I CAN COPE
Gail Wooding, Counselor
Geropsychiatric Assessment Program

There are people who have a lot of pain. So they have depression associated with their medical conditions. There are people here at JFS who are trained to help people with pain management. You could do relaxation training, meditation. Those kinds of things help people with pain.

Pain management is basically the idea that thought, behavior and emotions are connected in a triangle. Let’s say the thought is, “I can’t stand this another minute.” If you say “I can’t stand this another minute,” then the behavior may be even more agony and the feeling is despair.

If you change the thought and said, “I just need to get through this. This is going to last ‘x’ amount of time and I can get through this,” the behavior is “I’ll breathe,” or “I have some skills I can use.” And then the feeling is relief, or it could be “I can cope.”

How you think influences your feelings, and your thinking influences your behavior. You can reverse any one of those.