One way to deal with pain , even diminish it to vanishing point , is to reframe it . But before we do that , we can ask the client to describe their pain further .
The pitiful poetry of pain
Pain is really entrancing . It captures and narrows our focus of attention , just like an effective hypnotist .
If you have a raging toothache , it will get you focused internally no matter what ' s on TV or how interesting your friend ' s conversation is . So how do we begin to alter the experience of pain ?
The first step to reframing pain is to ascertain what metaphors your client uses for it . I ' m constantly amazed how descriptive people are when they talk about their pain . You hear words like burning , tender , sharp , dull , hot , boiling , searing , nagging , ripping , pulsating , screaming , shooting , violent ...
Pain , it seems , makes poets of us all . How does your client describe their pain ? Once we understand how they are framing it now , we can start to think about how to reframe it .
Technique one : Reframe the pain
We often think of
reframing as a cognitive psychological technique . But reframing can , when used
hypnotically , help manage physical pain .
A burning pain can be ' cooled '. The pulse of a pulsating pain can be slowed ( and eventually stopped altogether ). When we use these kinds of terms , we are building rapport with the pain sufferer by inhabiting their pain metaphor and using that metaphor to modify their experience of the pain .
One man who had been badly injured in a motorbike pileup had excruciating pain in his back and the soles of his feet as a result of an almost completely severed spinal nerve . I visited him at home and asked him to describe the pain . He said it was " burning ". When I asked how hot it was , he said " boiling !"
I taught him self-hypnosis to imagine cooling that heat to a point where it was comfortably warm , with a resultant relief from the constant pain . Whenever the pain got too much , he would apply this hypnotic reframing technique .
We can also ask our clients to grade the pain on a scale of 0 ( no pain ) to 10 ( the worst pain imaginable ). We can ask them how it would feel to be at a 7 instead of a 9 - what the differences would be , and so on . Here we are