How Do I Write My Pain Journal?
If you follow my writing or have been a client, you know that to help build the framework for the pain and suffering aspect of my clients’ personal injury claims, I recommend that they document their recovery/suffering/experience in a Pain Journal. Many of them ask, “How should I write my pain journal?” and I don’t have a super clear answer for them, sadly. Here’s the deal:
Your pain journal should be yours. It should be in your words, in your ways. I want it to not only reflect your experience throughout your recovery, but to reflect you and your personality. Because of all of that, I can’t say it should look like this or look like that; this is a very personal account of a painful experience, and the more micromanaging of that process I do the less powerful it tends to be.
Having said that, the minimum standard I ask for is that the journal should reflect 1) what hurts, 2) how badly, and 3) how it affects you in your day to day life EACH DAY FROM THE ACCIDENT UNTIL YOU REACH MAXIMUM MEDICAL IMPROVEMENT. I prefer them in a Word Doc or a Google Doc because they’re easily shared. Otherwise, formatting and content are totally up to you. More is more, generally, but you can guess that there’s a point where it becomes oversharing. Trust your gut.
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