Hypnosis and NLP in the Management of Pain by Adam Sargant, Dip.H.Ed (Nursing Studies), Dip.Hyp.,NLP(prac)

What is pain? How does pain manifest? What is the "structure" of pain? How can NLP and hypnosis assist in the management of pain?

A recent Scientific American article stated: "Though often denigrated as fakery or wishful thinking, hypnosis has been shown to be a real phenomenon with a variety of therapeutic uses -- especially in controlling pain"

Pain is an experience that blights many lives and comes in many forms. Chronic pain is often classified as pain that persists for a period of a month or more beyond the normal recovery time of an illness, or pain that persists for several months or years as a result of a chronic condition, and can be of any intensity. Even low-level chronic pain can be debilitating. Acute pain is a short-lived condition within the normal experience of an acute illness or injury. Breakthrough pain is a transitory flare of pain of moderate to severe intensity occurring on a background of otherwise controlled pain.

Pain originates in the nervous system and clearly has a useful role to play in the development of avoidance strategies for situations and experiences that can cause us harm. However, multiple factors can conspire to produce the sensation of pain in situations where the information is no longer useful. It is obvious that in some injuries and illnesses, the brain receives information about pain that the person experiencing that pain is able to do very little about in terms of avoiding the stimuli. What is not so obvious is that the conscious experience of pain is modified by many other factors such as memory, emotion, and physical condition. In other words, the experience of pain is determined by the context in which that pain takes place. This further complicated by the fact that some pain cannot be found to have an organic (disease or injury) related cause at all.

Milton Erickson described pain as a construct that consisted past remembered pain, present pain experience and of anticipated pain in the future. These combine to give the meaning that the pain has for us, and this is one of the reasons that chronic pain (of any intensity) can be so debilitating. Nothing will intensify one's experience of pain as much as the anticipation that it will be there tomorrow, and the day after and so on. Similarly, learning to relax and simply let go of the anticipation and the fear can result in remarkable changes in our experience of pain.

As a child, I suffered several bouts of recurring osteomyelitis, a bone marrow infection that was often accompanied by high fever and severe pain. The pain persisted as a result of the deformations of bone that took place and the necessary surgery, but I learned very early on that I could alter my own experience of pain through what I considered back then to be a number of mental tricks. I did not know what I know now about the nature of pain but I was able to effect some remarkable changes to my experience of pain, which laid the foundations for my current understanding of the nature of experience.

So, let's look at a few techniques that we can use to experience pain differently, and take some control over how it affects our lives.

Relaxation and Trance

One of the simplest (and the hardest) things to learn to do is to learn to relax. I do not intend to cover relaxation and trance techniques in this article, there will be others on those, but I suggest that you simply think about words and phrases that help you relax, and test them out. I find I can go a long way into trance simply by telling myself to "Breathe...and relaaax" in a gentle and deep tone, and feeling my body relax further on each out breath. I can then take it a little further by telling myself that as I count down from 5 to 1, I will relax further and further into a trance. Try it. Play with it.

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BIO:

Adam is an NLP practitioner and Hypnotherapist, as well as a mental health nurse with over a decades experience. He is passionate about the use of language to effect change, and about the ability of people to maximise their own potential.

This article is free for anyone to use as long as you publish a link to http://www.hypnosisaudiocds.com using the link text "Hypnosis MP3s and CDs"

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