Teaching Nurses Hypnotic Pain Control Techniques

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Tracy on December 29, 2009 at 8:13am

Hi Melissa,

I don't have any suggestions but it's something I'd like to eventually teach Midwives in my local hospital so I'll be watching this thread.

Tracy
http://www.GentleBirthUSA.com

Permalink Reply by Joshua Johnston on December 29, 2009 at 8:15am

I'm with Tracy. I don't have any suggestions for you, but it's an area I'd like to get into as well, so will also be watching the thread.

Joshua
http://firegoldhypnosis.com

Permalink Reply by Samuel Lurie on December 29, 2009 at 8:22am

I've done some work with hospital staff--people really appreciate the book "The Worst is Over--What to Say When Every Moment Counts" by Judith Prager (http://www.judithprager.com/ind-2.htm), which incorporates and explains a lot about hypnosis and medical settings, esp emergency settings, but with the added understanding that basically everyone in the stress environment of illness is already in a trance state and wide open to suggestion.

Good luck. Sounds like an incredible opportunity.

Samuel

Permalink Reply by Anne Mullis on December 29, 2009 at 3:11pm

Melissa - don't really have anything to offer here, in the way of suggestions, but as an RN, what I will say is, YOU GO GIRL!!! Hypnosis is something I "discovered" relatively recently, in my career (as of this June, I will have been an RN for 34 yrs.), but I definately feel it should be addressed during a nurse's education. As a matter of fact, I am slowly working towards becoming certified as a Pain Management Nurse, but it requires a minimum of 3 yrs of continuing education, before I can even consider taking the exam. Please feel free to pass my comments along to the nurses in your class. Anne

Permalink Reply by Greg M on December 29, 2009 at 3:33pm

Depends a good deal on the nature and source of the pain, of course, but I've used these with success:

1. Glove Anesthesia,
2. (hypnotic manipulation of) Gate Control Theory, and
3. Reinterpretation/Alternative Visualization

(I coined that last one, maybe it's out there under other names as a form of combining anchoring and visualization).

Number 3 worked best with a shingles patient I once assisted; he had suffered for almost 2 years, the underlying condition had long since cleared up, and he said he felt more relief from our work than from pain meds or the other hypnotist he had tried before.

Good luck!

Permalink Reply by Melissa J. Roth on December 29, 2009 at 8:50pm

Thank you for reminding me. Judith is actually a friend of mine. Her book is excellent and I will certainly recommend it on the reading list I give them. Can't believe I had forgotten her book. Thanks again.

Samuel Lurie said:

I've done some work with hospital staff--people really appreciate the book "The Worst is Over--What to Say When Every Moment Counts" by Judith Prager (http://www.judithprager.com/ind-2.htm), which incorporates and explains a lot about hypnosis and medical settings, esp emergency settings, but with the added understanding that basically everyone in the stress environment of illness is already in a trance state and wide open to suggestion.

Good luck. Sounds like an incredible opportunity.

Samuel

Permalink Reply by Melissa J. Roth on December 29, 2009 at 8:52pm

Tell me more about what you are doing with #3. From what you've said I don't have a clue what you are doing but I would like to know more.

Greg M said:

Depends a good deal on the nature and source of the pain, of course, but I've used these with success:

1. Glove Anesthesia,
2. (hypnotic manipulation of) Gate Control Theory, and
3. Reinterpretation/Alternative Visualization

(I coined that last one, maybe it's out there under other names as a form of combining anchoring and visualization).

Number 3 worked best with a shingles patient I once assisted; he had suffered for almost 2 years, the underlying condition had long since cleared up, and he said he felt more relief from our work than from pain meds or the other hypnotist he had tried before.

Good luck!

Permalink Reply by Melissa J. Roth on December 29, 2009 at 8:54pm

Thank you, I will pass along your comments.

Anne Mullis said:

Melissa - don't really have anything to offer here, in the way of suggestions, but as an RN, what I will say is, YOU GO GIRL!!! Hypnosis is something I "discovered" relatively recently, in my career (as of this June, I will have been an RN for 34 yrs.), but I definately feel it should be addressed during a nurse's education. As a matter of fact, I am slowly working towards becoming certified as a Pain Management Nurse, but it requires a minimum of 3 yrs of continuing education, before I can even consider taking the exam. Please feel free to pass my comments along to the nurses in your class. Anne

Permalink Reply by Tracy on December 30, 2009 at 8:45am

Hi Greg,

Can you tell me more about what you do with the gate control theory?

When working with someone in an emergency situation and in pain is there any need to do a rapid induction if they are already in a highly suggestive state?

Tracy

Permalink Reply by Greg M on December 30, 2009 at 4:06pm

Gate Control Theory, as I am given to understand it, is based upon the notion that the brain can only consciously process so much information at a given time, and the focal points of the input stream can be expanded when pain is involved in order to diffuse or even ignore the pain entirely.

When applying Gate Control hypnotically or with waking trance, you have a variety of highly adaptable choices available, any of which work quite well "on the fly." Here's a sample:

You can say "Look into my eyes; I am going to help you make the pain go way down now. Think about the way I am holding your hand" (take their hand, if it won't add to the pain). You then apply suggestions liberally to shift focus away from the pain. Right off the bat, you've diffused the pain signal on multiple fronts, you have your voice, your eyes, your touch, all distracting them from the immediate sensations of pain. You first affirm that they are feeling less pain (or at least there's a difference now, and the difference is better), and then apply suggestions relating to the affected area itself. These suggestions will vary according to the type and location of the pain, but their function is to allow the area to receive a touch from their own hand, both now and for use in the future (anchored), that diffuses the general signal from a few highly distressed neurons to a larger group of unstressed neurons that includes the original group in the same region of the body (touching the surrounding area directly is best whenever possible). The overall effect is that the brain feels far less pain because the batch of neurons being consciously 'felt' is large enough to drop the overall pain level as "sensed" by the person. (Formal induction is completely unnecessary in this case; just jump in and assume control of their pain trance.)

To help make the definition of Gate Control itself clearer, here's another example:
The dentist uses non-hypnotic Gate Control when they place a small hand vibrator against your cheek when they have to make the anaesthetic injection. (If your dentist does NOT do this, ask them why not.) You feel the vibrator as a non-painful stimulus that enlarges the size of the batch of neurons you're consciously processing from that region, and when they give you the needle, you either feel nothing at all or else it's so minimal, your mind scarcely notices (unless they hit bone, and even then, it's not nearly so bad as without.)

Bottom line, Gate Control means closing the gate on pain because the signal being processed is watered down with extra, non-distressed, signal being incorporated from the same region. Anchor it hypnotically, and any time it flares up, they can lay on their own hands, or employ the right visualization to produce the same effect.

Tracy Donegan said:

Hi Greg,

Can you tell me more about what you do with the gate control theory?

When working with someone in an emergency situation and in pain is there any need to do a rapid induction if they are already in a highly suggestive state?

Tracy

Permalink Reply by Greg M on December 30, 2009 at 4:41pm

Melissa J. Roth said:

Tell me more about what you are doing with #3. From what you've said I don't have a clue what you are doing but I would like to know more.

Hi Melissa!

Reinterpretation/Alternative VIsualization involves sensing the input, but just not feeling it as pain, per se. With this, you can turn a sharp pain to a general sensation of warmth, a sensation of burning to a feeling of cool stone (or visualizing a cool stone being applied to it as an alternative to sensing it as a cool stone itself). You get the idea. We don't deny the pain signal, we simply experience it as something else, and we acknowledge that the signal is there in the first place to keep us alerted to the need for healing to take place, so I always incorporate a suggestion to invite healing energy to flood the area while allowing the client to feel it as something less stressful, which serves to assist when anchoring the reinterpretation in the first place.

I guess another way I can describe it is to tell the story of the shingles patient. I listened to him in the interview for a good while, assessing his ego strengths, his primary processing modality, etc. (VAKOG: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory) so I would know how and where to focus my suggestions. Pain is kinesthetic, so I had to tie in his primary processing modality to the kinesthetic channel to increase our effectiveness. I then turned to his ego strengths for the inspiration for the alternative visualization itself.

In his case, he was very much in the mood for declaring war on the condition. So when he felt the pain, I had him interpret it as a call to arms to send soldiers of healing to the affected areas. This would involve a warm sensation to let him know his body was fighting it successfully, and the warmth was the delivery of goods and supplies for the healing to take place. His soldiers' duty was to block the way his nerve cells were reporting to the brain, and to retrain them to behave and report properly. It was then that I realized that his body had already fought off the initial condition that triggered the shingles, and that his present condition was really a carryover from that successfully fought war. It dawned on me in the middle of the session that what we really had here was akin to a metaphor of "winning the peace." He took to it quite well, and reported feeling much, much better. We had another session 2 weeks later to reinforce and capitalize on his reported results/insights/reflections/interpretations, and that was that.

Let me know if I need to clarify further, ok? Is this out there under another name?

Cheers!

Permalink Reply by Melissa J. Roth on December 30, 2009 at 6:43pm

Thanks for the clarification. Yeah, this is out there already in various nuances but I don't know if it has a name or not. I've never been big on remembering names of techniques. I do similar things but I really like your metaphor and I really like the way you utilized his ego strengths. Getting the UM to reframe the pain sensations is key to achieving any relief. Pain, after all, is just a collection of sensations, just like hunger, thirst, a carese, etc. The UM has interpreted those sensations in a way that is causing distress. Reintrepreting them differently results in relief.

Greg M said:

Melissa J. Roth said:

Tell me more about what you are doing with #3. From what you've said I don't have a clue what you are doing but I would like to know more.

Hi Melissa!

Reinterpretation/Alternative VIsualization involves sensing the input, but just not feeling it as pain, per se. With this, you can turn a sharp pain to a general sensation of warmth, a sensation of burning to a feeling of cool stone (or visualizing a cool stone being applied to it as an alternative to sensing it as a cool stone itself). You get the idea. We don't deny the pain signal, we simply experience it as something else, and we acknowledge that the signal is there in the first place to keep us alerted to the need for healing to take place, so I always incorporate a suggestion to invite healing energy to flood the area while allowing the client to feel it as something less stressful, which serves to assist when anchoring the reinterpretation in the first place.

I guess another way I can describe it is to tell the story of the shingles patient. I listened to him in the interview for a good while, assessing his ego strengths, his primary processing modality, etc. (VAKOG: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory) so I would know how and where to focus my suggestions. Pain is kinesthetic, so I had to tie in his primary processing modality to the kinesthetic channel to increase our effectiveness. I then turned to his ego strengths for the inspiration for the alternative visualization itself.

In his case, he was very much in the mood for declaring war on the condition. So when he felt the pain, I had him interpret it as a call to arms to send soldiers of healing to the affected areas. This would involve a warm sensation to let him know his body was fighting it successfully, and the warmth was the delivery of goods and supplies for the healing to take place. His soldiers' duty was to block the way his nerve cells were reporting to the brain, and to retrain them to behave and report properly. It was then that I realized that his body had already fought off the initial condition that triggered the shingles, and that his present condition was really a carryover from that successfully fought war. It dawned on me in the middle of the session that what we really had here was akin to a metaphor of "winning the peace." He took to it quite well, and reported feeling much, much better. We had another session 2 weeks later to reinforce and capitalize on his reported results/insights/reflections/interpretations, and that was that.

Let me know if I need to clarify further, ok? Is this out there under another name?

Cheers!

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