The IASP definition of pain as a "sensory and emotional" experience highlights the centrality of emotion in the experience of pain. However, many of the leading psychological therapies for chronic pain do not directly address emotional processing as a component of therapy.

In this discussion, we will discuss Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), two relatively new psychological therapies for chronic pain.

These therapies focus on the importance of processing emotion and linked adverse life experiences/trauma for the treatment of pain.