Picturing oneself over time: a multi-modal interpretative phenomenological analysis of pain management trajectories.

Not enough is understood about why some people get limited benefits from pain services. This idiographic longitudinal study illustrates how the impact of CP on identity can evolve when people are introduced to pain self-management, with some embracing change and others resisting it. For clinicians, this study describes four detailed CP individual paths, showing the interaction between contextual and idiosyncratic aspects. This is also the first study to use multiple drawings of self to explore the impacts of illness on identity longitudinally. In a person-centred approach to treatment, the drawings of self could also be adopted as a tool in clinician-patient conversations to gain a deeper understanding of the impacts of living with CP.