What Chronic Pain Has Taught Me About Resilience | Trung Ngo | TEDxCentennialCollegeToronto

Adversity sucks. I've seen it most of my life when I was younger. He was crammed into the hull of a small fishing boat with one hundred and seventeen people to escape oppression in Vietnam. That ship was a death trap that we could be stranded in the middle of. In the South China Sea we almost starved to death because we ran out of food and were almost killed during a pirate attack. Somehow we managed to survive and landed in a refugee camp. It was a traumatic month in our lives, but the real struggles began when we got off the ship because it took us years to adapt to our new countries.

There was an obvious culture shock, but the biggest challenge for us was how we saw ourselves. We were no longer the established members of society. Overnight we became nobody. Some people on Our Boat were able to adapt quite well at first, they had to work multiple jobs and barely had enough money to eat, but after 10 or 20 years they were able to become highly respected members of their communities, other people on the same boat fell apart. , although we end up with broken families in jail or commit suicide. All of us, in the same boat, face a similar form of adversity.

So why were the results so different? I kept asking myself this question and I think the universe heard me because it brought me into the realm of

chronic

pain

which is one of the most extreme forms of adversity, imagine you have a severe headache that is always there with no end in sight, but nobody believes you. Chronic

pain

affects 20% of the world's population and is one of the leading causes of our current Well, for most of the last decade I have had the privilege of leading a team at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto that specializes in

chronic

pain.

We understood that it is a complex condition that can affect a person physically, psychologically and socially. We had a unique approach where a patient could see a doctor, psychologist, chiropractor, occupational therapist, pharmacist or other healthcare provider in the same room at the same time and their patients could see us for a few hours a day, five days a day. the week for several months. getting to know our patients very well from multiple perspectives to be able to treat the whole person over the years, we saw some people whose lives were completely destroyed by pain, but we also saw some people who were resilient and able to return to a productive and meaningful life despite their pain, as we continued to see these results over and over again, we began to notice some key differences between the two groups and

what

we learned revealed something surprising, our findings showed us that regardless Whatever adversity you face, suffering is actually a choice.

I'm not saying you can choose whether or not you want to have pain and adversity. I'm saying that you can choose how that adversity affects your life. So

what

did we learn from our patients? Well, we learned that one of the worst effects of adversity is that it can make you feel like you've lost control of everything, it can change your life unexpectedly and leave you in a situation you don't want to be in and you don't know what. Related to this, we've seen two types of people in particular call these victims names and catastrophize mistakes.

Victims are people who are in their situation because of someone else and their attitude is that someone else caused this, so someone else should fix it. In my opinion, they feel that they do not have to be responsible for their lives or their actions because life has been unfair to them. They are catastrophically wrong. They are constantly thinking about what ifs in the future. They completely paralyzed themselves from doing anything because I always worry that something bad is going to happen, when there is a self-fulfilling prophecy, it feeds back into the worries that cause this vicious cycle, so while the victims are worried about the past and mistakes catastrophic, they are obsessed with the future, resilient people take ownership of the present.

By doing something now to improve her situation, there was one patient who really impacted this house for me. Her name is Teresa. She grew up in an abusive family. She struggled with eating disorders. She was kicked out of the house when she became pregnant at age 16. She had to drop out of high school and work any job available to support herself and her son, but then her knee starts to give out and she can't work anymore, so she has an operation that fails and then comes to us with chronic pain. on her knee when we met her Teresa was facing physical, emotional, interpersonal and financial problems.

She was so overwhelmed that she burned herself on purpose because the pain of the burn took her mind away from all the other garbage in her life. How bad is your life if you have to hurt yourself? To find relief, we obviously had to give her some emotional support, but we were surprised by her incredible attitude. She worked very hard to strengthen her knee and when she was able to stand and walk more easily she began to focus on finding good relief. At first she was rejected from many positions, but she never felt entitled as if she deserved a good job because of all the negative things she has gone through.

She simply asked us to help her with her resume and her interview skills and she kept working until she got the job she wanted and, once her finances were better, she started dealing with her relationship problems. 10 years later, I meet her again and discover that she is happily married, has two children and lives a very productive life. Teresa

taught

me that. No matter how out of control your life may seem, you will always have control over your actions right now, so do one thing and take responsibility for the results so you can steer your life in a positive direction.

Now everything you do requires time and energy. of which we all have a limited supply, so you can't always focus on just one thing because life happens, you still need to meet your deadlines at school or work, you still need to take care of your kids or take the car to the shop if it is necessary. needs repairs Some people feel overwhelmed by all their activities because they do not manage their time and energy properly, so they are not able to handle or cope with any problem. These are the yes-sayers and the go-getters. The people who do are like everyone's doormat.

They will do everything for others and run out of time and energy. On the other hand, entrepreneurs try to do everything all the time to deplete their resources. Resilient people accept that their time and energy are limited and understand. that in order to take care of others, they first have to take care of themselves, so they make their own well-being a priority. One of our patients. Curtis is the kindest person I have ever met. His job is physically demanding, which is not great. for his chronic lower back pain, but his supervisors also take advantage of his good nature and keep telling him to do extra work, which Curtis always agrees to, then after work his son asks him to play, but he is in so much pain that everyone All he could do was go to bed when Curtis came to see us.

He was constantly on the verge of tears because his pain was getting progressively worse and he felt guilty for neglecting his son. It was pretty obvious that all his extra work for a supervisor was perpetuating his pain, so we asked him why he kept doing it and found out it was because he felt intimidated by his supervisor, so we trained him to be more assertive and made him practice standing up for himself. himself, was finally able to develop enough confidence. to finally say no to the unreasonable demands of his supervisors the first time he did this, his supervisors were speechless, we were very proud of him ever since.

Kurtis has been setting aside time to relax so that his body can recover and rest over time. The back pain improved and he was able to play with his son again, so Curtis

taught

me that if you want enough time and energy to do the things that are meaningful in your life, then you have to set your boundaries and take care of yourself now. there are. Some people who take this to the extreme because they feel very miserable, even though they push everyone away or become completely dependent on others to take care of them, these are the recluses and perpetual patients, lonely people push everyone away because they just want to be. left alone, but in doing so they disconnect from any emotional support on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Perpetual sufferers take on the sick role and do nothing for themselves, thereby missing the opportunity to develop effective coping skills. What they are both doing is eliminating themselves as active participants in society. Resilient people understand that no matter what state they are in, there is still a valuable part of the human collective, so they become an interdependent part of society by using their relationships to meet their needs or find different ways to give back to others. In addition, there was a patient named Lily who lived in seclusion due to chronic pain in her legs and because she felt bitter towards her family for abandoning her.

She has been divorced for many years and her adult children do not speak to her. So over time she gained weight, she became weak and depressed so much that she was at risk of suicide. It turns out that during her marriage she cheated on her husband and it was her fault for this that made her feel unworthy of any relationship. During all these years , when this fundamental issue finally came to light, it became clear to Lily that she needed people in her life again, so she reached out to a divorce support group and began volunteering with school children.

She teaches them how to knit so that it doesn't aggravate her leg pain. Once she got the right support from her group and something to look forward to in her to work on, her pain and her mood improved, so Lily showed me that if you want To get ahead of adversity you need strong strength. social network so that you can draw strength and a sense of meaning from others, but some people still struggle to move forward even though they have the best support network, this is because they have very rigid expectations of how It must be their lives.

These doctor shoppers believe their lives should be the way they were before the pain started, so they put their lives completely on hold as they jump from doctor to doctor to find an immediate cure for themselves so they can return to their normal lives. . But chronic pain is multifaceted and most of the time they cannot find a quick solution, so their condition worsens because they feel more and more hopeless with each failed treatment. Resilient people are able to let go of their expectations about how things should be. and they are open to different possibilities. A great example of this is the story of Candice, she is a talented painter who many years ago decided to put her art aside in exchange for a stable job in a factory, she thought that once she got her retirement package.

She would be financially secure enough to be able to return to her passions full time, at least that was her plan, but just a couple of years before retirement she gets injured and ends up with chronic pain in her arm that It prevents him from doing his thing. She worked, since she had already invested so many years in her plan, she was determined to fix it, but every treatment and every attempt to return to work failed, so her pain and her mood worsened. . An important fact that you should know is that Candice also has a great interest in wigs because her wig helped boost her confidence when she experienced hair loss due to a thyroid problem.

Well, one day she's visiting Toronto and she walks into a busy wig store and then she starts thinking to herself, hmm, this kind of a service would really be useful in my hometown now if she'd been stuck and trying to find a cure for herself, that could have just been a passing thought and she may still be searching for a cure today, but instead she was able to let it go. her from her original life plan and she started talking to the store owner about her idea. It was risky for her to start something new at this stage of her career, but it was easy for her to dedicate her time and energy because she was so excited about it.

With so much passion and hard work, it seemed inevitable that her store would succeed. She still has pain in her arm, but it doesn't affect her much because she has a rewarding job that improves the lives of cancer survivors and others who have experienced it. hair loss, so the last lesson my patients taught me is that life doesn't always take you where you want to go, but that's okay because there are other potentially better paths if you are open to them. Personally, I am grateful for all of these lessons because a few years ago they really helped me deal better with some major struggles in my life.

My wife and I had three miscarriages while trying to have a second child. It was an emotionally challenging time for us and could have caused a lot of problems. damage, but knowing whatI did for my patients, I chose to be interdependent by getting the support of my friends and family and helping my wife in any way I could. Talking about our miscarriages was difficult and I see why many people don't do it. I did, but it was comforting to discover that others had also gone through the same thing while I processed everything I was going through.

I still had to work, do housework, and take care of my young son, so to avoid feeling overwhelmed. I chose to make my own well-being a priority. I set aside time each night to relax and laugh with my wife. I also said there were limits to the amount of work I would do each day. The job was stressful, but the biggest stress for us. at that time it was our sex life because it was always time come on or don't touch me I'm not ready here the first one was heard the second was me so we put aside our fixation with conceiving a child and became Open to adoption, we already had a child He was amazing and our miscarriages made us feel even more grateful for him, so I held him tighter and played with him more often.

I owned the present because I didn't want to regret wasting time with him while I was trying to have another child. After about a year we were able to maintain a pregnancy and now I have two amazing children for you all to face. some form of adversity in your life in those crucial moments if you feel overwhelmed and perhaps even desperate, remember that you have a choice, you cannot control what life throws at you, but you can control whether adversity will break you or break you. I hope you choose the path of

resilience

.