Pain control

Dear reader,

it seems fitting to write a blog entry on the topic of pain control when I'm sitting here with a sore throat.

I was born handicapped. I don't like that word much, because I'm independent and "handicapped" for me means a limitation. In the end all people are in one way or another helpless or limited or at least a bit inapt.

Anyway, I was born with my right foot missing. I have a prothesis and with it I can walk and ride a normal bike on a regular basis. Many people don't know I have a prothesis and are surprised when they find out about it. They don't see it. It had happened a couple of times in the past that the bone in the leg has grown faster than the rest of the leg. The bone had to be cut off. I know I have taken pain killers they have given me the first time. The next two times I didn't take them. I don't like being numbed and didn't want to sleep with meds. I didn't want to sleep. I wanted to be pain free! I know that the third and (to date) last time I had deliberately slept through the following one or two days after the operation.

I don't quite remember if it was the first or second time. But I remember that my grandmother had been visiting me in the hospital with my dad and my sister. My mom had been there in the hospital with me anyway. I don't remember what my grandma hat told me. The others had gone out of the room and she told me something. Something that made me forget my pain. As soon as the others came back, the spell was broken. I have no idea what she did exactly or how. I'm also not sure she was conscious of what she did. The important thing was, that it helped.

Pain is a messenger. Normally it wants to tell us, "Take better care of yourself!" or "Change something! The way it is now is not good for you." These are important signals, which shouldn't be ignored like that under any circumstances. This is why I suggest to everybody not to shut down all the pain. That's often not necessary anyway. We all can go on pretty good with a certain amount of pain and ignore that. But please not for long! That would be unhealthy and unreasonable. A messenger wants to be heard and requires that something has to be done, changed. This should be respected under all circumstances!

Hypnosis Salad is an organisation, which gives hypnosis seminars. On youtube there's a video with Michael Watson, where he talks with lots of humor about an effective method of pain control a friend of his used. Here are two of the main points of the video about pain:

• Pain is so uncomfortable, because we think of it as uncontrolable.


• At the given moment pain seems endless.

The method Michael Watson describes is so simple and clever. You take the pain and turn it into a symbol (maybe also a colour) and hold this symbol in your hand. Then you throw it into a bin or flush it down the toilet or whatever. Why is it a clever method? Well, by turning the pain into a symbol, you change the sensory perception. It's a feeling changed into something visual. By placing the symbol in your hand it's away from the original place. (Except it's pain in the hand of course. Although even if that's the case it would be a change from a feeling actually in a part of the body to a symbol you can see and hold in the hand.) What did you do there? Taking control through giving a shape and change of location and change of sensory perception! The endlessness stops when we throw away the symbol.

I personally placed a symbol in my hand only one or two times. What I do is my own variation. Let's assume it's a headache. I imagine a geometrical shape with edges or spikes, which could give me the kind of pain in my head that I have at that moment. Often it's something like a polygon or something thorny. A colour may or may not come with the symbol for everyone. For me the shape often comes with a sort of yellow or green. The colour is there without me thinking about one. I keep the shape in my head and imagine it go change into a ball. A ball has no edges, so they can't cause pain. Because of Erickson the colour purple is special for me and has a calming effect. So the ball turns purple. Often what I do is imagine my whole head in a light purple, transparent ball. Like my head is in a gold fish bowl.

Simply by having to concentrate on something, which you have to see in your head, is distraction by itself and changes the intensity. One advice if you're working with colours, too: pick a colour that's far enough away from the pain colour. For example if your pain colour is blue, purple will be rather close to that colour. One time I told my dad about this method and he suggested to take the complementary colour. I never did that. I keep forgetting about it, because purple is my colour of choice automatically or sometimes blue. Also one needs to know which colour the complementary colour is. (Interestingly enough it fits for me with yellow-green and purple already.)

Like I said, you should keep a little bit of pain. It happens for me that at one point I don't have to concentrate on the purple ball anymore and I just keep doing what I do at that moment. The headache is gone by itself then. So it often is enough to make the pain less, but not delete it all together.

Richard Bandler, one of the founders of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) knows a lot about hypnosis. When asked what he does against a toothache, he said he goes to the dentist. And with a headache? He takes aspirin then. The people are surprised about his reply then. With an expert in hypnosis they seem to expect some sort of hypnosis. The method Michael Watson describes or my variation are possible methods. Richard Bandler's way of dealing with a toothache or headache is important anyway: if there are ways and methods to get rid of the pain in an easy way, we should use them, too.

I mentioned Charlie Chaplin in my blog entry about my room of motivation. But the quote fits here once again, too: "Nothing is permanent in this wicked world - not even our troubles."

Until next blog,

sarah