4 Ways to Keep Chronic Pain From Straining Your Friendships

Not only can chronic pain feel isolating, sometimes sharing it with friends and family can be worse than keeping it to yourself. Here's a guide from patients who know about the problems you may encounter with your loved ones and how to handle them.

Help your friends help you
"Chances are your family and friends will react to your pain in one of three ways," says Jen Singer, 41, a cancer survivor from Kinnelon, N.J. "They'll want to fix it for you, they'll wish they didn't have to know about it, or they'll want you to suck it up."

Singer advises pain sufferers to avoid analyzing friends' and relatives' motives and focus on how they can support you.

"When you're feeling relatively OK, tell them how you want to be treated when the pain hits," suggests Singer. "Maybe you want to be left alone. Maybe you need help breathing through it or reaching for your pain meds. They'll probably be relieved when you let them know—even if you want them to do nothing."

Understand why it may be difficult for them
Some people just can't handle a person in pain. "People really don't want to be around sick people," says Steven Feinberg, MD, a past president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine.

"When someone is ill you feel sorry for them. But we're all busy," Dr. Feinberg says. "We say we care and things like that but the reality is, except for our immediate family, we don't want to be reminded of our own mortality."

At the same time that friends may be pulling away, you may not have the energy to pull them back.

"If you're in chronic pain, you don't have the physical strength," explains Dr. Feinberg. "You're irritable—and people don't want to be around you. So you start losing relationships."