Pain Management with Alchemical Hypnotherapy

PAIN MANAGEMENT

In 1986, while I was living in London, a friend of mine came
back from the dentist whom he went to see to have a wisdom
tooth removed and told me: Guess what the dentist told me
just before extracting the tooth? He said "Remember,
resisting pain is 95% of the pain". He paused and then added
"Just relax as deeply as you can and it’ll be over in a minute".
Now, I am asking you to pause for a minute, too. Relax and
ask yourself: "what does the word "management" evoke for
me? Close your eyes, reflect now...

Control? Elimination as far as possible? Eradication?
Suppression?
OK. If any of these words indeed is associated in your logical
mind to pain management, here is some news for you.

The magic pill that makes your pain go away instantly, the
numbing of pain accompanied with numbed reactions,
perceptions, feelings, or the cutting of limbs or organs…
They sometimes necessary or preferred by some patients in
distress or experiencing excruciating pain.

However, there are other options. Many of us are tired of side
effects, tired of the recurrence of pain after a few days if not
hours, tired of not feeling anything any more.

Before the development of allopathic medicine (not so much
more than 100 years ago), people used natural herbs and
talking to grandma or finding a shaman or healer to find relief
and asked God for relief, whatever their God maybe, in
different religions over the planet. A great part of the relief
actually comes from being able to talk about your pain, to be
heard, to feel in your whole being some empathy for your
pain; somebody is there with you that listens to how you feel.

In the last 50 years, there has been a growing awareness,
including in the "medical community" that although allopathic
medicine has enabled great progress and has provided great
relief to many, it doesn’t have all the answers and can be
complemented, if not replaced, by healing methods that have
proven their efficiency for thousands of years, rather than
100+ years. It is now widely acknowledged, although not as
long as 30 years ago, would make many members of the
traditional scientific community smile, that emotions have an
effect on the immune system and our capacity to cope with
disease, pain and recovery (David Felten, Neurobiologist,
and his team found receptors of neurotransmitters in the
immune system).

Hypnosis was used for healing in Ancient Egypt more than
2,000 years ago and also in the East, by Tibetan monks
among others. The word is Greek, it simply means sleep.
Through the use of the brain frequencies experienced during
the sleep cycle, but used consciously and with consent during
a therapy session,
a hypnotherapist guides you to where you need to go to heal.

First of all, accessing with this ‘other part of the brain’ a place
where you can feel peace, harmony and relief is possible
through hypnosis and affects your whole body's response to
the otherwise relentless pain. Hypnosis gives you ‘time out’
from the pain because it is a state of deep relaxation, some
call it deep concentration where your mind has the ability to
focus on what it’s want to achieve, and if it happens to be
relief from pain, you can achieve it.

So say you experience chronic pain. You take some pain
relief pills, they help some, but they have side effects or, you
don’t have money to buy more, or, you are developing a
tolerance to them ("they don’t work anymore") and your doctor
has changed brands, but it goes on and on.

Or you have to go to the dentist and get a wisdom tooth
extracted. Or, your have this back pain that doesn’t want to go
away, or you have carpal tunnel syndrome and "not much can
be done".

In your mind is the power to find the source of the pain, to
ease the pain, to decrease the pain, to dissolve it.

I am not talking of control here, or a magical wand, or
resistance, or ignorance.
I am talking about finding why the pain is there. It’s there for a
reason, you know, like a little person nagging you, are you
willing to hear what it wants to say. If you have a 3 years child
having a tantrum in front of you at the supermarket, do you
shout to him "Stop it right now?" Yes? Does it work? What
happens next? Does he get quieter? Hmmm, not in my
experience. He gets louder because he wants ATTENTION.
Pay attention to what your body is trying to tell you. The body
doesn't lie. We can invent all sorts of lies, mainly to ourselves
with words, attitudes, "I am fine", and “all is good". When I
was a child in France, there was this comic singer that was
regularly invited to shows and he kept singing the same one
song "All is well, marquis, all is well" and then whispered (the
stable is burning, the cooks are running, the river is
overflowing) BUT, all is well.

So you can find the source of your pain, that’s not control, nor
suppression, nor management, YET, that’s understanding.
Stand under your pain. Do you have friends? What do you
expect the most from your friends? I don't know about you, but
in my case, it's understanding, that they try to understand me,
that I feel they understand me and I can talk to them without
being judged, laughed out, ridiculed, despised. No, they listen
with patience and compassion and try to understand even
when "it doesn’t make sense"

What about being a friend to yourself FIRST? Try to
understand YOURSELF?
First step. Not so easy, but the good news, is that in the state
of deep relaxation reached though hypnosis, that judging part,
controlling part, logical part, connected to the left brain, well its
politely asked to sit at a distance and audit.

So your feelings, sensations, memories, true insights can
come out. You can see your attitudes in a fresh way and, once
you UNDERSTAND your pain, have talked to it like a friend,
not an enemy, not somebody to bar off and slammed the door
at (it’s strong, it can break doors like an invader, some of you
sure know that who are reading this), then you can find other
ways to deal with the real issue, you can "reprogram" the pain
response of your neurotransmitters to some other response.
Pain is a transmitted response. Once you listen to the
question, you can respond differently, your brain can respond
intelligently rather than react.

What about just "plain not feeling that pain anymore", you say,
“I don't care where it's coming from, I just don’t want it
anymore!”

The good news is your brain is PART of your body, it
produces hormones. Heard about a computer box without a
processor? Not me. The box doesn’t do a thing without the
processor, that what’s life is, isn’t it, all those transmitters
circulating within your body, sending millions of messages
every millisecond.

For plain old pain, your knees hurting from running on the
asphalt and not having heard it's not good, for the wisdom
tooth, for the cutting your finger with the kitchen knife, the
"mechanical pain", and for any organ pain that’s settled in,
Hypnotherapy shows you how to apply self-hypnosis to
yourself (all hypnosis is self-hypnosis, it is a therapy of
consent, meaning you need to be WILLING to heal). By
trusting the right part of your brain to lead your body’s
response, by learning to letting go of resistance to pain, fear
of pain, by relaxing and associating different thoughts to the
pain, you can actually diminish the pain. That method is used
a lot in dentistry, where for example, you can visualize a clock
dial, where 12 represents the most extreme pain and 1 no
pain at all. The hypnotherapist can during a procedure that
would normally « require » anesthesia, suggests to you the
absence of pain by associating it with a lower number so that
indeed, you will experience minimal or no pain at all. Magic?
No. You intercept your neuro-transmitter's response and
twitch it.
You focus completely, wholly, from the depth of your being on
how you want to feel, and your body responds.

Hypnotherapy isn’t for everybody. They say about 80% of the
population respond to it very well, part of it is trusting your
hypnotherapist and above all, trusting yourself that you can let
your logical overactive analytical mind take the role of
observer.

However, If you are the kind that’s proud that « nobody can
hypnotize YOU » and you’d rather be Unhypnotizable than
experiencing well-being, by all means, it’s your choice.

Not mine.

See you soon,

Agnès CARTRY, CHT