Why Attend 

We attend PIRSG because we have chronic pain and need the mutual support and identification to address our pain that we have not found elsewhere. We believe that a person in recovery with chronic pain can best identify with and help another person who lives with chronic pain.

While our family, significant others, and friends – both inside and outside twelve-step programs, may be supportive, over time we have found that most people cannot relate to the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pain we live with on a daily basis. In PIRSG, we are free to discuss the challenges of living with chronic pain and the solutions we have learned.

As a self-help group, PIRSG provides us with the opportunity to meet others who share, understand, and can identify with the challenges we face. We can better help ourselves through helping each other. We can know with certainty that we are not alone.

Before we found PIRSG, we often felt that no one understood, or could possibly understand our dilemma. It seemed to many of us that we had only two options. We could give in to our pain and allow it to dictate our actions and control us - resigning ourselves to the “fact” that our life, as we knew it, was essentially over. Or, we could fight against our pain, attempting to “kill” it with medications - a battle that was impossible to win. Both of these choices only made our pain worse.

Through PIRSG, we find that there are other possibilities. We can accept the reality of our pain without either giving in to it or fighting it. We can learn new ways to think about and respond to our pain. We can acknowledge and accept our pain as we discover new ways to learn, and grow, and heal.