Alleviating Chronic Pain

Alleviating Chronic Pain  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD, Dip CH
Aug 2013

     I know pain. I know it intimately. I have had fibromyalgia (an autoimmune disorder) for 15 years, contracted originally from a flu-like illness I got in China. I’d gone to there to give a paper at a health conference in Nanjing. After the conference I, and our little group of Australian travellers did a special acupuncture course, working with de-skinned corpses soaked in formaldehyde. Perhaps it was the toxicity of the formaldehyde, or the environment in which we worked wasn’t all that clean, perhaps my illness had more to do with the ages old dust stirred up by the intense building activity going on in the midst of China’s ten year rebuilding plan. Wherever it came from, it made me very ill. Since that time, fibromyalgia expresses itself in my left leg that cramps spasmodically when I get over tired. There used to be a constant chronic pain, but now, after intensive acupuncture and remedial practices, I’m much better. I do know, however, really know pain.
 

     Pain is inevitable, but suffering is not, so says the Buddha, an observation that is very useful to know when we contemplate alleviating it. Pain is necessary for survival. It allows us to avoid injury or respond to injury as quickly as possible. When it becomes chronic, this purpose is less clear. Neurological evidence suggests that chronic pain imprints itself on our brains, amplifying its experience and getting in the way of its resolution. I’ve watched how fibromyalgia works with me: a cramp is felt, my attention goes to the cramp, the cramp intensifies, intensifies until the cramp is all there is, and stays like this for days, unless I break the cycle with massage or acupuncture or some other effective intervention. I wish I’d known more about hypnotherapy, though. This would have broken the cycle much earlier, perhaps not to get rid of the disorder, per se, but then again, maybe it could have.

     Chronic pain (defined as pain that continues longer than 6 months) infiltrates our lives, affects our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behaviour infecting our relationships with one another, our work and our enjoyment. Understanding this multidimensional quality of pain is most useful for how we go about working with people in pain, as pain managements units attempt to do. 

     I work with people in pain, mental, bodily, emotional, spiritual and social, and psychotherapy, of which clinical hypnotherapy is essentially a part, is very useful in this regards. It’s significant that most research work on the efficacy of clinical hypnotherapy has been done on pain (over two centuries of research). Hypnotherapy was and is used by doctors and dentists and has a respectable place in surgery, in the alteration of heart beats, in the control of bleeding, and even in the diminution of tumours. It is used in childbirth; used when a person can not take chemical anaesthetics, used to reduce the levels of body damaging medications (when morphine is no longer an option), when pain management is now too expensive, and/or doctors no longer know what to do with a person with their ongoing pain. Clinical hypnotherapy when used by psychotherapists, work to manage physical pain as well as psychological issues.

     We now know a lot about pain and also hypnotherapy, although the shifting paradigms of mind-body relations have altered this understanding quite substantially. Where once pain was thought to be psychogenic (originating from the mind), we now know there is an interrelationship between what the body feels and how the mind interprets this. There is still much to be learned about pain and its effective alleviation.

     Pain is a matter of the whole organism and thus its management  is not about convincing the person that it is “all in the mind”, for it is not. What we now know is they we are complex beings where an intervention on one level affects the experiences we have across the board. This is possible because of the plasticity of the brain and each new experience forges new neurological pathways, essentially and fundamentally changing us.

     Pain is a subjective phenomenon, and privately suffered. The way a person explains their pain is really useful in allowing the therapist to structure an intervention with hypnosis or other therapies. The narrative is an affirmation and acknowledgement of the pain’s presence and effects. This chronic pain narrative is a story told over and over, thus increasing the effects of imprinting on the brain.  This phenomenon is what is known as the symptomatic trance state. The art of healing is in breaking the circularity of that state, which is more about suffering than pain itself. The Buddha was right. Pain is inevitable, but much suffering isn’t. 

      Pain alleviation isn’t about getting rid of it, but changing how it is experienced. This can mean shifting the physicality of it from totally dominating our awareness to somewhere else in the body that isn’t so all encompassing.  The clinical hypnotherapist has tools up her sleeve that seem almost magical, but they are not so much magical as transformative. This is why I do the work I do. I am interested in participating in the transformation of lives. This is collaborative and empowering work, and deeply nurturing of client and practitioner alike.  

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell