Pain management
Apparently there are seven hundred million work days lost in the USA owing to pain. Just imagine how much the economy would improve if we could lessen such pain and mange our discomforts through hypnosis without chemical intervention or least by diminishing the amount of drugs we take for pain control.
Hypnosis and hypnotic techniques have been used for pain management ever since the dawn of time. In the linked article I write about the history of pain management and anesthesia using hypnosis.
Before any work on pain control may begin (even on oneself using self-hypnosis) one must have a thorough medical evaluation of the situation and proper treatment of the injury or disease. This is extremely important since pain is a signal. It is an indication that something is wrong and has to be healed.
Suppose we have a pain in the side and through hypnosis we remove the pain and then discover that we have masked a cancer tumor, we would not be too happy. Also as a hypnotherapist we can only treat people with pain after referral from a medical doctor.
Consciousness can only concentrate on one thing at a time. Thus if say one’s tooth aches a huge amount one can pinch the hand and feel relieve of the tooth ache which is diminished thanks to the self-induced pain in the hand. This principle may be used during self-hypnosis to remove pain. One can concentrate on a beautiful scene. A guided imagery garden of heavenly delight can be a useful space to be in while the body might normally feel pain. Another distraction technique is to concentrate on parts of the body which are well.
Here I wish to give some current methods derived from hypnosis and NLP.
According NLP theory pain is kinesthetic (body feelings). When we are in kinesthetic mode of perception we look down to our right. However when we look up we are in the visual mode and as far away from body feelings as possible so the pain diminishes.
To the same end when we imagine our pain as a color and give it a shape we move it from its natural kinesthetic mode into a visual mode and the pain once more diminishes.
The words we use do matter. If I say an event makes me mad there is a different effect than if I say about the same event, "It makes me peeved." Believe it or not we feel what we say. Thus when we call the pain a discomfort it tends to become less painful. I remember explaining this to a seminar participant who became very angry with me for not empathizing with her situation. I do understand that she had been suffering from a chronic ailment with much pain for a long time. I was only attempting to help lower her suffering. I am sure if this had happened in a private session I would have already established enough rapport so that the problem would not have arisen.
Note that unless you are an MD or dentist you should never do any hypnosis for pain management without first getting a referral from the attending physician to make sure that your intervention does not interfere with her work.
What I do within private session is to start by hypnotizing the client and teach self hypnosis and entering the trance state rapidly. After we have rapport (each time you hypnotize a person rapport increases) I use glove anesthesia.
Note: one typically uses glove anesthesia on the dominant hand however if that hand is the body part which is in pain use the other hand or if both hands are suffering then select a part which is not in pain. If all the body is in pain (say a person burnt all over or some autoimmune illnesses which cause pain all over start with the dominant hand or even a finger).
In the following script I am summing the pain is in the left leg and the person is right handed. Also the script starts after the induction and the deepening.
And now allow yourself to concentrate on your right hand... Imagine you have placed your right hand in a bucket of ice cold strongest anesthetic in the universe... As you continue to relax allow your right hand begin to lose all feeling in a most wonderful safe way. That's right. Relax, let go... Focus your attention on your hand and allow it to lose all feeling. Imagine your hand is becoming number and number.... No feeling at all. Totally and completely numb. Now mentally tell your hand to go to sleep. Number and number as that ice cold anesthetic effects it more and more. Tell it, now, to go to sleep. Right hand go to sleep. Your hand is going to deep, deep sleep. Allow it to become number and number. Let go of all feeling in that hand. No feeling at all. Now with every breath you take allow your hand to become number, and number, and number, until you just can't feel your hand at all. It is as though that hand had totally disappeared. You just can't feel your hand at all because it is so utterly numb.
Now.... begin to transfer wonderful this lack of feeling up your right arm through the shoulders down down to your left leg where the discomfort was. You may wish to imagine the soothing feeling being a fluid of a certain color. I don't know what color you will select.... Allow your unconscious mind to select whatever color means total relief and numbness to you. Imagine that numbing fluid pumping, pumping to your left leg and anywhere else you may need numbing.
With each breath you take allow yourself become number and number. As you become number you can allow yourself to relax more and more pumping more and more of that numbing fluid to that leg and continue to go deeper and deeper....
[repeat suggestions as above to move the lack of feeling to the part that needs relief from pain calling the pain as discomfort. At times I may say something like: "I am going to remain silent for a while to allow you to continue pumping that numbing feeling in peace. Next time I talk imagine an hour has past." I remain silent for about a minute. This allows me to later give the suggestion for time dilation and shortening as described later.]
I next give various post hypnotic suggestions to reinforce the pain management. I like suggesting: "Whenever the discomfort is at its highest allow time to accelerate but when you are feeling comfortable allow time to drag on and on as you have done in this session.... After all as Einstein said time is relative. He said, 'When you are sitting on a hot oven two minutes seem like a day but when you are with a loved one a day seems like a minute.' Now.... Allow yourself to control your time and your body safely giving you comfort...."
Finally I end the session with my normal reawakening.
My teacher Dick Sutphen uses a keyword (anesthesia) as a trigger (anchor in NLP) to restore the feeling of numbness at will. He ends the glove anesthesia with:
'The word "anesthesia is a conditioned response key to your subconscious mind and when you say "anesthesia," you will draw upon the unlimited power of your mind to control physical sensations. When you say "anesthesia," you will feel the cooling numbness you experienced earlier in this session spreading to the part of your body in need of relief. The word "anesthesia" now becomes your key for totally effective conditioned response, and every time you hear this suggestion and every time you use your "anesthesia" programming, it will become more and more effective.'
According to Milton H. Erickson, there is an important aspect of pain which is caused by the accumulated memory of previous pain (Pavlovian conditioned reflex pain) and thus hypnotic amnesia may be used as a pain reducer.
Another technique of pain control used by Erickson is to use time dilation and contraction: Erickson describes a case history of a terminally ill cancer patient where he used a time distortion technique to diminish his patient’s suffering. He first explained that our perception of time varies and how time can seem very long or very short. He suggested that the periods of pain should be felt as very very short and the periods of relief from pain very very long. He next described the components of pain perception to his patient.
According to Erickson there are three components to pain perception:
- The organic pain itself.
- One’s psychological awareness of that pain.
- One’s personality reaction to the pain.
In this case Erickson suggested that his patient limit his pain just to the organic pain and then minimize his response to it. Once the pain had lessened due to the above measures, Erickson managed to at last produce hypnotic anesthesia.
I have used this technique with a client after reducing the pain using glove anesthesia. At that stage I gave the posthypnotic suggestion to make time run faster when she was in discomfort (I had already suggested changing the words she associated to her pain) and slow down the passage of time whenever she felt comfort.
I also got her to describe her discomfort visually -- that is to say to give it a color and shape next we experimented by changing the color of the discomfort and change the shape. In time after many sessions she managed to move the pain around her body. When things were going real well for her she would move the pain to her big toe and eventually one inch out of her body.
All this (change of the name for the pain, giving it shape, color, moving it around puts the person in control of her own body and in the words of Richard Bandler shows her, "Who is driving the bus."
One last important aspect of this case is that I left my client with a cd to use when I was not there. Typically she would listen to it twice a day.
Note that Erickson warned against saying to the pained client, "How are your pains?" Altogether many times hypnotherapist can undo the effects of hours of hypnotherapy by regressing the client back to the previous state before the intervention.