Scientific Studies Prove Hypnosis Can Reduce Your PainNon medicinal treatment of pain gains adherents. CNN article. Ordinary People Worldwide Know How To Manage Pain. You Can Too.Pain management: one of the final frontiers of modern medicine. Pain is still not very well understood. The reason for this is that there is a mental component to all pain experiences. Some examples of this can be found in ongoing case studies:
Athletes regularly are found to have completed an entire game with a broken bone or other injury that should have stopped them.
The Couvade syndrome is a well-studied phenomenon that occurs in certain societies in the Amazon and Micronesia. A pregnant woman works in her normal chores, takes a few hours off to have the baby, and then returns to her work. The father goes into convulsions and pain for days and is tended to as if he had the baby!
Soldiers in wartime give us more hope. They frequently report no pain from severe injuries while awake. And then they wince at the minor pain of a needle injection. This tells us that the pain mechanism has not been shut off due to shock and has been discriminated out for the injured area.
To help you understand how you can take the controls over your pain, it is first necessary to understand the concept of the duality of your mind’s functions.
The conscious mind and the unconscious mind
The conscious mind’s purposes are to look, listen, and learn; to analyze, criticize, accept and reject. This is what most of us use to manage our daily existence throughout the day.
The unconscious mind, on the other hand, is that part of us that runs our automatic processes. This includes what is called the “Autonomic Nervous System.” This keeps our heart and breathing going and other such bodily functions including healing and the pain message system. The unconscious mind is the storehouse of our memories and it regulates our energy and emotions among other things. It has been said that the greatest discovery of the 19th century was made by the father of psychology, William James when he wrote about this in the new science of psychology.
Have you ever heard that we only use 10% of our mind’s powers? Well, that other 90% resides in our unconscious mind. Some call it the “subconscious mind” and it refers to the exact same thing. The only difference is the spelling. I prefer the term “unconscious” because the prefix “sub” tends to suggest a lower or lessor meaning and that is far from actuality. But you must know that the unconscious mind makes no choices or decisions. It just acts based on the programming you’ve given it either by your inborn DNA or your life’s experiences.
Why Hypnosis and NLP Works For Pain Management
It is sad when I think about how most folks are never even introduced to the ideas you just read above. Most people go on about their daily life thinking that all they should put their attention to is what they see, touch, feel, hear, or smell. I congratulate you! You have now been introduced to your true potential for taking back the steering wheel to your body.
Now, why can’t I just say to myself (my unconscious mind) “turn off the pain” and have it do just that when I want to?
Sometimes you can but you must first have a rapport or, an agreement between your unconscious mind and conscious desires. They must be on the same page and in harmony. The unconscious mind’s primary function is to protect you and keep you alive. Everything else is subservient to that and there are a lot of issues surrounding that. It’s job is NOT to make you happy or comfortable.
Between the conscious and unconscious mind is a barrier we call the “Critical Factor (CF).” This is that part of us that filters for which messages will be delivered and programmed into the unconscious mind. As we get older, the CF gets tougher and more difficult to penetrate since we have more experiences and memories to process new information through. Children are infinitely more suggestible and believe and act on anything because they haven’t developed the CF. That is why they can imagine themselves being a movie star or superman so easily.
I should also note that there is a very strong link within the unconscious mind between our emotions and physical pain. The work of Dr. Candace Pert in her book: “The Molecules of Emotion” now gives us scientific proof under a microscope of the role that negative emotions play in wreaking havoc at the cellular leve.
Where hypnosis and NLP come in is these techniques set aside the CF so that the messages can go straight to the unconscious. They operate in the communication system that the unconscious mind presents to us. We will work together to clear your negative emotions and get your unconscious mind’s programming in sync with your desire to reduce your pain through these modalities. |