Chronic pain and chronic illness can be overwhelming for both patients and the clinicians who treat them. Patients must navigate an unfamiliar psychological and physiological landscape with few (initially) recognizable resources. These challenging circumstances, in turn, require that the clinician develop an integrated skill set that addresses the patient's painful physical symptoms while effectively dealing with the feelings of hopelessness, defeat, and fear that inevitably accompany the experience of chronic pain and illness.
Recrafting a Life: Solutions for Chronic Pain and Illness directly meets this complex challenge by presenting a new treatment approach that creatively incorporates powerful Ericksonian hypnosis interventions with effective solution-focused therapy techniques. Resource focused and rooted firmly in self-care theory, this integrative approach enables the clinician to effectively reduce physiological pain and suffering while successfully addressing the psychological issues associated with a chronic condition.
Engaging the reader with the transformational metaphor of Robinson Crusoe , the authors describe the five stages of recrafting a life through which patients pass in the journey to transcend their chronic condition. The clinician can utilize the dynamics of this framework to construct therapeutic strategies that best fit each stage, substantially improving treatment outcomes. The rich case examples that illustrate this process are accompanied by specific hypnotic and clinical interventions.
Readily accessible for both clinicians and their patients, the clinical material in Recrafting a Life: Solutions for Chronic Pain and Illness is supplememted by a virtual "self-care toolkit," offering interactive scales and inventories, solution-finding interview interventions, self-hypnosis protocols, self-care experiments, and healing homework assignments.

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Chronic illness and pain are now, more than ever, seen asas major problems in the current health care system. Because they are unresponsive to both antibiotics and surgery, theyr are seen as elusive and mysterious. The National Medical Expenditure Survey estimates that over 80 million U.S. citizens live with a chronic illness. The most prevalent are arthritis, diabetes, respiratory diseases, hypertension and mental illness. This book uses the novel Robinson Crusoe as an archetypal metaphor for the patients who must learn to survive on their own isolated "island" of chronic pain. This unique style is combined with a variety of in-session approaches and other tools which clients have found helpful in identifying their goals and progress. By emphasizing the importance of self-care the authors hope to diminish the sense of helplessness felt by the both the patients their loved ones.