Breaking the Cycle of Chronic Pain and PTSD

Key points

Chronic pain and PTSD often reinforce each other, but the cycle can be broken.

Avoidance and catastrophic thinking make physical and psychological pain worse; active coping helps.

Mindfulness and challenging unhelpful thoughts can change your pain experience.

You can live a live worth living, even if pain remains part of your story.

If you experience chronic pain and PTSD , you might find yourself stuck in a loop of unhelpful thinking and avoidance behaviors that backfire over time.

Research shows that people with both chronic pain and PTSD have higher pain sensitivity, more psychological distress, and greater impairment than those with either condition alone (Reed et al., 2021). Often, care is siloed—physical pain managed by medical providers, psychological pain by me