reorganization of your priorities in life, etc.).

We understand that movement needs to be tailored to one’s physical abilities at a given point in time. We help promote regular movement, which helps with mood, anxiety, physical conditioning, healing, and sleep. We also help you navigate the delicate balance between how long to move at once and how long to rest afterward (called physical pacing).  After an injury, this might start with home stretches and exercises for strength and range of motion.  Over time we might encourage you to progress to walking, pool exercise, or other forms of exercise.

Sometimes, when people are in pain they avoid going out or moving much, because they want to feel less pain. We challenge you to reduce excessive pain avoidance, so you can enjoy activities with appropriate modifications.

We help ensure that you have a balanced eating pattern that promotes health, energy, a healthy weight, and pain management. We help you understand any problematic eating patterns you have and change them with cognitive-behavioral strategies. We teach you behavioral weight loss strategies if you are struggling with excess weight.

We help with body dissatisfaction related to weight or injuries that change one’s appearance (burns, amputations, etc.). We help you navigate difficult social situations in which individuals notice or comment on your weight or visible injury.