Pain relief

Pain is a ‘whole-body phenomenon’, the consequence of a subtle interaction of our physiology with our hearts and minds.  Dr Ingrid Bacci

Pain doesn’t just hurt. It can wear you out, particularly if it is persistent, and recurring. The result is that you feel tense and stressed. In turn stress and tension increase your sensitivity to pain. A vicious, unhelpful cycle gets underway.

The deep relaxation of a hypnotherapy session can help to break this cycle and to lessen the intensity of the pain signal. For that is what pain is, a signal that something in the body needs attention. However, once you have received the message and acted on it, you don’t need to be constantly reminded. It’s like when a computer flashes up reminder messages. You can touch a tab to tell it not to remind you again. You can do something like that with your body.

Distraction

You may have noticed that when you are really absorbed by an interest or activity, you do not notice the pain as much, if at all. It’s as if you switch it off, if only for a moment. Sportsmen do this with injuries. A footballer can be so absorbed in a game that it is only afterwards that he discovers that he completed the match with a broken toe. Using hypnosis, you can utilise this ability to become distracted away from your pain to somewhere or something pleasant.

Interpreting the signal

Like all signals, pain is open to interpretation. That interpretation is affected by a number of factors: your mood, whether you tend to see the worst or best in a situation, whether you know the cause of the pain or not, whether you have experienced it before, and so on. Woken at 3.00 in the morning by an uncomfortable pain below the ribs, you may interpret it as something serious. In the light of day, with the sun streaming through the bedroom window, you realise it was indigestion.

Managing the pain

I will teach you how to reduce stress and how to lessen the effect of pain, using techniques that suit you. For example, a man with rheumatoid arthritis has learned to replace the pain of arthritis with the sensation of warmth. If he overdoes it, his joints become hot. A woman with a chronic back condition has learned to send the pain out and away from her body. Other people find that they can remove themselves from the pain – just float away from it. You can learn to make a painful part of your body numb, or to ‘turn up’ and ‘turn down’ pain. Having learned how to control your pain, you can practise these techniques using self-hypnosis – which I will also teach you.

Appointments and free telephone consultation 0161 474 7996

Email enquiries  enquiries@stockport-hypnotherapy.co.uk

Copyright © 2006 Chris Dawson - Hypnotherapist and Performance Coach - Last modified: December 14, 2006
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