Pain Control

Charles E. Henderson, Ph.D.

The control of physical discomfort and pain is one of the oldest – and a surprise to many, easiest – applications of hypnosis. [This material was prepared to accompany my latest book Self Hypnosis but these methods can be applied by anyone with a basic knowledge of self-hypnosis and suggestion.]

Ancient history is just that and need not concern us here. However, it is interesting that pain control goes back 5,000 or so years. It was one of the first recorded applications of hypnosis. The ancient Egyptians used it in their sleep temples and called it the “sleep of the gods.” I think it's safe to say that pain is as old as life itself.

On a more personal level, if you've ever known pain, real pain, you will no doubt agree that anything that can make pain stop is a godsend.

Quite a bit is known today about pain and what causes it. We have an entire pharmocopaedia of pain-killing drugs, few of which were known to or available to the ancients. Major advances have been made in our understanding of how the brain is able to process information related to pain and pleasure. In particular we know how opiate drugs exert their remarkable effects. This research has culminated in the discovery of normally occurring opiate-like substances in the brain. These are opioid peptides called enkephalins and endorphins. They are neurotransmitters (chemical messengers) that travel along specific nerve pathways in the brain that process information related to pain, emotional behavior, and other bodily processes known to be affected by opiates.

The major disadvantage of pain-killing opiates and other drugs is the fact that they are all, to one degree or another, habit forming. They also have other side effects, some of which can be unpleasant. Even when the side effects are pleasant, anyone with an ounce of sense knows they are not to be used often or for long periods.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that the human brain can fairly easily produce its own endorphins that kill pain, and hypnosis is one of the best ways of doing that.

Relaxation and Pain Control

One of the big secrets in the battle against pain is this: You cannot feel pain if you are relaxed enough! To state this more correctly, you will not be bothered by pain if you are relaxed enough.

The problem, of course, is in getting or staying relaxed enough in situations of pain. Telling yourself to relax can be expected to be ineffective when you've just closed your finger in the car door. Or after your (usually) lovable little tyke has just butted you in the groin while horsing around.

Relaxation, or more appropriately, deep relaxation, is a very effective technique for gaining control of chronic pain.

It is said there are 50 million Americans who live with chronic, persistent pain. I don't know what the numbers are in the rest of the world, but this is obviously a huge problem. Relying on drugs for these unfortunate people is tricky business, to say the least. For instance, two COX-2 non-steroidal anti-inflammatory (NSAID) medications have just been withdrawn from the market and the American FDA has mandated more stringent warnings on all NSAIDS. For many these medications make the difference between productivity and disability. And it is only natural that many people with chronic pain also worry about the risks involved with taking drugs.

Enter deep relaxation procedures. Suggestions are powerful, but it is difficult to get them to work when one is stressed and tensed up with pain. That's why learning a method of deep relaxation is the first step for those in chronic pain.

(Chapter four of my book covers deep relaxation techniques, and there is also a Deep Relaxation CD and audio cassette tape available.)

If you suffer from chronic pain, the place to start gaining control of it is by practicing deep relaxation. Not only will you be able to get a handle on your existing pain, you will be able to move on to the more dramatic effects of self-hypnotic suggestion for pain control.

Suggestion and Pain Control

I have heard many reports from people who said they were aware that they had a feeling that should have been painful, but it wasn't. More than once I have heard this seemingly contradictory statement: “The pain was there but it didn't hurt!”

I too have experienced this phenomenon, having had several surgeries in my life, some of them supposed to be quite painful. All I can say is that it is hard to describe but you'll know it (pleasantly) when you experience it.

As you will recall if you have read chapter on of the book, my early interest and learning about hypnosis first began back when I was in high school. My first experience in using suggestion to deal with pain was prompted by the burns I experienced from the iron used in wrapping chickens at the grocery store where I worked briefly. I must have been about 14 at the time.

Wrapping chickens was a daily chore and I frequently burned myself on the hand or a finger or wrist with a subsequent blister and all the discomfort that goes with a second degree burn. To deal with this, somehow my pubescent brain had conjured up the concept that if that hot iron could burn me, it could also act as an agent of suggestion and “pull the burn back out”.

So I developed the practice of waving the hot iron back and forth over the burned area whenever I had slipped and burned myself. I would hold it just close enough to my skin to feel the heat. It would be unpleasant at first, but after a few passes of the iron, voilà, the burning sensation would be gone and no blister would develop. The magic of suggestion at work!

At the time I told my younger sister about the technique and she found that it worked the same way for her, too.

How do I know it was suggestion, and only suggestion, at work? Because in fact I was doing exactly the wrong thing to treat a burn. The correct action to take with a second degree burn is to immediately submerge it in cold water to stop continuing damage to the skin, and until the sense of burning has gone away. This can sometimes take ten minutes or more of submersion.

What I was doing when I passed the hot iron over the burn area was actually burning it some more. So not only did the suggestion have to overcome the original burn, it had to combat the additional burning that resulted from my waving the iron over the burn. Idiot!

Years ago I told my sister to stop doing that, to use water instead, and why. But I know for a fact that she still uses the hot-wave technique. Ah, well – a profit in his own land hath no glory.

Here is another example from my own experience. When I was in my early 30's I had to have osseous bone and flap procedure. This is where your teeth are okay but your gums have to come out. It was the result of my not having believed dentists over the years when they told me to floss.

Not in vogue these days like it was back then, periodontal surgeons would remove diseased gum tissue, exposing the roots of the teeth. Post-surgery pain was reputed to be about as painful as it gets.

But I was pretty cocky because I knew how effective suggestion could be and I knew how to prepare for the operation and subsequent healing period. So I did my preparations (you'll see this below), had the operation, and the following day was back on campus for all my classes. I had not felt one iota of real pain.

Because my mouth was packed all around my teeth with post-surgical protective stuff it was obvious to my students that I'd been involved in something. When they asked I told them about the surgery. Some of the students had had the same procedure and they could not believe I was back the next day, working, and had not had any pain. And no, I told them, no drugs. Just a few aspirins.

Now, I have to tell you that I have a very strong subconscious prohibition against boasting. If I boast, I pay.

Evidently I subconsciously interpreted my behavior that day as boasting, because that night, or rather the next morning, I was awakened at 3:15 a.m. with the most horrendous pain in one specific place in my mouth. It was truly awful. It was in the gum just above my left incisor and the message was unmistakable: Here's a sample of what you could be feeling in your entire mouth, all the time, chump! No bragging!

I suffered like that for 15 minutes. Then bam! I fell back to sleep as if someone had knocked me out with sodium pentothal. When I awoke the next morning there was mercifully no pain, and I had no further episodes of pain. But I had learned my lesson (yet again – I say again because this was not my first encounter with my subconscious concerning bragging). From that point on I was very careful not to be arrogant or boast about my no-pain good fortune.

Whether or not you have these kinds of conscious/subconscious communication is beside the point. You probably will when you have been working with these self-directed change methods for awhile, but they are not necessary.

Before we get into actual pain control methods, there are a couple of points I'd like you to keep in mind. One is the business about learning and practicing deep relaxation if you have chronic, persistent pain. Even if you are fortunate enough to not have chronic pain, it is still useful to know how to get quickly into a state of deep relaxation. In addition to all of deep relaxation's other benefits, it is very helpful when you are confronted with an unexpected, pain-producing situation.

Another important point is the “preparation” concept. Preparation is what makes true pain control possible. It is a lot more difficult to get control of pain when it catches you by surprise if you have not prepared yourself ahead of time for such an eventuality. Once you are experiencing pain it is harder to do something about it.

Pain makes you tense up and this worsens the experience of pain. Tension also blocks the development of self-hypnosis and diminishes the effectiveness of pain-control suggestions. By practicing pain control ahead of time you develop what is in effect a post-hypnotic suggestion that can be used to control pain. For more information on this topic, see the book, chapters 8 through 12. (As you can see from the amount of space devoted to the topic of suggestion in the book, it is an important subject.)

Procedure

Glove Anesthesia. Practice self-hypnosis and apply suggestions to develop glove analgesia (or anesthesia, as some people incorrectly refer to it). As you will note from the Red Rocks Scale of Hypnotic Depth (book, p. 46), this requires only a medium depth of hypnosis which can be achieved by most people with a little practice.

Suggestions can be both verbal and image. Incorporate into the suggestion the concepts of a post-hypnotic trigger and analgesic transference. That is, include a post-hypnotic suggestion that you will develop glove analgesia when, say, you think, “My hand is getting numb.” The transference is accomplished by placing the anesthetized hand on or near the body area where there is pain, thereby “transferring” the analgesia to the painful area.

Keep in mind the use of terms like numb and anesthesia are merely shorthand terms for analgesia. Actual numbness is not required (technically, being anesthetized would mean being numb, devoid of feeling, which is not necessary to control pain).

You can test your progress any time by pinching yourself after transferring the glove analgesia. As you get better at it with practice you will feel the pinch, but it won't hurt. Practice and test as often as you like. Don't worry, you won't break anything – the more practice, the better.

Pain Control Messengers. Now we come back to the opioid peptides called enkephalins and endorphins I mentioned in the first part of this article. For simplicity lets call these neurotransmitters “messengers” because that is what they are, and that is how we want to use them.

Formulate and apply suggestions – image suggestions will probably work best for you here – that anytime you need to control pain your brain will send out messengers to dull and block sensations of pain.

The sophisticated version of this kind of suggestion picture might include the working brain producing a chemical message that is transmitted to the affected area via a network of nerves. (All of this does in fact exist and happen in your body.) You could add a further ingredient to this model if you wish and imagine that the chemical message bathes the cells of the area with a pain-killing liquid.

A less sophisticated version is the switchboard model. (Some young people who know only about cell phones may find this model confusing.) Imagine there is a switchboard in your brain. You have a filter on this switchboard that can turn off the messages from any part of your body, especially pain messages. If the messages of pain are not “connected” to your brain, the messages don't get through and your brain is unaware of the pain. That is, there is no pain.

For an updated cell-phone version of this kind of suggestion, you could imagine that pain messages are calls from a particular number that has been blocked. Hence the brain's phone does not ring, so it does not pick up, and there is no message of pain.

The Ice Man model is another approach. It involves the concept of coldness which has a natural pain-dampening effect. Work with verbal and/or image suggestions that have ice being applied to the painful area. Imagining mothers or fathers massaging the area with ice works well for a lot of people.

As you can see there are several ways to formulate and apply suggestions for pain control. Feel free to experiment. You can modify some of these ideas, or blend two or more together, or even come up with something entirely different that will work for you. If you are a neurophysiologist, for example, get as detailed as you like. On the other hand, if you wouldn't know a neuron from a Quonset Hut, no matter. Just work with any model that feels comfortable to you: ice, glove anesthesia, switchboard, or something of your own devising.

For Those Facing Surgery. People who are preparing for surgery can help themselves immensely by applying the proper suggestions, both ahead of time and after. The application of suggestions should begin as soon as it is known that surgery is necessary, and should be continued through the post-operative period of recuperation. Each situation has its own requirements, which can be determined through common sense and autoquestioning (book, chapter 7), but the following verbal suggestions will give you the basic idea. (Convert them to image suggestions as you wish.)

I will relax while I am in the hospital and enjoy the attention I receive there.

I will experience little or no pain or discomfort before, during, and after surgery.

Bleeding will be minimal.

Shots and other medical procedures will not hurt or disturb me.

I have confidence in my doctors and medical staff, and in my own recuperative powers.

The surgical operation [or other procedure] will not be a shock to my physical system or mental state.

Each day I will continue to heal with good progress and become healthier.

I will not heed or be upset by any remarks or comments made during surgery, or made at any other time.

You can of course add to or modify these suggestions to suit your own case and needs. Don't be afraid to get more specific with your suggestions to fit your own exact circumstances. Just remember to include the concepts of relaxation, rapid recovery and healing, less or no pain, reduced shock to the system, and reduced bleeding.

It will be normal to feel a little nervous or be somewhat apprehensive as you go into the hospital or care center. But having practiced these methods ahead of time you will be pleasantly surprised at how easily you will sail through and recuperate.

As for pain itself, it is not necessary. With these methods you will prove that for yourself.

One final caution, though. Pain is not necessary when you know what is going on! You do need pain to alert you to the fact that something is wrong, so don't try to work with suggestions that you will never feel pain. That would be foolish.

For more information, see:
Book: Self Hypnosis for the Life You Want.
Catalog of CDs and tapes on topics such as suggestion, autoquestioning, and deep relaxation.
There is also an older book by me (Henderson) that is out of print but available in Adobe PDF format on CD: You Can Do It With Self Hypnosis.

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