How Hypnosis Works for Back Pain (and Anywhere Else That Hurts)

Before I started Berkeley Hypnosis & Pain Management, the first time I performed hypnotherapy for pain relief was for a friend.  Cameron told me he was in fairly significant back pain, so I offered to try hypnosis on him.

Even though I was still in hypnosis school and had never actually hypnotized someone for back pain, we both figured it couldn’t hurt if I tried one of the scripts in my hypnosis textbook.                                                                                           Click Here to Schedule Your FREE Consultation

When I arrived at his home, I saw that Cameron was in so much back pain that he was hunched over.

We got right to work. I started by asking, on a scale from 1 to 10, what level his back pain was at. Cameron said it was at a 4. Then I asked the same question, not about his physical pain, but about his emotional reaction to it. He didn’t understand at first, so I framed the question in a different way: “On a scale of 1 to 10,” I asked, “how upset are you by the fact you have this back pain?”

He said he was at a 7.

This was interesting. His “emotional pain” number was higher than the rating he gave his physical back pain.

Though it seemed notable back then, I’ve discovered through my years doing pain management hypnosis that this is not at all unusual. In fact, every single one of my chronic pain clients has told me their emotional pain number was equal to or greater than the rating they gave to their physical pain.

Does Your Pain Bother You? That Could Be a Problem 

It turns out that how you feel about your pain has a lot to do with how much pain you feel. It’s also one of the key reasons hypnosis works for pain management. Brain scans show that when you lower how upset you are about your pain, your pain level decreases.

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Here’s what psychologist Mark Jensen, of the University of Washington School of Medicine reports: “During hypnosis,” he told livescience.com, “you can ask people to imagine that the sensation that usually induces extreme pain is minor, that it isn’t bothersome and you immediately see a decrease in activity in the prefrontal cortex and those other parts.”

Or as William Ray, a Penn State psychology professor who has also done EEG brain studies, says in the Penn State News: “ . . . hypnosis removes the emotional experience of pain,” he says, ”while allowing the sensory sensation to remain. Thus, you notice you were touched but not that it hurt.”

It’s obvious that our brains are connected to our physical sensations. After all, when we think something is embarrassing, we blush. We get hot when we are angry, and also when we think a thought that is sexually exciting or when we find someone attractive. These physical responses are not of our own volition. They happen automatically.

Timothy Trujillo, a hypnotist who focuses on patients with immune disorders, says: “Every idea is a chemical action within our body. That chemical reaction is going to influence every other chemical reaction within the stew that we call ‘ourselves.’”

But just as thoughts related to fear, anger, anxiety and stress have harmful effects on our bodies, through hypnosis we can send out ideas that heal and harmonize them.

Managing Cameron’s Back Pain with Hypnosis

Though I had never done pain management hypnosis, I did have a lot of experience doing hypnotic inductions. This is where I help clients relax—first by having them slow down their breathing, then by having them visualize a beautiful serene place, either one they remember or a place they make up in their mind. I ask them to experience this place with as many of their senses as they can, so even if someone’s not visual, they can imagine what it sounds like, what sensations they might feel while they are there or even what it smells like.

This leads to a very relaxed state, which is part of how hypnosis enhances the mind-body connection. Brain scans taken at Stanford University show that hypnosis enhances the parts of the brain that deepen connections between the mind and the body, which is why it’s so effective in pain management. (Bottom Line Inc.’s newsletter reports that hypnotherapy offers relief in 75% of cases.)     

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I started to do an induction with Cameron. Soon he was hypnotized, which means he was in a relaxed, daydreamy state where he could still focus. I then read the script out loud to him. The basic premise is of this script is to imagine that your pain, at its current level, has a color, a shape, a texture, a feeling or a sound. In Cameron’s case, it was a 4 for his physical back pain and a 7 for his emotional reaction to his back pain.

Cameron came up with an image that was a dark reddish blob that was a bit like an amorphous jellyfish. Sometimes the image is like that, or even just a sound or a texture. Other times it’s a specific image. I once had a client imagine that her sciatica pain was a green light bulb.

Next, I asked Cameron to imagine what his back pain was like before it was a 4 and a 7 and to come up with imagery that related to his new levels. Now it was more of a reddish gold and it was a blobby circle. I asked him what level his pain was at. He said he was down to a 3 physically and had a bigger jump emotionally, down from a 7 to a 4.

Sometimes at this step a client comes up with an action that removes the pain almost entirely. My sciatica client pulled a string on her green light bulb and turned it off. Her pain went away for the rest of the session and was only the size of a dime when she came back the next week. It had previously been a shooting pain that went through her back and legs.

I continued to work with Cameron to visualize his back pain at lower pain levels. He got down another step to a 2 for the physical back pain and two steps down to a 2 for the emotional and he couldn’t go farther.

I thought that was pretty good for a first try, so we stopped and talked for a while. After about twenty minutes, we discovered something surprising.

When I came to his house, Cameron was hunched over. About twenty minutes after his session as we stood talking in his kitchen, we suddenly noticed that his back pain was low enough that he was able to stand straight. This back pain reduction came from just from one pain management hypnosis technique that I read out loud, word for word, from a book.                                      

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I’ve since developed a specialty at Berkeley Hypnosis in working with people to relieve chronic pain and to deal with their medical issues. I have learned and created many other techniques to use with people, including: creating a hypnotic control room where you can lower dials for the pain and increase the dials for calm, comfort and control; working with an imagined anesthesia glove to numb the pain in a particular area; releasing the stuck energy from old, unexpressed emotions that create muscular tension and impedes oxygen flow in the body, thus exacerbating pain; using the power of suggestion to let the mind know that the sensation in the body doesn’t have to bother it and that it can go on undisturbed; and discovering unconscious issues from childhood, perhaps even trauma, that when recognized and released takes away pain.

I’ve also found that many times when I work with people we develop pain management solutions in hypnosis that are unique to them. With my client who turned off a green light bulb to stop her sciatica pain, we found that by putting the same kind of light bulbs under her feet and turning them ON, that the numbness in her feet caused by neuropathy disappeared for good.

If you’d like to find out how hypnosis can help you lower or eliminate your pain or your medical issues, you can set up a free consultation here or call me at 510-813-8004. Or you can email me at info@BerkeleyHypnosis.com.

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