A common complaint among people with chronic pain is that their pain has come to occupy too much of everyone’s time, attention or energy. In other words, it can sometimes feel like their pain is the only thing anyone ever talks to them about – that they’ve become almost synonymous with their pain.

We call it pain talk. Pain talk is the persistent verbal focus of everyone’s attention on the pain of someone with persistent pain.

One of the more long-standing recommendations of chronic pain rehabilitation is to reduce pain behaviors. It’s one of the ways that people with persistent pain can learn to cope better with pain. Let’s review how to do it.

From the time before Socrates in ancient Greece there stood a temple built upon a spring at a location the Greeks would have considered the center of the world. They called the temple, "Delphi". Inscribed on the walls of this holy temple was the simple phrase, “Know Thyself”.

If you wanted to learn how to knit well, you might take a class at your community craft store. You might also get a how-to book out of the library or watch a few YouTube videos. But as you did all these things, you would also pay attention to those who already knit well and watch how they do it. You would then try to do what they do.