Chronic Pain Management from a Muslim Therapist

About Aisha Chaudhry

Aisha Chaudhry is an Aalimah and Muslim Therapist. She specializes in trauma which often looks like depression, anxiety including OCD, intrusive thoughts, health anxiety, and panic. She has a special interest in helping clients learn how to calm the body through a combination of neural informed therapies, Internal Family Systems, CBT, and Exposure-Response Prevention. For clients looking for integrated therapy, a holistic approach is available.

Chronic Pain Management from a Muslim Therapist

The information contained herein is to offer a comprehensive overview of chronic pain (not for treatment or diagnosis). It is important to get treatment from a Muslim therapist, particularly, one who has studied Islam and who knows the Islamic rulings surrounding the issues clients seek treatment for. The reasons are two-fold:

Therapeutic Alliance: It is important for the client to develop a good therapeutic relationship with the therapist. This can only happen if the client feels safe enough to discuss matters that they feel embarrassed about or fear they may be judged negatively due to them. Sometimes the themes related to the obsessions are very difficult to communicate to anyone, which is one of the reasons for lack of seeking care at all.
Islamic principles may be utilized per client comfort. For example, for the audios, special care is taken not to include music or unislamic principles. Similarly, any audios are always geared toward lifting up the spirit of a person which aids in the healing and coping process.

What is Chronic Pain?

Chronic pain is long-standing pain that persists beyond the usual recovery period or occurs along with a chronic health condition, such as arthritis. Chronic pain may be “on” and “off” or continuous. It may affect people to the point that they can’t work, eat properly, take part in physical activity, or enjoy life.

Pain starts in receptor nerve cells found beneath the skin and in organs throughout the body. When you are sick, injured, or have another type of problem, these receptor cells send messages along nerve pathways to the spinal cord, which then carries the message to the brain. Pain medicine reduces or blocks these messages before they reach the brain.

Pain can be anything from a slightly bothersome, such as a mild headache, to something excruciating and emergent, such as the chest pain that accompanies a heart attack, or pain of kidney stones. Pain can be acute, meaning new, subacute, lasting for a few weeks or months, and chronic, when it lasts for more than 3 months.

Types of Chronic Pain

Chronic pain is one of the most costly health problem in U.S. Increased medical expenses, lost income, lost productivity, compensation payments, and legal charges are some of the economic consequences of chronic pain. Consider the following:

Low back pain is one of the most significant health problems. Back pain is a common cause of activity limitation in adults.
Cancer pain affects most people with advanced cancer.
Arthritis pain affects more than 50 million Americans each year.
Headaches affect millions of U.S. adults. Some of the most common types of chronic headaches are migraines, cluster headaches, and tension headaches.
Other pain disorders such as the neuralgias and neuropathies that affect nerves throughout the body, pain due to damage to the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord), as well as pain where no physical cause can be found–psychogenic pain–increase the total number of reported cases.

How Can a Therapist Help?

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is a form of talk therapy that helps people identify and develop skills to change negative thoughts and behaviors. CBT says that individuals — not outside situations and events — create their own experiences, pain included. And by changing their negative thoughts and behaviors, people can change their awareness of pain and develop better coping skills, even if the actual level of pain stays the same.

“The perception of pain is in your brain, so you can affect physical pain by addressing thoughts and behaviors that fuel it,” Hullett tells WebMD.

What can CBT do for you? Cognitive-behavioral therapy helps provide pain relief in a few ways. First, it changes the way people view their pain. “CBT can change the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors related to pain, improve coping strategies, and put the discomfort in a better context,” Hullett says. You recognize that the pain interferes less with your quality of life, and therefore you can function better.

CBT can also change the physical response in the brain that makes pain worse. Pain causes stress, and stress affects pain control chemicals in the brain, such as norepinephrine and serotonin, Hullett says. “CBT reduces the arousal that impacts these chemicals,” he says. This, in effect, may make the body’s natural pain relief response more powerful.

To treat chronic pain, CBT is most often used together with other methods of pain management. These remedies may include medications, physical therapy, weight loss, massage, or in extreme cases, surgery. But among these various methods of pain control, CBT is often one of the most effective. “In control group studies, CBT is almost always as least as good as or better than other treatments,” Hullett says. Plus, CBT has far fewer risks and side effects than medications or surgery.

To help provide pain relief, cognitive behavioral therapy:

Encourages a problem-solving attitude. “The worst thing about chronic pain is the sense of learned helplessness — ‘there is nothing I can do about this pain,’” Hullett says. If you take action against the pain (no matter what that action is), you will feel more in control and able to impact the situation,” he says.
Involves homework. “CBT always includes homework assignments,” Hullett says. “These may involve keeping track of the thoughts and feelings associated with your pain throughout the day in a journal, for example. “Assignments are then reviewed in each session and used to plan new homework for the following week.”
Fosters life skills. CBT is skills training. “It gives patients coping mechanisms they can use in everything they do,” Hullet says. You can use the tactics you learn for pain control to help with other problems you may encounter in the future, such as stress, depression, or anxiety.
Allows you to do it yourself. Unfortunately, good qualified cognitive behavioral therapists aren’t available in all areas. Luckily, you can conduct CBT on your own as a method of pain control, even if you’ve never set foot in a therapist’s office. “CBT is a cookbook approach. It can easily be applied to self-help and computerized programs,” Hullett says. And the literature supports that these self-help methods can be just as effective for pain management as one-on-one sessions.

Most cognitive-behavioral therapy for pain control consists of weekly group or individual sessions lasting 45 minutes to two hours. Expect to attend between eight and 24 sessions, with possible “booster” sessions to refresh your skills.

What We Think Affects How We Feel

The goal of therapy is to change the way you think about the pain so that your body and mind respond better when you have episodes of pain. Therapy focuses on changing your thoughts about illness and then helping you adopt positive ways of coping with illness. Aisha Chaudhry prefers to use a combination of talk therapy along with meditation and relaxation techniques that soothe and calms the nervous system response.

Additional Pain Treatment Options

In addition to CBT, getting chronic pain management from a Muslim therapist has added means. As a Muslim therapist, I like to take a complete whole-body or holistic approach which involves adding spirituality and spiritual meditations including duas during it. For example, I have special meditation audios I use to help the whole entire body relax and work on encouraging coping thoughts while using Sunnah duas at the same time. Chronic pain management from a Muslim therapist will help you get the balance you hope for and one in line with cultural attitudes. Most of my clients feel more relief when working with a Muslim therapist because of the holistic approach.

I have special audios for the following types of pain. I create the audio for my client’s specific situation. Chronic pain management from a Muslim therapist will be beneficial to you because all of the audio aim to increase belief and reliance on Allah swt The following conditions are ones I am able to create intense meditation audio for include:

Endometriosis pain
Vulvodynia
Auto immune disorder pain
Cancer pain
Fibromyalgia
Neuropathic
TMJ
Shingles
Post Catheter
Anesthesia like induction
Mental Massage that relaxes the body
Myofascial syndrome
Rheumatoid Arthritis
Hip pain
CRPS pain
Phantom limb pain
Lower back pain
Frozen shoulder pain
Fear of pain

How long until relief comes?

It varies from person to person and their willingness to immerse their whole mind and body into the experience. Quite often, clients leave the first session feeling extremely calm, relaxed, and able to manage. It is necessary however to continue listening to the audios to train the brain in managing. Practice makes more permanent, and booster sessions are often useful every 2 to 3 months or so.

What’s the guarantee this will work?

I do wish I could guarantee that. Like with any treatment whether it’s therapy or medicinal, there is no guarantee. We put forth our best efforts and sincerely engage in the process. When that happens, usually we do find improvement; however, it would be unethical to guarantee change.

What are the charges?

For meditational audios, the process looks like:

To get started, schedule an intake session for background and symptom history.
If the client wishes for a specific treatment like hip pain, then after the intake session, a meditational audio will be created just for that issue.
To receive the audio, you will receive a link to pay. The price for the meditational audio is $200. You will receive access to the audio on the client portal for 60 days or you can purchase the audio for $350 and it will be emailed to you for lifetime access.
If you would like to receive talk therapy sessions in addition, you would schedule the individual sessions through the appointments page. I would suggest counseling sessions be taken alongside as usually, clients have co-occurring issues that can exacerbate the pain, which can make the audio less effective and the pain increased.

Disclaimer

None of the information on this website is intended to diagnose or treat any condition. This information is for educational use only. Please get treatment if you feel you are struggling with different symptoms.