Language, Pain, & Neurophysiology
Eleanor Criswell Hanna & Peter Behel 4-26-2019
While the experience of pain is universal, research has uncovered various factors that influence each person’s individual pain perception, including personal history, social interactions, mood, and expectations. This assortment of influences can make communication with a client in pain challenging and multi-faceted. Through our language and communication we can either soothe or amplify pain perception, and help our clients become open to the possibility of a positive outcome or at least a potential reframe of how they choose to see and live with their situation.
This workshop will focus on facilitating positive interactions with clients, keeping pain-related communication complexities in mind, and furthering the recovery process through effective practitioner communication. To this end, we’ll be using both role play and biofeedback instruments to monitor the physiological effects of communication from practitioner to client, as well as the effects of the way clients talk to themselves.
The presentation will include participation from the group with regard to times they realized they may have made communication blunders or created misunderstandings, times when using positive language felt contrived and untrue, times when the practitioner just didn’t know how to respond in the moment, and times when practitioners might have communicated with a client in pain in a way that was truly beneficial. Given the abundance of influences that shape the way individuals experience pain, learning to maximize our capacity to facilitate beneficial outcomes is an important component of client interaction.
Eleanor Criswell Hanna, Ed.D. is emeritus professor of psychology and former chair of the psychology department, Sonoma State University. Founding director of the Humanistic Psychology Institute (now Saybrook University, San Francisco), she is editor of Somatics Magazine, the magazine-journal of the mind-body arts and sciences, and director of the Novato Institute for Somatic Research and Training. Her books include Biofeedback and Somatics: Toward Personal Evolution, How Yoga Works: An Introduction to Somatic Yoga, and she is editor of Cram’s Introduction to Surface Electromyography. She is past president and board member of the International Association of Yoga Therapists. She is also on the board of the Association for Hanna Somatic Education. She is the originator of Somatic Yoga and Equine Hanna Somatics.
Peter Behel, MA is a biofeedback specialist who has spent 20 years specializing in the treatment of chronic pain, beginning in 1987 at Mt. Diablo Hospital Medical Center in Concord, CA. Currently serving as an adjunct faculty member at Sonoma State University, Peter has also been involved in the treatment of acute care psychiatric disorders as a member of a behavioral health treatment team at Community Psychiatric Hospital in Santa Rosa, CA. While formerly a member of a multidisciplinary treatment team who treated Pixar and Industrial Light and Magic animators suffering from repetitive strain injuries in San Rafael, CA, Peter is currently practicing as a provider for Kaiser Permanente in Santa Rosa.