People sometimes talk of needing to ' escape ' their pain , and we can help them do that hypnotically .
Technique three : Disassociate from the pain
When someone is in trance , we can begin to direct their attention to other areas of their body , or other times and places when they were free from discomfort . This is a distraction technique , but also utilizes our natural capacity to disassociate from one kind of attentional focus and switch to another .
We all disassociate deeply when we dream during sleep . Physically , we are in bed . Psychologically , we may be riding on the back of a camel , exploring some alien landscape , or flying through the air . We have forgotten the body lying in bed and become associated instead to the apparent reality of our imaginations .
So hypnosis is naturally disassociative , just as dreaming or any other use of the imagination is . And the suggestions we make during hypnosis can deepen the benefits of pain relief for our clients .
For example , I worked with a 15-year-old girl who was extremely allergic to chemical anaesthesia but needed a series of quite complex facial surgeries to correct a
cleft palate . Now this girl loved to ride horses , and she also proved to be a wonderfully talented hypnosis subject .
I suggested she could " be somewhere else entirely during the operation " - that she could rise up above the operating theatre and see it from high above , then go ride her horse until the operation had finished . This proved to be highly effective , much to the amazement of her surgeon .
The groundbreaking psychiatrist
Dr Milton Erickson relates a case in which he helped a woman with intractable cancer pain hypnotically leave her painracked body in one room while she experienced going into another room to watch TV . This hypnotic ' out of body ' experience meant that she could take regular breaks from the relentless , intractable pain she ' d been experiencing .
Even our language can be disassociative . I will sometimes talk not of " your pain " but rather " that pain ".
Use dissociation to help distance your clients from the pain . The results can be amazing . Okay , finally , we have the hypnotic art of numbing .
Technique four : Use hypnotic anaesthesia