Pain

Let’s face it….Pain can really slow you down.

Pain can interfere with your ability to take part in daily activities. It can impact your work-life, make your brain foggy and make it difficult to focus. It can negatively affect your relationships and interactions with others. It can sap your energy and make you feel less healthy overall. The more severe the pain, the heavier a toll it takes on your well-being.

It can stop you from being your best self.
In the US, addiction to opioids for pain medication has reached crisis levels, causing numerous deaths. Unfortunately, Australia is not too far behind, with one in five people suffering chronic pain, and many of those on prescription pain medication. Pain is now a serious and costly problem affecting the livelihoods of many.

More and more people are now looking for more natural, alternative treatments for pain and research has shown clinical hypnotherapy as a successful treatment for a variety of pain conditions.

How does pain work?

The latest medical neuroscience research tells us that all pain is produced in the brain.

According to Dr Lorimer Moseley, one of Australia’s leading pain scientists at the University of South Australia, “Stress can contribute to nerve sensitivity or pain system sensitivity. Stress lives in the brain, and therefore the experience of people with chronic pain often is that their pain increases as they become more stressed”.

There are essentially two types of pain.

Acute pain

This type of pain is usually short term and could come from tissue damage like a sprained back or ankle or a burn. It is fast-occurring, sharp and intense. It is a protective mechanism to stop us doing what we are doing or take us out of harms way. If you burn your hand with hot water, the message reaches the brain very quickly and the brain responds super fast by sending pain to the site. Pain gets you to pull your hand away.

Chronic Pain

Chronic pain can be more complex. And while pain scientists have learned a lot, there is still much to uncover in relation to pain and the brain. Most health professionals will agree that the majority of issues that occur in the body are healed as well as they can be by 3-6 months. So if the pain is ongoing, it is termed Chronic or Persistent pain.

It then becomes less about structural changes in the body and more about the sensitivity of the nervous system, which is still trying to protect us but is possibly stuck in a cycle of responding to old pain memories.

How does hypnotherapy help with chronic or persistent pain?

Solution Focused hypnotherapy is a safe and natural treatment with no side effects.

Hypnotherapy helps you with decreasing the sensitivity in the nervous system and re-training it, gradually, to be less protective. Essentially it helps to calm down your body’s internal alarm system, which has become super sensitive over time.

Hypnotherapy also helps you to change your perspective on the various associations that accompany pain, Ideally this process should enable you to reduce or possibly diminish the pain completely.

Hypnotherapy for pain management can be used either alone, or alongside medication or other treatments. If you are considering using Hypnotherapy for pain control, you should first seek a diagnosis from your medical practitioner to rule out any more serious causes of pain.

Is pain affecting your quality of life?

It’s certainly no fun when your brain keeps on producing a pain response, even after the body tissues are restored and healed. Pain is originally created for our protection but what can happen is we can get into a cycle of expectation of more pain, causing us to think negatively, which causes more anxiety, which leads to more pain. Just like a not-so-merry-go-round.

Solution Focused Hypnotherapy can break the pain response cycle. Neuroscience now tells us that the brain and body respond to our thoughts and emotions by producing various neurotransmitters. Depending on the thoughts, these chemicals can be helpful or harmful to our wellbeing in the longer term. Hypnotherapy helps you to refocus your thinking in order to see more aspects of your life in a more positive way, thereby producing more of the helpful chemicals from your body’s own natural pharmacy.

Is pain dragging you down you and making you grumpy and irritable?

Chronic pain can be so debilitating and it’s such a personal thing, which everybody experiences in different ways. It can be so frustrating to have this ever-present factor in your life, which no-one else seems to understand. It can also be difficult to plan social events due to pain and we can tend to avoid pleasurable activities.

Solution Focused Hypnotherapy uses positive suggestion while you are in a relaxed state of focused attention. It is aimed directly at the subconscious mind to help you reframe various aspects to see things from a different perspective and get you to where you want to be…enjoying your life more and not feeling so restricted.

By utilising the powerful state of Hypnosis and bringing you into a calm, relaxed state of focused attention, this therapy helps you to access your inner resources to help you feel better and in more of a state of balance. Hypnotherapy helps you to break the cycle of pain which is exacerbated by the anxiety which pain causes. Solution Focused Hypnotherapy helps you to manage and often eliminate pain and get back in control of your life.

Solution Focused Hypnotherapy is safe, natural and can be used to treat pain alongside other medical therapeutic approaches you may be using.

At Hill Hypnotherapy we treat you with respect and in a non-judgmental way. We take things at your own pace and work with you in a collaborative process.
There IS light at the end of the tunnel and you will ALWAYS be in control throughout the process. In fact our aim is to help you feel empowered, resilient and ready for your brighter future.

For more information about your particular pain issues, contact us at Hill Hypnotherapy to arrange a complimentary phone chat and take the first step to feeling better.