Working with Autoimmune conditions & Chronic pain

This might not be the most obvious thing for a hypnotherapist to work with, but after you’ve had a little read-through I hope you’ll have a deeper understanding of as to why this is such a fascinating and multi-layered topic to work with - in fact, it’s my absolute favourite thing to treat. 

Hypnotherapy has proved to be very successful in treating chronic pain and inflammatory responses in the body. 

Especially when it comes to (e.g.) irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, skin conditions like eczema and psoriasis (even blushing) psoriatic arthritis and migraines.

With all these conditions, we’re of course talking about a physical manifestation - stiff, swollen joints, aches and pains, redness. But what we also need to pay attention to, especially in conditions that are exacerbated by stress, is that they have a psychological component to them as well, not just a physiological one. And it’s that psychological component that we are able to work with. 

Hypnotherapy is definitely not a cure-all for everything, and it’s not a way to alleviate that pain completely, but it can still be powerful - because I’m sure as you’ve noticed, if you have a chronic condition - the psychological component to the condition is actually quite big. The condition is not the same every day. Because your thoughts are not the same every day. On bad days it’s usually worse, on good days it’s better. 

And here’s where we’re coming to the bit where you might start to not like me so much. This bit is not for everyone. 

So I invite you to take as much, or as little, as you want from this post. You can even tell me to piss off if you’d prefer - but please just hear me out first.

Our subconscious mind is always trying to protect us, at least I believe that. 

So if you take something like chronic pain, the subconscious mind is often acting as a protection mechanism for us - creating the pain.

And you might be thinking: “surely our subconscious mind is supposed to protect us FROM pain, right?” 

Well, not always.

Think about it this way: having a condition with chronic pain often stops you from doing certain things, it stops you from taking certain action, stops you from maybe putting yourself out there where you might get hurt, ridiculed, criticised or shamed. Things like that risk hurting us a lot, because we’re only human. So if your subconscious mind was looking for a way to reign things in for you, to control you a bit and to keep you “held back” in order to keep you safe, then chronic pain would be a fairly decent way to do it. 

We might even go so far as to say there’s a perceived benefit to the symptoms as well - as hard as that might be to admit to ourselves. We get care. Maybe even special treatment from those we love, without having to ask for it - and that feels good. Of course it does! It’s completely natural. People call to check in on us. We have an excuse to get out of things. We can cancel things last minute without much explanation. Our condition might come with some benefits too. When we find it hard to ask for unconditional love and care, or receive it without having to ‘earn it’, or struggle to voice our needs and put our foot down - our bodies might find a way to do it for us.

So as hard and counter-intuitive as it may feel, it might be worth asking yourself; 

“What is the symptom stopping me from doing?”

“What are the symptoms making me do instead?” 

“What am I actually getting out of this?” 

And

“Who would I be without this condition?”

The person you might be able to be without it might feel really, really scary to your subconscious mind. So full of potential. Actually Doing The Things. Yikes.

Just a gentle enquiry. With lots of compassion - because it’s not like you’ve done anything wrong here. Absolutely nothing. Again, you’re just human. 

Now, I’m not saying ALL of your condition is something that’s made up by your subconscious mind - absolutely not. Please don’t think I’m trying to oversimplify things like this, or that I don’t see how debilitating, hard, frustrating, gut-wrenching and painful chronic conditions are. I truly do. That’s the whole point of why I do this work. 

But I think it’s healthy to invite some curiosity into it. There are many layers to a condition. There are many layers to people. And could it be possible that a small part of it is getting something out of it too?

IT’S SUBJECTIVE

There’s very likely an element of pain in your condition that’s at a fairly constant level - related to the physical aspect of it. And there’s very likely also a subjective level of pain that’s introduced above it. Almost like a sliding scale of protection. So if your subconscious mind was to perceive, or anticipate, that you’re really quite likely to hurt yourself soon (physically or emotionally) it will increase the pain and therefore make you do less of that. Make you make certain choices to keep yourself safe. 

Do you find that to be true for you? That when you’ve exerted yourself a bit too much, and taken on a little too much at work or at home, without getting anything back, the pain level increases? Or you easily get a cold on top of it? Yes, me too.

Whereas other times when you feel safer, it reduces the pain and therefore you have a much better quality of life. The sliding scale of protection has gone down a bit, so you don't need as much “alerting”.

Because that’s what pain is. It’s a way to alert us of real - or perceived - danger. Chronic pain is a message to say: “watch out, be weary, there’s something you need to pay attention to, don’t take risks, keep yourself safe.” But we don’t always listen.

THE TIGER INSIDE

When you really think about it, we feel pain in our minds, not in our body. That thought is actually quite trippy. Our body is merely a way to convey a message to the brain. We cannot feel pain without our brain, but we can feel pain without the body - having a body is not a prerequisite at all. Just look at phantom-limb pain - amputees sure can feel it, but it’s not “real”. 

Not that this is perhaps the most relevant example for you, but it just shows how big a part our mind actually plays in all of this.

There’s a sweet story from one of the Founding Fathers of hypnotherapy, the guardian angel of hypnotic metaphors, Milton Erickson, about when he worked with a lady who’s chronic pain had put her in a wheelchair. Milton Erickson had had polio twice and was in a wheelchair himself, with very little mobility, which is why this lady had decided to come to him for help.

Here’s what he said. 

“I told her that I could see she was in terrible pain. I could see it by her eyes. But if that door there were to open and a large hungry tiger were to come into this room, licking its chops and looking straight at you, how much pain do you think you'd feel?” And she said, “Oh, my goodness. I don’t feel any pain, just thinking about that.”

So that gave her a new way of thinking. That pain, as real as it felt to her, is also relative. If a tiger wants to eat you, your arthritis isn’t really so important to you anymore. Our mind has way more to do with it than we might give it credit for.

The lady went on to say;

“I'm going to take that tiger back to the hospital with me. I'm going to keep it under the bed and if they ask me if I want some drugs, I’ll just say, ‘I'm keeping the tiger.’”

(from the book “MY EXPERIENCES WITH MILTON ERICKSON” by Rob McNeilly)

Or, using a more current example perhaps, haven’t you decided to go to a party even though you had a massive headache - and ended up having so much fun that you forgot about the headache completely, only for it to return as soon as you left the venue? Yep. And it’s not just thanks to the cocktails… although I’m sure they play a part too.

What we perceive depends on how we direct our attention.

OUTSIDE IN VS. INSIDE OUT

One thing that people with chronic pain often do is that they arrange their life in a way that keeps them in a safe state, that mitigates the sensations of pain. It might be anything from living in certain climates or areas, removing all stress elements as much as possible, limiting interactions with certain people and generally walking on eggshells around the condition. With IBS you might feel the need to control exactly what seat you’ll have on the train so you won’t get caught short, or only book trips that are less than an hour away. 

And whereas boundaries, planning and putting your well-being at the forefront is great, this is a bit of an outside-in approach that can be quite tiring and stressful to maintain in and of itself. It’s changing your environment to fit you, with very little flexibility. Changing the world in order to change the way we feel. 

By finding some wiggle room in the psychological component of the condition, we start to create an inside-out strategy instead, where we gain much more flexibility around it and the eggshell-walking may not be as needed anymore.

OK GREAT, SO HOW DO WE FIX IT?

First of all, we can’t immunise ourselves from life - or desensitise ourselves from it. That’s just not possible, nor should we really aim to. And whereas we can hit the reset button on the psychological element of the pain - if there was something in your life that would happen that’s traumatic, sad or stressful - would the condition come back? Yes, probably. Because this is your body’s specific protection mechanism, its alert/alarm system, and it’s all very individual to us. Your condition is the way your body is showing you that something’s a bit off.

We wouldn’t want these protection mechanisms gone, they serve a really important purpose. Having a natural self-preservation mechanism in place is vital to our well-being and survival. We want you to have a natural stress response in place. We always need to allow for the pain to come back and serve its purpose of keeping you safe if it needs to. 

It's just that when the body’s initial warning has done its thing and told us to slow down, take care, focus inwards, maybe even feel some important emotions - then it can back off again. It’s showing us there’s something we need to urgently look at, and that’s a beautiful thing the body does for us. But we may not need it to play out as strongly as it has for us up until now. 

THE ACTUAL SESSION

The way I'll be working with you when it comes to chronic conditions is to get you into a trance state so that your subconscious mind is more open to suggestions. 

And then I’ll have a genuine discussion with it. We will see how much it’s willing to back off to. 

As I’ve mentioned, there is a positive intention in there somewhere and we need to be mindful of that. So I will always give your subconscious mind an open invitation that if there’s anything new you’d need to be alerted to, it can absolutely let you know.

I would never ever want to desensitise you or remove anything for good. That’s not sensible, that’s not safe and that’s not ethical. Your body needs to be able to feel pain and create inflammation. I am not here to influence your body to that degree. There’s that outside-in approach again, and I’m not a fan. But I'm here to help you heal, because there’s been too much pain. I’m here to help you work WITH your body. Listen to your body. And allow your body to work in a way that works for you. Inside out. 

Hypnosis can lessen the pain, can reduce the inflammation. When we tell the subconscious we've got the message, and thank it for it, it can back down. It actually does so quite gladly. I’ve seen it time and time again.

AND LASTLY

Let me just say:

This is not a way of shunning traditional/clinical medicine, and using an either/or approach - this is a way for them to work in tandem. The medicine that helps you, helps you. Take it. But it’s absolutely beneficial to work on the psychological component of the pain as well. 

By seeing the condition as not just a physical “fault” or “error” or “attack” of your body but ALSO a manifestation of something deeper, imagine what could be achieved? That is holistic to me - not to see one or the other as bad. Use and embrace them for their individual strengths. They work on different levels.