Jules -

Following specifically on what Mslday and hope4thebest said, there is a clarification from my experience that might be helpful.

Too long ago, about a year into this, I was being treated at the pain clinic of a good hospital in town, when somehow or another, I was referred to its on staff psychologist. As it turned out, he was the only person on the clinic's professional staff who wasn't a network provider on my health insurance. (Such a waste of money.) At one point I said that the key issue I was having was an increasing inability to control my frustration/temper, not with family and friends, but sales clerks, telephone representatives, etc. To which he responded there really wasn't much I could do about it, that it "went with the territory" of chronic pain.

Shortly thereafter, and for unrelated reasons, I left that pain clinic and began being treated by a wonderful (and now semi-retired) neurologist who specialized in neurological rehabilitation and pain management, to whom I had happened to have been referred four or five years earlier for compressed cervical disks. And he wanted me to see his pain psychologist. In addition to being a licensed clinical psychologist, she is also a psychoanalyst, specializing in pain management. I had one 2 hour evaluation with her, but that's all it took. I told her about the "went with the territory" remark, to which she said (in so many words) that it would make excellent organic fertilizer and then handed me the card of an MBSR instructor, which changed my life forever.

Bottom line: there are psychologists who happen to have gotten a job in a pain clinics and call themselves pain psychologists, and then there are those psychologists to whom neurologists (or anesthesiologists or physiatrist) with many years experience in treating chronic pain refer their patients. Wherever possible, I would seek out the latter. Can you get such a referral from the spinal injury physiatrist with whom you spoke? At least in my understanding of the world, chronic pain is chronic pain when it comes to psychology.

Mike

ps For a great introduction from a meditative perspective, I would strongly endorse Shinzen Young's
Break Through Pain: A Step-by-Step Mindfulness Meditation Program for Transforming Chronic and Acute Pain (2005) (1.25 hour CD plus 80-page hard cover book Published by Sounds True). His primary website is http://shinzen.org/ and he has been my teacher since 2003, turned out the MBSR teacher - and still close friend - was also someone who works closely with him.