Reversing Chronic Pain Book Review
Psychologist Maggie Phillips' Holistic Solutions for Pain Relief
A new book by psychotherapist and author Maggie Phillips covers approaches to pain management from energy psychology to mind-body exercises and visualization.
Living with pain from an injury, chronic illness, or from an unexplained source takes a toll on every aspect of life and is draining to body and soul, mind and heart. Maggie Phillips, Ph.D., is an expert in treating chronic pain, post-traumatic disorders and dissociation disorder using psychotherapy and hypnosis. Her latest book, Reversing Chronic Pain: A 10-Point All-Natural Plan for Lasting Relief walks the reader through a series of mental, physical, and energetic techniques to relieve pain and boost confidence in one’s ability to heal and begin to participate more fully in life.
Reversing Chronic Pain
Maggie Phillips is a psychologist and author of two previous books, Finding the Energy to Heal and Healing the Divided Self (co-authored with Claire Frederick).
Her focus in Reversing Chronic Pain is on small, gradual steps to relieve longstanding pain. With clarity and understanding of the challenges posed by chronic pain, she presents in ten chapters several dozen tools and techniques that can be used to relieve pain by small increments – one or two points off a ten-point scale per chapter is ideal – until pain is manageable or completely gone.
Phillips’ focus in this book is on long-lived pain from an injury that has healed, or discomfort from an illness or disability for which medicine has run out of conventional treatment options, but her suggestions could also be useful for relieving transient pain or relieving discomfort as an injury heals.
Remarkably for a self-help book, the writing throughout Reversing Chronic Pain is direct, clear and very readable, with a warm style that is both inviting and illuminating.
"A 10-Point All-Natural Plan"
The tools presented in Reversing Chronic Pain range from energy psychology to more conventional approaches with mental imagery and visualization, including:
- focus on the breath and various breathing exercises
- listening to the body’s wisdom and “felt sense”
- relaxation exercises
- pendulation between an area of pain and an area in the body that feels “safe”
- exercise and stretching
- self-massage
- energy psychology tapping (EFT), TAT, and energy balancing points
- imagery to focus and challenge pain patterns
- spiritual approaches to pain, including lovingkindness or “metta” meditation and prayer
- healing the emotional aspect of pain by clearing trauma and focusing on love and forgiveness
Lasting Relief from Chronic Pain
These exercises (and many more) are presented as steps in building an individualized “cocktail” of approaches that bring relief – your own “pain relief cocktail” (like the drug cocktails administered to AIDS patients which are more effective than any one drug alone). No single approach is supposed to relieve pain entirely on its own, but a solution made up of several of these tools may bring lasting relief and pain management.
Phillips suggests tuning in to your body’s sense of “yes” and “no” to choose the exercises and practices to explore from the instructions in each chapter. She also discusses, briefly, the short-term benefit of pain medication and other conventional treatments in some people’s pain relief “cocktail.”
One aspect of pain management which is not discussed – and is missed by its absence – is the role that food and dietary interventions can play in pain relief. Other than the absence of a nutritional perspective, however, Reversing Chronic Pain is remarkably thorough and easy to follow, and will doubtless be a source of hope and relief for many people struggling with chronic pain.
Related Reading:
- Fred Gallo's book Energy Tapping for Trauma
- Alternative Origins of Back Pain
