e-mail: barbara.burgess@rocketmail.com or call 01626 210330 for an appointment
Pain Management
Pain is found in two main types – acute and chronic. Acute pain is short term and associated with a specific cause such as cuts, surgery or broken bones. It is usually managed successfully by medication. However when pain becomes chronic, medication can often be ineffective or undesirable. Pain, however, is the signal the body gives to the brain that there is a disease or injury so it is important to get a medical diagnosis to eliminate treatable organic diseases,
The problem with pain is that it is subjective, people have differing pain thresholds, and there is no real way of knowing how much pain someone else is suffering. Chronic pain can affect all parts of a sufferers life: activity levels, relationships, ability to work and sleep. Sadly 50% of people who suffer with chronic pain become anxious and depressed.
Pain signals are processed in the brain where they connect with emotional centres. The brain sends signals back to the spinal cord, which process the signals and can, in turn, reduce or increase the pain further. Pain is a complex interconnection of pain signals from the body and their interpretation by the brain. Their interpretation, and thus their intensity, can be affected by your emotions, your previous experience or associations with pain and even your perception of what the pain signifies.
This can be seen clearly in young children, they may fall over and graze a knee, they may then get up and carry on running around, oblivious of the injury unless they see the graze. Suddenly they are distraught with the pain, until Mummy picks them up and wipes off the blood – then they will happily run off again to play. Almost every mother knows about Magic Kisses!
Hypnotherapy and Pain Management
One of the methods used by many hypnotists to prove to a client that they are in hypnosis is to induce anaesthesia in the arm so that, if they are pinched, they feel nothing. Some of the early uses of hypnosis, by John Elliotson and by James Esdaile, in the mid 1800s, were to carry out surgical operations and amputations painlessly. Hypnosurgery can be used for anyone, but is extremely useful in cases where general anaesthetic could be dangerous for the patient or where having a patient awake during an operation is desirable. This kind of pain removal is also useful to eliminate pain for dental patients.
As you can imagine, if hypnosis is capable of this level of pain removal, it is also extremely effective in removing or reducing pain in chronic conditions. Although it may not always be wise to remove pain completely in conditions that could be worsened by blocking the pain. For instance you would not gain anything by continuing to go running on a sprained ankle, even in these cases it can be reduced to a minor irritation or itch – just to indicate to the person when care should be taken.
However, where there is a chronic condition there may also be secondary gains that the patient has. It may seem strange to suggest that someone could benefit from being in pain but the subconscious does not work logically (that’s the job of the conscious). They may get attention or get out of doing things they don’t want to do. This is not to suggest that this is intentional or that the pain is any less real. The subconscious has the job of protection and by talking directly to the subconscious we can transform how it sees that job of protection. It may be that there is a need to increase self esteem and confidence.
Regression Therapy and Pain
Past Life Regression where it used as a therapy, can alleviate problems that have been affecting your life for which there seems to be no cause. It is common for people to describe pain in ways that reveal their understanding of its origin - a pain in the shoulder ‘like a knife in my back’; headaches like ‘a band being tightened around my head’. Most of us have no experience of these in this life, however, under hypnosis, if we are taken back to the origins of these experiences, our subconscious will take us to a life where these things actually happened to us. During a Past Life Regression these issues can be resolved, by understanding the learnings of that life and the connection with this life and why you have chosen bring this reminder into this life and sometimes by removing the knife, the band or whatever it might be that is causing the pain.
I have used this successfully for pains like migraines, frozen shoulder, and pains that doctors tend to call psychosomatic – in other words ones for which they cannot find a physical cause.
Pain is inevitable; Suffering is optional (Unknown) - Don’t continue to suffer
Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
(Tender is the Night)
from the Past Life Regression Academy