[Coping with pain]

Chronic pain is to be understood as a complex syndrome influenced by its intensity, character, localisation and time aspects as well as the subjective feeling of impairment and the accompanying emotions and cognitions. Based on the biopsychosocial concept of pain, therapies have to be multimodal to take into account the various dimensions of pain. One element of multimodal pain therapy is pain coping skills training, aimed at giving pain patients increasingly greater control over their pain by following the didactic guideline of small steps at a time. In addition to giving them disease-specific information, patients are supposed to learn to recognize dysfunctional components of their pain disorder and to alter them. Improved health and increased joy of living as well as a decrease of stressor-related activation (pain being the stressor) are the objectives of the training. Coping with pain as a programme aims at helping patients to help themselves. Pain coping skills training is indicated for patients already suffering from chronic pain or running a risk of pain chronicity.