For people suffering from chronic pain, they do not only have to cope with the physical distress caused by the pain but their direct experience of life is substantially altered as well. They become uncertain about the future, learn to live moment by moment and struggle to experience quality of life. Their life can narrow down to their home, their room and the few activities that they feel they can continue to risk each day. The patient’s awareness can become focused on their pain experience and their isolation and they can become chronically under stimulated.
These situations all have direct impact on the meaning of life for the patient. Existential therapy speaks of the interaction between the person and their physical environment (places they visit or the conditions they live in), their social environment (family, friends and other people) and their internal environment (their hopes and dreams, their spirituality, mood and personal responses to different situations).
The main benefit of existential approaches includes applying some of the existential concepts to the pain situation so as to help change the patient’s view and understanding of their pain experience. Some pain patients can be described as living lives of isolated desperation while others lives can be described as quiet heroism. Existential approaches seek to help the patient improve the quality of their life and increase their motivation by learning to value positive experience, improve and deepen their relationship with their world. Often the gentle affirmations and encouragement provided during other therapeutic interventions can be made more powerful with a little extra thought that seeks to include existential dimensions of the patient’s life’s journey, the patient’s spirituality, the patient’s passions and which seeks to re-awaken the patient’s sense of engagement with their hopes and dreams. This type of approach inevitably builds on a sense of deep respect for the humanity of the patient. It can include a number of short sentence type thought provoking lines in the middle of a different activity.