Linda Yegge-Brannon, LCSW

I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who provides Pain Services and is integrated into a rural Physical Therapy clinic in Newberg, Oregon (mid Willamette Valley). My unique role is to be a coach in helping patients find ways of obtaining their own pain relief (Power over Pain) and preventing chronic pain. I assist a patient to learn practical ways to target stress, pain and anxiety, addressing each in a treatment plan that focuses on individual interests and needs (goals like sleeping restfully, getting back to favorite hobbies, managing a vacation, work or alternate career when injury prevents job return).
 
Developing a regular personalized daily practice of relaxation is a great way to do that. There are other quick methods to use when standing in a grocery line, driving, working, or studying. Biofeedback can help patients recognize and control the tension in their muscles.  Other strategies improve sleep so the body can restorative itself. The mind and body have much to offer each other.
 
Patients tell me I'm creative finding community resources. I regularly connect to meals on wheels, home health, vocational rehabilitation, medication grants, dual diagnoses or specialized providers, health insurance and prescription grants. I coordinate closely with the patient’s primary care and other specialists, resources and programs because my patients don’t want to be tossed back and forth between different treatment providers with different goals.
 
I believe the mind/brain is plastic (pliable); we each can change how we feel by changing how our mind learns to de-stress, manage pain, and think. I often tell my patients, “No, it’s not ‘all in your head’, but pain is experienced by the brain and we can change how the brain experiences these sensations.” When we change how our brains work, we can change our experience of life so we have control, satisfaction and joy again.
 
Pain should not be a life expectation—to just ‘put up and shut up’. We form a partnership of learning and finding solutions that work in each person's life so that hope returns and success is attainable.