Pain Relief or Pain Control using hypnosis can substantially reduce or eliminate pain.  For this reason, it is not used where the cause of the pain in unknown. Pain is usually a protection for the body.  I am only prepared to teach these (usually very effective) pain blocking techniques where the client has received medical advice, and the cause has been diagnosed, or the medical practitioner has confirmed that the pain is serving no useful purpose. 

One of the symptoms of the fight/flight response is the involuntary or unconscious tensing of muscles.  This can lead to a variety of aches and pains - including headaches and chronic backache, for example. See fight/flight response for more information. As you might expect, such chronic pain, which a person may have suffered for years as a result of stress, usually responds very well to hypnosis.

There is another effect of hypnosis which can produce far more dramatic effects.  Pain is ultimately a subjective experience, which is to say that, although it is very real to the sufferer, it is ultimately a product of the brain.  In deeper states of trance that a person can learn, it is possible to teach the mind new ways of processing the information received by the brain, from the peripheral nervous system, so that a particular pain is no longer perceived.  Three examples come to mind as I write this.

The first example is a young woman who was in considerable pain when she first consulted me.  She had been involved in an accident while hang gliding - she had fallen around 200 feet onto concrete.  She had broken her back, and several ribs, and after much medical treatment and surgery was able to drive and walk again, wearing a plaster cast on her body from shoulders to hips.  She was in constant pain, and told me that prescribed painkillers were having less and less effect. 

She proved to be an apt learner, and was soon able to achieve the levels of trance at which pain relief is most effective, and over some months was able to acquire considerable pain control skills. She was highly creative, and at the suggestion of a friend of hers wrote a piece of creative writing to describe her experience of therapy.

The young woman very kindly gave me permission to publish her writing, and her piece, entitled 'Glow' can be read by clicking here. This is, of course, her experience - and the experience of individuals can vary considerably.

The second example is a young woman who had originally consulted me for other problems, and some months later, these were now resolved.  She had now become pregnant for the first time, to her delight, and the delight of her husband.  She asked me whether hypnosis might be effective to address pain in childbirth.  We worked together during the months leading up to the date on which she the baby was due, and, as expected, this client was easily able to learn self-hypnotic pain blocking.  After the baby was born, she told me with evident pleasure that she used no anaesthetics, although they were offered to her by the midwife who attended the birth, and that she had experienced absolutely no pain at any time during the childbirth.

The third example is a young woman who had sought treatment for other problems, but who arrived for an appointment one week with her hand in bandages.  She had dropped a large heavy wooden box on that hand, and was obviously in considerable pain, despite the medical attention she had received.  This made her wince occasionally as we chatted for a few minutes before beginning work.

Over the weeks we had been working together, we had already developed good rapport at the unconscious levels needed for good hypnotic work, and she had already learned good self-hypnotic skills.  We decided that it would be appropriate to use the session to give her some relief from the pain.  At the end of the session of around an hour, after we had completed the piece of trance work, she reported to me with some evident surprise that her hand was entirely pain free for the first time in the four days since the accident happened.