Hypnosis for Chronic Pain Relief
Struggling with constant pain causes everything else in your life to be overcast with a shadow. There’s this constant fear that pain will attack at any time. You start living your life in a smaller and smaller circle, avoiding anything that might spark the pain. With hypnosis, you can manage the pain and regain control of your life; many even heal, becoming entirely free of the pain holding them back!
Just being in the hypnotic state is healing for people because it activates your parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) and allows your body to exit the flight or fight mode of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) that many people are stuck in today. Once you’re out of flight or fight mode, you and your body can focus on getting better and improving your situation.
Hypnotherapy addresses chronic pain from three different angles.
Number One
The first way hypnosis addresses chronic pain is by getting you out of your SNS, as mentioned above. Activating your sympathetic nervous system shifts blood to your heart, lungs, big muscles, and low brain. This is what allows you to flee or fight. Your autonomic nervous system frees up blood flow to go to these areas by reducing blood flow to your immune system, digestive system, reproductive system, and frontal lobes (higher mind/problem solving). If you’re constantly in a stressful or survival situation, you have a prolonged lack of blood flow to essential parts of your body and can develop pain and illnesses.
Just being in hypnosis is healing because it activates your immune system and allows blood to flow to essential systems in your body. Hypnosis is a natural state of mind with numerous beneficial characteristics like regulating the nervous system and increasing response to suggestion. This last piece is critical, and I’ll cover it more later.
Number Two
Second, you process the emotions and experiences causing your pain by utilizing a series of therapeutic sessions. Suppose your pain was caused directly by an incident of some kind. In that case, the form of hypnotherapy I use lets us collapse the negative emotions and fear around the event and remove any emotional charge. This allows you to move past the fear and into a place of healing.
If your pain is from an unknown cause, then there are techniques to dive into the reasons and process those once they’re discovered.
You are in hypnosis for the therapeutic sessions, allowing you to reach the inner problem-solving intelligence within you. Through imagery, metaphor, and inner dialoguing, you can resolve a lot of issues that free your body and mind to heal themselves.
Beyond direct causes, limiting beliefs develop when you have chronic pain. Most people lose trust in their body and their ability to function normally. There is also a constant fear of doing something that will cause pain. When I was sick, there was a paralysis in me, holding me from living my life. I was constantly afraid of triggering an episode and designed my entire life around being prepared for an attack to happen. I had my bag of rescue meds; I needed to know every detail of an outing to be as prepared as possible. I limited what I did to make sure I could bail at any moment if any symptom started. I avoided places I identified as triggering. My world became a tiny circle compared to what it used to be; I became trapped in an ailing body and mind. And there were many more habits I developed that I’ve now forgotten since healing through my illness. You, too, can heal through yours.
Number Three
Lastly, the most crucial step of hypnosis for chronic pain is the customized therapeutic suggestions delivered to you while in hypnosis. These suggestions direct your body and mind to heal. A series of recommendations are created around your specific physical issue and incorporate anatomy and physiology terms into them so that the natural healing intelligence within you knows what to focus on.
Other suggestions reverse limiting beliefs that are discovered during sessions. These suggestions help you regain trust in yourself and your body. They also help instill self-compassion, a necessary component of any healing journey because healing is not linear. There are often times of progress followed by setbacks, and a setback is your mind revealing what else needs to be addressed for you to achieve the healing you want.
Now you might think I’m crazy that simply thinking your way better is impossible, which is what the utilization of therapeutic suggestions is, but have you heard of something called The Placebo Effect? The placebo effect is when someone has a response to what they believe is a medication but is not medicine. We can think ourselves into health; we just need to be shown how.
In summary, hypnosis for chronic pain addresses the pain in three ways. First, activate the parasympathetic nervous system allowing your innate healing intelligence to work on healing you. Second, go through a series of hypnotherapy sessions (usually 10-12) to process the causes of your pain. Lastly, you and the hypnotherapist design therapeutic suggestions around your physical and emotional healing and saturate your subconscious mind with these new ideas. These new ideas become your reality, where you are comfortable and at ease in your body, happily trusting it to carry you through your daily life.
We all have a healing intelligence within ourselves. Are you ready to activate yours?
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