How psychological therapy can help ease fibromyalgia symptoms

Psychology therapy can be a great support for people who suffer from the chronic pain that Fibromyalgia produces. This article tells us how this helps us.

What is Fibromyalgia?

Fibromyalgia is a disease characterized by musculoskeletal pains and hypersensitivity. This disease is often related to persistent fatigue, sleep disorders, and anxiety and low mood symptoms.

How does it affect quality of life?

Because of chronic and persistent pains, the lives of people with this disease revolve around their discomfort, and their recurrent thoughts that negatively influence the subjective perception of it.

Fibromyalgia limits quality of life, generating psychological and emotional symptoms related to anxiety and low mood. People with this disease perceive themselves limited by their pain, forming a low self-concept of themselves, not being able to live a normal life, in terms of work and relationships.

Moreover, a common attitude of these people is to feel a victim of their illness, incapable of overcoming it, and resigned to suffering and to a diminished life.

How to help a person with Fibromyalgia?

First, the person suffering from Fibromyalgia must learn to accept the disease, organizing their life and recognizing themselves capable of moving on, taking care of themselves and managing the pain, their attitudes and emotions.

From the psychological intervention, therapy helps people suffering from this disease, teaching them to identify thoughts, emotions and attitudes, which increase psychological distress, influencing the subjective perception of pain.

On the other hand, in the therapy, the secondary gains of pain are identified, that is to say, those benefits that are unconsciously obtained from chronic pain, for example, care, support, protection and care of loved ones, Feeling of victim and the passive attitude before the life.

In addition, the therapy teaches techniques for the control and reduction of pain.

What techniques can be learned in a Psychological Therapy?

The techniques for the control, management and reduction of pain, are based on the relaxation and decrease of anxiety.

These can be suggestive techniques and hypnosis, which enable the sick person to control pain and effective management of anxiety symptoms.

In addition, cognitive techniques allow the person to discover and restructure their irrational beliefs about disease and pain; Learning a subjective interpretation of pain, more healthy and bearable.

Through emotional techniques, they can learn to feel good about themselves, achieving an optimal emotional balance that enhances an adequate self-concept and self-esteem, so that the person takes over the reins of his life, without the disease doing it for him.

What can Psychology bring to Fibromyalgia? 

·        If you receive Psychological help, you will learn to control the pain and          anxiety states that you may feel on account of the illness.

·        Psychological Therapy will help you take the reins of your life, feeling your   emotions and your body, without feeling like a victim, but with the attitude of overcoming, learning and growth through illness.

·         You will learn to care for yourself without waiting for others to do it for you.

·         You will end up modifying wrong and negative attitudes, which kept you in     a dead end, where the pain increased more and more.

·         It is important to learn to communicate and express your own needs,            opinions and feelings, in this way, you will feel better with yourself and with    others.

·         Psychological Therapy will help you to live with illness, learning from it, and  improving with it your attitudes and ways of seeing life, to feel well and  happiness, giving importance to other circumstances of life, without              focusing exclusively on the disease.