The following is a summary of the “Potential Misfortunes in ‘Making Sense’: A Cross-Sectional Study in People with Chronic Pain,” published in the January 2023 issue of Pain Management by McCracken et al.
Normal people, chronic pain sufferers included, benefit from trying to make sense of their experiences. On the other hand, sense-making may negatively affect one’s ability to carry out daily tasks. This study aimed to create and validate a measure of potentially helpful and harmful forms of sense-making behavior in patients seeking treatment for chronic pain to gain a better understanding of the roles of sense-making. The Sense-Making Questionnaire (SMQ) is the name of this instrument. The study comprised 451 persons with chronic pain and receiving interdisciplinary treatment. Participants in this study completed a battery of standard pre-treatment questionnaires to provide data for this investigation.
Avoidance of Incoherence, Overthinking, and Functional Coherence are the three factors that emerged from an EFA of 15 items measuring cognitive processes related to coherence. There was satisfactory internal consistency concerning the first two and the sum. Significant relationships were found between SMQ scores and measures of pain acceptance, committed action, cognitive fusion, and intolerance of uncertainty, providing further evidence for the SMQ’s construct validity. All three variables (pain interference (r =.23), depression (r =.41), and work and social adjustment (r =.30) were strongly linked with the SMQ total score (P<.001 for all three). After controlling for age, gender, education, pain duration, pain severity, and pain acceptance, the total score was still a significant predictor of depression in multiple regression analyses, accounting for an additional 8.0% of the explained variance.
Literal coherence and functional coherence are 2 separate things. While dealing with chronic pain, it may be helpful to shift the emphasis away from trying to make literal meaning of the suffering and towards maintaining a focus on taking appropriate action, even if this seems counterintuitive at first. An important part of our research into people looking for help with chronic pain is creating a measure of how people act when trying to make sense of their pain. It demonstrates how these patterns of conduct aren’t always productive, mainly because they seem to be linked to lower levels of psychological, physiological, and social well-being.
Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1526590022004060
