Don’t focus on the colour of the walls in your house if you don’t have good foundations or you’ll be forever sorting out cracks rather than enjoying the delicate mocha.

All these messages are built from the science and understanding of what actually works to get people a long-term recovery in our clinic.

Learning to drive is a rite of passage for most people and many can remember how tricky it felt initially working out how to control the car and change gear whilst listening to directions and advice from the driving instructor. Well, getting control back of your body is not entirely different.

Example: You’re a learner driver and back with your driving instructor after a gap in lessons. As you drive along, just as you’re about to go past some parked cars your instructor stamps on the brakes and you come to a sudden abrupt stop. What happened you think and ask as you didn’t do anything wrong. Well suppose you consider that the last lesson you had you wrote the driving instructors car off, you see you might think everything was fine but your instructor didn’t as it looked just like the situation that caused them lots of pain last time they went out with you so they predicted what might happen and took action. In order to gain your instructors trust back again you can’t just tell them you’ve learnt from your mistakes you have to show them and after doing so for long enough their foot isn’t hovering over the brake ready to stamp as soon as something it considers threatening comes along.

Imagine the same driving instructor with one of their best students – in the same situation they probably have their foot on the floor not hovering over the brake. Driving past some parked cars they are impressed with you moving away from the centre of the road to allow more space for the large vehicle coming the other way. Exactly the same actions but completely different behaviour.

How do you build your driving instructors confidence when you don’t control it? The driving instructor is your pain system, a very primitive bit of your brain that only cares about doing what it thinks will keep you safe and anything that it perceives as a threat will get it very interested and it’s only way to communicate is with pain.

The best way to gain it’s trust is by starting to consider your day and the activities you do and ask can I predict the outcome with 80% certainty? We can’t control 100% of our lives so why bother trying. Start to get into the habit of making sure you’re 80% sure what you are going to do won’t cause you lots of pain and if it does then learn from that and factor it in next time as either there was something you didn’t consider or you were a bit over confident. It will be challenging at first like learning to drive, but with practice, like most things becomes easier and easier and builds the trust with the very primeval bit of your brain looking for things to react to with pain.

We need to give our very reactive pain system a reason to trust us as we hurt it before and ‘once bitten twice shy’. It will predict a bad outcome once it senses something that looks similar to a past experience. So much like the driving instructor that remembers the crash, show them you’re a better driver and can look after them, like with most instructors once they think you’re safe and have learnt all you need from them you will pass the test. Now you respond to the hazards with an 80% prediction of the outcome and pain only steps in when you really need it such as if you sit on a wasp when you get in the car.

The Key Takeaway:

Start thinking of the activities that make up your day and ask ‘are they 80% safe?’ If not can, I make them any more likely to be safe? We want to avoid triggering or making the pain worse and learn what is contributing in your life. Mirror, signal, manoeuvre felt really hard when you started driving and is often automatic now, this can be the same too if you start practicing it now.