This is a follow-up to Pain management part 1: Attention techniques.
Attention is not the only drug-free way to manage pain. Imagination is also very powerful. I know of at least five imagination techniques which can all be highly effective in managing both acute (sudden, severe) and chronic (long-term) pain.
First is direct imagery of the pain. This technique works either in or out of hypnosis. You begin by closing your eyes and imagining the pain in terms of other sensations, translating it into visual, auditory or kinaesthetic terms. For example, you might imagine it as red, spiky, a grinding noise, high-pitched, or rough.
Now that you have that clear in your imagination, you can change the imagined sensation and this will in turn change the pain sensation – since both sensations are taking place in your mind, they’re equally modifiable by your mind, and linking them together helps you believe that. You might, for example, imagine the pain shifting from red to blue, or spiky to smooth, or lowering in pitch or loudness, or smoothing out its texture.
This is quite a good technique for unexpected pain.
The second technique is what I call the Switchboard. This uses imagery to remind you that you do have control over your own perception of pain. It involves imagining a switchboard, or something like a sound engineer’s mixing board or some other kind of control panel – anything where there are dials, sliders or switches. You then imagine using these to turn your pain down (and also up – you can experiment with turning it up as well to demonstrate to yourself that you have control). This probably is taught best under hypnosis, as it requires focused attention and a certain amount of reduction in immediate reality checking, but it can be used in the usual alert state once learned. You can use a numeric scale, usually 1-10, as an easy way to refer to the different levels.
photo credit: surroundsound5000
The Switchboard can be used for a great many other issues apart from pain. I’ve used it with a man who was experiencing hunger pangs as a side effect of antidepressants, and with another man who wanted to reduce his emotional response in certain circumstances so that he could retain dignity in a responsible public position. Both have found it helpful. I’ve also seen a video of Gil Boyne, the distinguished American hypnotherapist, using it with a man who had Parkinson’s tremors. He was able to dial the tremors down to the point that they were undetectable, and up to where they were extremely marked.
The Switchboard is usually a temporary strategy. You usually can’t turn the dial down to 1 and leave it there indefinitely. It’s a way of being able to cope when you have to. However, with the man with the hunger pangs I used a slightly different metaphor, saying that his brain should adapt to a lower level of sensitivity, treating the signal as if it were much less “loud”, and this seemed to work for him.
Glove anaesthesia is the third method. How this works is that you first imagine your (non-painful) hand growing progressively numb, and then “transfer” the numbness over to the part of the body that is or will shortly be in pain by touching it with the numb hand. In a hypnotic state, where logic is dreamlike, this makes perfect sense, and most people can do it.
This is a good technique to use for pre-operative anaesthesia (actually analgesia, strictly speaking, since you can still feel other sensations, just not pain). It can be used, for example, to numb the jaw for dental work.
photo credit: Conor Lawless
The fourth method is to displace or replace the pain – either move general pain to a localized area (and possibly shrink it), or replace it with another sensation such as an itch or a tingling feeling. This has been used successfully with cancer patients in long-term pain as well as with women giving birth.
The fifth method is to displace the person, rather than the pain, which is similar to the attention techniques. During my training I saw a remarkable film of a woman having a Caesarian section with only hypnotic analgesia. Her relaxing, pleasant activity was playing the piano and singing, and the surgeon, who was also the hypnotist, got her thoroughly involved in a hallucination that this was what she was doing during the operation. She was actually singing aloud, and her hands were moving as if on the keys of a piano, happy as a lark while the surgeon made a 20cm incision in her abdomen and removed her baby. There was very little blood, because she was relaxed and calm. The film was, judging by the clothes and hairstyles, from about the early 60s, and in order to get the (black and white) film to come out, strong, hot lighting was used in the operating theatre. The surgeon had given a suggestion of a pleasant temperature, though, and when he asked her later – not prompting her answer – she said that she had been pleasantly cool.
Obviously, this woman was an excellent hypnotic subject, able to involve herself thoroughly in her imagined activity, and this is the key to success with pain relief using the imagination. If you find that you become easily involved in a movie, TV programme or book or a daydream, these techniques should work well for you.
Relevant Product: Pain Management (audio CD)
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