Life Plan & Recovery
Optimizing your personal power will be the foundation for recovering from chronic pain. It is a process that can be taught, experimented with, and refined to help you thrive. Using the New Possibilities book, the course, and workbook, you will explore the circumstances of life
chronic pain created. You will learn how to recover and you will develop a life plan that restores what’s been lost.
Life Plan
Identifying
disruptions
Pain is in your life, not just your body. Many people are so busy responding to events that they have very little sense of having an actual plan for their life. Other people have a clear plan for themselves. Either way, pain disrupts lives. It unbalances your sense of who you are and what is likely or even possible to have happen in your life. People suffering with chronic pain always experience disruption and loss and—in some cases—devastation and catastrophic loss.
Converting
loss to challenge
We help our clients overcome the losses and neutralize the disruptions by converting them to challenges that can be met.
Determining
what matters most
The life plan begins by exploring your relationships, activities, interests, skills, goals and aspirations—all of the elements of life that you say has given you meaning and purpose. Within the stress created by the negative events around your pain, there is an opportunity for personal growth. Utilizing your inherent strengths and reinforcing them, we help to restore balance, meaning and health in your life.
Assessing pain’s impact and your progress
in recovery
Once the goals are clear, we assess the impact of the pain condition on an individual’s life. The next step is rebuilding your life around what is important to you. This step involves some trial and error and is, perhaps, the most fun part of the recovery process.
Celebrating and
Fine-Tuning your plan
The final step is for you to engage in the on-going process of savoring what is meaningful and to continue to skillfully address any challenges to your health and well-being as they become known.
Recovery
There’s no silver bullet just consistent effort in the right direction
Most of us would like to find the quick and easy cure, the “silver bullet” for whatever vampire is taking our energy and leaving us wasted. But chronic pain, whether physical or emotional, requires that we do many small things over time to change our life and our pain experience. Like an ocean liner changing course in a small harbor, we need many gentle shoves in the right direction to get us where we’re going.
Use goals
to guide you
Guided by your goals and hopes for your life, recovery planning includes and develops the people, events and skills you need to reach those goals as well as the motivation and inspiration required to continue on the path to recovery.
Be specific about what you need to accomplish
Making changes means that you’ll be challenged to overcome obstacles. If you aren’t aware of the obstacles or what you need to overcome them, you probably won’t succeed. We help our clients be very specific about what they want to accomplish and just as specific about how they can get it done. Planning is an essential tool for making change.
Finding the
resources you need
Recovery is about finding the internal and external resources that we need to live in a better way. Our program provides the tools for recovery to anyone interested in doing the work of living well.
Plan for
relapses to succeed
Relapse prevention planning is an important part of recovery planning. This planning really pays off whenever stresses accumulate and resources are tapped out. And predicting that challenging situations are a normal feature of life gives you the luxury of having a plan you can use to ride out the “storm”, however it shows up.
What Clients are Saying
Dr. Weisser’s approach has helped me to not only deal with my pain more effectively but has strengthened my ability to get my needs met, better connect with others, and find new and invigorated value and purpose despite my pain.
– J.K. 38 – Chef
After only a few months’ working with Dr. Weisser’s approach, even though my pain levels were the same, I was able to react to it with less distress and emotional suffering and was better able to manage it. I began to see it as an event in my life not the master of It.
– S.R. 47 – Neurologist
This approach has helped me to feel considerably more in control of my pain and my life. It has had a major positive impact on how I feel about myself and taught me how to be more empowered in dealing with any stressor.
– T. D. 54 – Carpenter