5 Ways to Support a Loved One With Chronic Pain
/By Crystal Lindell
Recently I wrote that one of the most important things you need to enjoy life with chronic pain is supportive loved ones.
But what does that look like in practice?
Below are some tips on how to realistically help loved ones who deal with chronic pain.
And if you’re the person in pain reading this, perhaps you can pass this on to your friends, family and other loved ones. Afterall, sometimes getting advice from a third party can help it land better.
Also, of course, if you have your own tips to share, we’d love to read them in the comments!
1. Keep in Touch With Them
If you care about someone with pain, maybe the most important thing you can do is to just stay in contact with them.
Having chronic pain makes it difficult to attend in-person events, but that doesn’t mean we lose the need for human connection. In fact, it just makes that need much stronger.
Sometimes friends fall off because they don’t see you as often, but other times it’s because they don’t want to have to talk to someone with chronic health issues. Those conversations can force them to face the fact that their own body is also fragile and mortal.
But if you actually care about someone, I encourage you to push past all that.
Texting and phone calls can be a lifeline for people with chronic pain — as can in-person visits.
Your interactions with them may be the majority of human interaction they have, and it can be enough to keep them going for another day.
2. Give Them Meals and Help with Chores
When I first started having chronic pain, one of my friends did one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me – either before or since. She drove 2 hours to come visit me and then cleaned my entire apartment, including the bathroom.
It is not possible to express how grateful I was and how much of a difference that made in my ability to keep going through one of the darkest times in my life. Just having a clean space to exist was like having a weight lifted off my very painful ribs.
While healthy people can take for granted the ability to do daily household tasks like cooking meals and doing the dishes — a person with chronic pain knows how easy it is to fall behind on those things.
And when that happens, on top of the stress of dealing with a broken body, you also have to deal with a messy house. That can come with a lot of guilt and even physical discomfort.
So, if you’re able to help them with housework in any capacity, that can also lift a truly heavy burden.
Having someone make or drop off meals once a week, or even once a month can also be a massive help. There’s also the option of sending meals with services like DoorDash or Uber Eats, or giving them food delivery gift cards.
It may seem like cooking and cleaning for someone is no big deal, but when you do it for someone with chronic pain, it can be as helpful as the best medication.
3. Don’t Be Offended If Someone Needs Rest
I need more sleep than the average person, I assume because my body is using so much energy to just exist with chronic pain. I also need more time to recover after big events like parties.
It can mean that I can’t respond to calls or text, and that I need a lot of time alone to sleep and rest.
But even my most well-meaning loved ones can take this need for rest as some sort of indictment — as though I just don’t want to be around them or to interact with them.
It’s not about them though, it’s about me and my defective body.
If someone you love has chronic pain and they need a nap, or a couple days to respond to a text, don’t take it personally. It probably just means they needed some extra rest.
4. Go to Doctor’s Appointments With Them
Chronic pain can make it more important than ever to have productive doctor appointments — but it can also make that task more difficult.
That’s why having a loved one attending doctor’s appointments with you is truly invaluable.
A second person being there to focus on what the doctor is saying and to ask questions on your behalf can mean the difference between finding treatments that actually work or not.
It also usually makes doctors take a patient more seriously when they know that a loved one is keeping tabs and will be holding them to account for their treatment outcomes.
So, if you’re able to go to doctor appointments with your loved one with chronic pain, I highly recommend doing so.
5. Be Accepting of their Use of Pain Medications
A lot of people face stigma for using pain medications, especially opioids.
But oftentimes, pain medication can become a point of friction between patients and loved ones, who don’t fully understand the importance of alleviating chronic pain.
Other people’s pain is always easy to endure, so it’s always easy to tell someone else that they don’t need to treat their pain.
While loved ones who say such things are usually well-meaning, those conversations can cause a lot of unnecessary stress for people in pain.
It’s best just to assume that if someone is using pain medication, then they need that pain medication.
In the end, the best advice for supporting a loved one with chronic pain is to treat them how they want to be treated. And to accept that whatever they are going through is at least as bad as they are describing.
When you approach help from that mindset, you’ll often naturally find the best ways to support them.
Having support from loved ones can mean the difference between being able to endure a life with chronic pain or not. It’s just as important for their health as a good doctor is, and it can have just as much impact.
