Pain relief Video
In this video on Pain Relief, Mark Tyrrell discussed the fact that although pain is a physical experience, psychology can greatly influence the experience of pain. We’ve all hurt ourselves and not noticed until later, proving that distraction can be one effective pain management technique. Mark talks about how this can be used in hypnotherapy, using a story to illustrate the technique. He also talks about how anaesthesia can be induced using hypnosis, utilising natural experiences of numbness to ‘remind’ the brain how to produce a lack of feeling in a specific area for surgery and other applications. He goes onto dicuss other psychological aspects of pain and how these can be modulated in a therapy session to produce pain relief.
Transcript of Pain Relief video
Anybody who tells you that pain is all in the mind is out of their mind. But it’s also true to say that although, of course, pain is an extremely physical experience, the psychology of the person experiencing the pain - the way you’re perceiving the pain - influences the experience of pain immensely. For example, if we take the idea of distraction: people can be extremely distracted by, say, being in a battle or being in a boxing fight and they don’t realize they’ve been injured until after the fight is over. They may have a broken jaw - or even severe injuries sustained during battle time may not be noticed by the person who’s received them until afterwards. So the distraction of the situation can actually distort their perception of pain quite radically. And we can use this therapeutically with someone.
If you think when you stub your toe - now, what do you do when you stub your toe? If you just stand there and don’t move at all, just close your eyes and focus in on the pain, you’ll experience more pain than if you hop around the room. One of the reasons we hop around when we stub our toe is to produce more sensory input through other skin sensors, which distracts us from the pain to some extent. It still can be excruciating, but less so because we’re distracting ourselves by swearing, cursing, jumping up and down. So we can use this hypnotically.
There’s an old Milton Erickson story - Milton Erickson, the great clinical hypnotherapist, was working with a woman who had severe cancer pain. And he said to her one day - hypnotically, he said, “Now, what would happen to that pain if - very unexpectedly, as you sat here - through the door came a great big, hungry tiger, licking its lips and coming towards you? What would happen to that pain?”
And she said, “Well, for a few seconds, it would disappear. In fact, it’s kind of disappeared now.”
He taught her to post-hypnotically have images of this tiger every time she felt pain. So he was diverting her attention away from the pain, towards something else. For example, if you have intense pain in one hand, by intensely focusing on the other hand, you will take some of the experience of the pain away, to some extent. It could only be 10% or 20%, but our mind can be used to ameliorate and sometimes even banish pain completely.
We might use anaesthesia - numbness - through hypnosis. So for example, we’ve all had the experience of perhaps standing up suddenly and realizing that you’ve been sitting in an uncomfortable position and your leg’s gone numb. Or waking up in the night and having been sleeping on an arm and the arm’s gone numb; you can’t feel that arm, and it’s almost like you have to drag that arm along behind you. We can evoke these natural times of numbness hypnotically to reproduce numbness in somebody experiencing pain for anaesthesia. To the extent that some people can have operations just using hypnosis as a general anaesthetic!
Another psychological intervention for pain might be what we call ‘reframing’ - reframing the experience of pain. For example, I worked with a man who’d been in a motorbike crash years before and his spinal column had been almost severed, to the extent that he could no longer walk. But there were still millimetres of connection there, so he was suffering incredible pain in his legs and the bottoms of his feet. I got him to describe the pain, and he said it was kind of searing and burning. I latched on to his word ‘burning’ - and something that’s burning can be cooled. So now we’ve reframed the idea of pain to a temperature. Temperatures can go up and down, so I talked about an ice-cold coolness travelling into his legs and so forth. And he found that through this reframing exercise, he could begin to lower his experience of pain and feel more comfortable.
It’s also true to consider that the perception of pain is influenced by its meaning. So for example, if someone’s the victim of a mindless assault - they’ve been mugged in broad daylight, maybe - and they’re in a great deal of pain, that experience of pain may be very different from the pain that you experience after having a lifesaving operation and you know the pain is the pain of healing; different perceptions around pain.
So the psychological aspect of pain is always very important, and we can always do something with the psychology to influence the experience of pain.
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