A pioneering programme to support people living with chronic pain is expanding its reach even further through the adoption of new trauma-focused interventions.
The Empowered Relief (ER) programme delivers practical support in managing pain, tackling the emotional and psychological influences that contribute to an individual’s pain experience and making lasting positive changes in their quality of life.
The programme, run by RTW Plus, initially delivered in a group setting, began with the charity Black Thrive and subsequently went on to deliver ER in the Lambeth community to help address health inequalities too often experienced by minorities.
The Lambeth area project saw RTW collaborate with six Lambeth PCNS, supporting people to resume many parts of their lives their pain had previously prevented.
By addressing underlying individuals’ pain beliefs, alongside teaching strategies to reduce the anxiety and stress that accompanies pain, the brain remarkably can calm the impact of chronic pain.
Pain symptoms are often tackled with medication, but when a person can gain a greater understanding of their pain and employ techniques like guided relaxation and clinical hypnosis, it helps them cope better both psychologically and physically.
Now, having proven its success in Lambeth, with their ER – which won the CMSUK Award for Rehabilitation Innovation – RTW Plus is collaborating with a new venture, ReGain U, to enhance their pain services further by adding chronic pain-focused EMDR to address the trauma in addition to the physical impact of persistent pain.
ReGain U’s Jane Eastwood, a Specialist Trauma Informed EMDR Therapist, has brought a proven intervention in trauma therapy from Australia and RTW Plus is adopting the technique to support its work in pain management. ReGain U are now accepting referrals from RTW and other case managers for this latest expansion of its award-winning programme.
“While EMDR is widely adopted in the UK, ReGain U is pioneering this programme focused on using EMDR for chronic pain,” says Deborah Edwards, CEO of RTW Plus.
“Jane’s team have enhanced the educational component of ER, previously delivered in a two-hour group session, to provide expanded pain education combined with EMDR preparatory work plus self-hypnosis, all over six sessions.
“This expanded programme, led by Jane and her team, provides four additional hours of psychologist-led group time to embed strategies and practice learning. If indicated and agreed, a further 12 weeks of 1:1 pain-focused EMDR sessions are available.”
The growing evidence base is demonstrating positive outcomes.
Mark Grant, a Clinical Psychologist specialising in EMDR for pain, started the delivery of the specialist approach in Australia and has worked in the field of long-term health conditions for 30 years.
Mark described the new service as ‘Groundbreaking’ for the UK as we have very limited trauma-informed EMDR services specialising in chronic pain.
“We are advancing what we do all the time. We had lots of good results from Empowered Pain Relief, and that has led to the RTW and ReGain U collaboration for the development of what we are doing now, which is taking pain management forward,” says Deborah.
Over the last few years, RTW Plus has become a recognised name in chronic pain management, with a commitment to understanding the background factors in clients’ lives to make lasting change to their experience of pain.
We acknowledge the importance of understanding not just the pain problem but the individual who is experiencing the pain.
“The mechanism of our programme is about understanding emotional influences, our culture, and potentially trauma experienced in your early life – these things all impact on how individuals interpret pain,” says Deborah.
“So many people don’t understand pain, even within the clinical community. We must address the emotional side of pain. The brain is the processing unit for all things neurological, including pain; anxiety, stress and pain are all processed in the same area of the brain.
“When we experience chronic pain, it can become a vicious cycle because the more pain we are in, the more stressed the nervous system becomes, hence more pain leading to more stress.
“Through our programme, participants learn to manage the stress component of their pain by using their breath as a gateway to calm the noise around pain.
“Embedding the strategy in daily life is key to realizing the benefits this process can bring to reducing the negative impact that pain causes.
“We’re not saying we can completely take away a person’s pain – but we can change the relationship they have with their pain and gain some control over how it impacts their day-to-day life.
“We can help them not to be afraid of their pain anymore; it’s not going to damage them, and they’re not about to die.
“It’s about understanding that when the pain becomes chronic, the injury/pathology to the acute pain has generally resolved, and pain becomes the disease.
“It becomes a software problem, not a hardware problem in the body – that’s what we have helped people to do so far, and we’re stepping that up even further in the next phase of our work.”
