Around the globe, pain has been manged with hypnosis for thousands of years, with well documented accounts from Ancient Egypt and its ‘sleep temples’ But it really debuted into the West in the 19th Century as hypnotic analgesia. Pain management works through hypnotherapy by focusing your mind to manage the sensations of the pain.
Managing these sensations can include moving the pain, diluting the pain, or freezing the pain, to name a few. These are the techniques I use in pain management. By moving, diluting or freezing, you can manipulate an unpleasant physical symptom so that it no longer behaves in the same way. When a person comes in with multiple pain and varying types of sensations, I will address each one separately. Essentially it is a series of techniques I teach clients so that they can do it for themselves.
Emotional/Physical Pain
I have seen many clients literally riddled with pain. The story often goes that it started some 20 years back, and then another part of the body would ‘take a hit’, perhaps a hip, and then a knee might start crying out for help, followed by a shoulder or a lower back, and the pain keeps mounting. By the time they come in to see me, they are virtually crippled with this pain that won’t seem to go away but just keeps getting worse.
A common thread I find with many, but not all clients with compounded pain is emotional pain. Experiencing guilt, feeling trapped, self-loathing, suffering emotional abuse and poor self-worth are some of the key findings. When these things are dealt with, miracles can happen – I’ve seen them. Other times when we begin addressing the emotional wounds, the outpouring is a unexpected, often instigating the comment “I didn’t expect to be talking about my feelings, I just wanted you to work on the pain”.
Separating emotional pain from physical pain is impossible in some cases, if you want to get well. You have to do the work. There is no reason on earth to feel embarrassed. Pain exists to send you a message. All you are doing by working through this emotional pain is listening to that message. Healing can happen, inside and out. Releasing years of emotional backlog can do wonders for the physical and emotional self, let alone resolving those issues.
Other times, pain is just pain and emotions are not strongly interlinked, just like with a sporting injury. But then emotions usually become involved and complicate things, causing some people to feel useless for example.
Warnings on Pain Management
I will always check with a client that their pain has been explored by a medical professional before working on their problem. The reason is simple – pain is a warning. It exists to warn the body of an imbalance. Some people have their wires literally malfunctioning and firing off warning signals when it is not necessary, but how do you know if your pain is serious, or otherwise, unless you have had it examined by a medical doctor? Imagine this… you come in with a migraine and I help you to relieve that pressure in your head, and you feel better. You go home and go about your life. But unbeknownst to you, there is a brain tumour forming, and you don’t do anything about it because the pain is now manageable. Then, it could be too late for you take action.
If you have consulted a medical doctor about your pain and you are following their advice for pain management, and if they are ok for you to try hypnotherapy as well, then let’s see what we can do 🙂