Dr. Dean Ornish is a physician and researcher. For over 35 years, Dr. Ornish’s series of scientific research studies have been empowering the way people think about the simple lifestyle choices they make each day in relation to their health & wellbeing. He also recognizes love and support are a key factor in recovery.
Physical pain in the body can also manifest itself from years of accumulated emotional pain. This can be a layoff from a job or the void experienced from the loss of a loved one many years ago. One generator of physical pain in the body are negative emotions people manifest. Negative emotions activate your brain to produce pain-inducing chemicals that cause musculoskeletal pain. Once physical pain is experienced the cycle begins. Negative emotions lead to physical pain. Physical pain leads to negative emotions (fear, anxiety, catastrophizing). Do you see the pattern?
Use Valentine’s Day to Begin Healing
In honor of Valentine’s Day, we look toward the impact love and support can have on recovery. Love begins with communication. If you don’t understand how you express love, or how those around you prefer to receive love, relationships can be strained. In Dr. Gary Chapman’s book, The Five Love Languages he discusses the five ways people communicate love; words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, quality time, and physical touch. (To learn your love language take Dr. Chapman’s free quiz.)
Know Your Love Language
Your love language is how you express love to others. Your preferred way to express love and appreciation might be words of affirmation. However, if interacting with someone who’s primary love language is physical touch, your attempts may go unnoticed. Knowing your language also helps you communicate what makes you feel good.
Other Peoples Love Language
Dialing into another’s love language can make relations more fluid. Adapting to our patients preferred method of communication is big in physical therapy. Some patients are kinesthetic learners while other do better with visual or auditory input. Learning another’s love language can speed the healing process for both patient and therapist.
Master the Five Love Languages
Whether you are a physical therapist whose aim is to rapidly improve health or simply want to enhance relationships at work, learning the various love languages can be impactful. Begin by mastering the love language of someone you interact with daily. Learning all five is easier than high school French and can go a long way toward improving relationships.
Love and Support Mutes Pain
Feeling of sadness, hopelessness and depression often go hand-in-hand with physical pain. We know feelings of social rejection changes the way the brain perceives pain. Understanding someone’s love language can help you relate whether you are physical therapist or a manager in business. Patients come to us with tight muscles and painful joints. Exercise and manual therapy can heal tissue although often a patient needs positive reinforcement such as:
- A full recovery is possible; we will work on this together.
- You will relearn healthy movement; we have tremendous success helping patients overcome this.
- You will return to your activity and the pain will subside.
Words and thoughts of encouragement can be powerful. Your doctor of physical therapy will answer all your questions. We take the time to work through the physical and emotional aspects of your care. You will find physical therapy to be a supportive environment where you receive one-on-one attention and interact with others who are recovering from physical injury and challenges.
Our goal at Premier Physical Therapy is to help you recover fully from any physical ailment. Providing caring and supportive physical therapists is one way we are helping you lead a healthy life.
Wishing you love and health this Valentine’s Day.
Joe Tatta, PT, DPT
Let us know how we can help you overcome injury or if you have had a positive, caring experience with one of our clinicians.
http://www.painmed.org/patientcenter/facts_on_pain.aspx#incidence
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2546683
http://www.5lovelanguages.com/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24623774
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