Pain is a message that something needs attending to in the body. It is a signal system that’s designed to keep us safe. In an ideal world, we would only ever have pain when it was useful, like if you momentarily touched a hot stove. The pain signals in your body would get you to instantly whip your hand away from the stove and within a short while, the pain would fade away. But in cases of chronic pain, when you’re already receiving all the proper medical treatment for your condition but still experiencing pain, it’s likely that the pain signals in the body are no longer serving a useful purpose or that they’re firing excessively, too intensely, and to a degree that is taking away from your capacity to enjoy life.
Hypnosis has been successfully used for many years to help with pain management because pain, as a signal in the nervous system, is remarkably malleable, meaning your experience of it can and does change depending on how you’re paying attention to things.
When you’re tired, stressed, or preoccupied with the pain or if you’re feeling emotional and overwhelmed from having to deal with it, this can exacerbate the physical sensations. On the other hand, when you feel calmer and more relaxed or when you’re absolutely focused and absorbed in an engaging activity, you may have found that any physical discomfort tends to diminish, like it recedes away into the background, and that it becomes much more manageable.
Therapeutic Hypnosis (or hypnotherapy) allows you to tap into this natural capacity to tune out discomfort by giving you a way to direct your own mind to process those pain signals in a different way. This isn’t something you need to consciously try to do, because hypnosis is not about doing things with the conscious mind. This is about making these changes with the subconscious mind through deep relaxation, guided imagery, and hypnotic suggestion, so that you can feel calmer and more relaxed throughout the day, sleep more soundly at night, and generally feel so much better in yourself.