People who suffer with chronic pain due to injury or illness can begin to feel at the mercy of their body’s nerve responses. This may sound strange, but with hypnosis and hypnotherapy you can actually “talk” to the part of you that is creating your pain. Once you have its attention, you can then discover the purpose of the pain and get it to dramatically reduce, and often stop, sending “hurt signals” to your brain. Hypnotherapy does this by helping this pain-producing part of you to fulfill its purpose in a truly beneficial way.

At one point my wife was having terrible back pain that prevented her from going to sleep at night. She was allergic to the drugs usually given for severe pain, so she couldn’t take those. Fortunately she’s a trooper and was able to work standing up at a special raised desk. This way she was able to ignore her pain during most of the day while taking Tylenol. But at night the pain would increase dramatically as soon as she lay down in bed. After a few nights of my hypnotizing her, she learned the visualization, remembered my suggestions, and was able to do self-hypnosis to get herself to sleep without my help.

According to pain research, swearing also helps. But that doesn’t usually solve the problem if it’s persistent, or chronic.

Besides making for a better night’s sleep, using hypnosis and self-hypnosis to heal chronic pain — or even intense, brief pain such as that associated with dental work or childbirth — teaches a powerful hands-on lesson. I am not the victim of my body’s nerve endings!  It’s possible to train your mind to tune out any kind of unnecessary pain.

In every hypnotherapy session where I’m giving suggestions to reduce or eliminate pain, I always include this message to the mind: Keep the ability to feel any pain that you need. Because pain isn’t the enemy. It has a purpose — to alert us to the fact that there’s something wrong that needs our attention.

But when pain is too intense to bear, or becomes chronic — when we already understand the cause, but the pain continues — that sort of pain is unnecessary. Through direct hypnotic suggestion, and by connecting with the memory of our body in its normal, relaxed and easeful state, we can let the pain go.

You may find it helpful to check out my Finding True Magic audios: Quick Pain Relief and End Insomnia