Ask a physio: When someone you love is in pain, you don’t need the perfect answer

Someone you love is in pain, and you don’t know what to say.

Maybe it’s a partner whose back has been bad for two years. A friend with headaches no one can explain. Your mother, lowering herself into a chair in a way she didn’t used to.

You want to help, so you reach for something useful. Have you tried stretching? A new mattress? And some small part of the room can go flat, and you’re not sure why.

Here’s what I think is often going on, from watching this play out for years. The flat feeling may not be that you got the advice wrong. It can be that advice wasn’t quite what the moment needed.

We rush to fix, or we go silent, often for the same reasons: we want to help, and we’re afraid of getting it wrong. Pain in someone we love can at times make us feel helpless, so we may grab for a solution just to have something in our hands.

But the person in front of us usually isn’t asking to be solved. More often, they’re asking to be heard or even believed.

That’s a shift worth considering. What tends to help more is being there for a hard moment.

Picture going over for dinner, and your friend is hobbling, or can’t quite bend to reach the oven. You have three ways to go.

You can say nothing. You can reach for advice. Or you can get curious. “That looks sore, how long has it been going on?” “That sounds hard, how can I help?” And then listen.

The first two are the easy reflexes. The third is the one that tends to land, because it isn’t trying to fix anything. It lets the person feel heard, and that is often what they needed most.

This is the idea behind Unsilence Pain. During National Pain Awareness Week, November 2 to 8, Pain Canada and more than 40 partner organizations are working to change how we talk about chronic pain, which touches about one in five of us, likely someone in your own family or on your street, and is too often met with silence.

Much of their message fits on a sticky note. You don’t need the perfect answer. Listen and ask questions with curiosity.

Seek to understand rather than solve. Acknowledge what the person shared. Find out what would actually feel helpful.

Help connect them to support.

None of those asks you to fix anything.

If you’d like the words ready for the next time it comes up, Pain Canada has a free resource, “When Pain Comes Up,” at UnsilencePain.ca.

And if the person on your mind lives with pain, there’s something for them too. That same week, Pain Canada runs a free online conference, Putting the Pieces Together, November 2 to 6, for and by people with pain. Worth attending, or passing to someone who could use it. Register at paincanada.ca.

None of this is complicated. The barrier usually isn’t medical knowledge. More often it’s the fear that unless we can make the pain go away, we have nothing to offer.

You have plenty to offer.

The goal isn’t really to find the perfect thing to say. It’s closer to making sure the person hurting doesn’t carry it alone, or go silent to spare the rest of us our discomfort.

Listen. Believe them. Seek to understand. It fits in any kitchen.

Sean Overin is a registered physiotherapist who coordinates the Chronic Pain Program at Tall Tree Health, which has a clinic in Port Coquitlam. This column is general information, not a substitute for individual medical advice.