Resilience is not a personality trait you either
have or lack. It is a set of skills — they can be learned, practiced,
and rebuilt after setbacks.
The Resilient Path
Book
Managing Life with Chronic Pain · Pendleton B. Wickersham, MD, and Louise Locker, LCSW
You have been told to manage your pain. Nobody has told you how.
That gap is where most people living with chronic pain spend years —
the diagnosis arrives, the prescriptions start, the appointments stack
up, and the daily work of actually living with the condition falls to
you.
Dr. Wickersham is a practicing rheumatologist who has spent his career
in that gap with his patients, and who has lived with ankylosing
spondylitis since he was 22. This book is what he wishes he had time to
say in every appointment. Written for people with rheumatoid arthritis,
lupus, fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis, and other autoimmune and chronic
pain conditions.
Grounded in the biopsychosocial model, it shows how your body, your
mind, and the life around you all shape how much pain you feel —
and how each one offers a way to turn the volume down. Not a to-do list
to finish, but a way of living well with pain, one step at a time.
Available in paperback and for Kindle
The Resilient Path Workbook
Workbook
Pendleton B. Wickersham, MD, and Louise Locker, LCSW
Reading about managing chronic pain and actually managing it are
two different things. The book helps you understand; the workbook is
where the lessons take root and become yours. Every chapter matches a
chapter of the book, so you are never left wondering which exercise goes
with what you just read.
Every exercise is approached through three lenses —
patience, self-acceptance, and honesty — which
turn a list of activities into a way of being.
- Guided reflections that surface the patterns you have not noticed
- Trackers for pain, fatigue, sleep, and flares — turning scattered impressions into information you can bring to your doctor
- Pacing plans built around your real energy, not an ideal day
- Scripts for the hard conversations with family, employers, and clinicians
- Flare planning you do while you are well, so the decisions are already made when you are not
The pages are yours to write on. There are no right answers and nothing
to score.