Living with chronic pain can be a long journey. Over time, people may have tried different treatments, learned a great deal about pain and about themselves, and found ways of doing things that once seemed impossible. And yet there can still be a quiet question: is there anything else that might help?

That question is one of the reasons I continue to develop my work using EMDR with chronic pain. What particularly interests me is that EMDR gives us additional ways of working not only with pain itself, but with the sensations, emotions, memories and experiences that can become connected with living in pain.

Sometimes the therapeutic work may involve a particular memory or experience. At other times the starting point may be the pain itself, a bodily sensation, fear associated with the pain, or the effect that living with pain has had on someone's life. And sometimes something new emerges during therapy — a change in sensation, an unexpected association, a different understanding or a new felt sense of oneself — which we can stay with and work with further.

I recently had the opportunity to attend the second part of Australian psychologist Mark Grant's training on using EMDR with chronic pain. What I particularly valued was the breadth and flexibility of the approach. Rather than treating EMDR as a single technique to be applied in the same way to everybody, the training explored different ways of working according to the person, their pain and what is happening for them at that moment.

The training has broadened the range of approaches and techniques I can draw upon in my existing work with chronic pain. It has also left me wanting to explore further. Mark brings considerable experience to this field, together with a strong sense of what may be possible. I found that genuinely energising — not simply learning more but coming away feeling increasingly confident about putting that learning into practice.