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You are not your pain. You can make that statement a reality by utilizing the powerful tool of hypnotherapy. Hypnotherapy can harness your ability to retrain neural pathways and develop new patterns in the brain and body, to help you reclaim control and ‘put pain in the back seat’.

Clinical trial evidence over the past 10 years, confirms that hypnotherapy treatments are effective for reducing daily pain intensity levels in people with chronic pain.

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When pain persists, your role in managing it becomes really important. What you think, feel and do on a day-to-day basis, has an affect on your pain. In order to change your pain state it is necessary to change your thoughts and emotional responses.

Hypnotherapy is a powerful tool that helps you take back control over your pain and your life by enabling you to change your thoughts and emotional responses to both your pain and to external factors. This will assist you to retrain neural pathways and calm down the over sensitized state of your central nervous system, helping you lay down new templates of response in the areas of the brain responsible for determining the pain experience.

With hypnotherapy you will be able to promote and experience the healthy effects of positive energy in your life, empowering you to get back in the driver’s seat of your life once again.

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What exactly is chronic pain?

Pain is considered chronic when it occurs for most days of the week and persists for longer than three months. It includes persistent pain that no longer has an identifiable cause where the original injury has healed, as well as pain that has an identifiable cause such as arthritis, fibromyalgia, TMJ dysfunction, cancer, diabetic neuropathy, shingles, multiple sclerosis etc. It also includes persistent pain that has no identifiable cause at all.

It is now estimated that 1 in 5 Americans suffer from chronic pain. The cause and treatment of persistent pain is complex, added to which is the enormous impact chronic pain has on a person’s ability to function effectively in the wider areas of family, social and work life.

Chronic pain and illness is debilitating, isolating and extremely stressful. There is no single approach or ‘magic bullet’ solution to treating and living with chronic pain. Rather, it’s a matter of being in charge of your health management and decisions, choosing the right combination of treatment strategies and health care professionals to help you improve your health outcomes and the quality of your life.

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How do we know that hypnosis can

actually make a difference for pain?

There is physical evidence that hypnosis works to alleviate chronic pain, and medical imaging studies have shown that hypnotic therapy influences all of the cortical and neuro-physiological processes that underline pain. Current scientific research shows that hypnotherapy treatment causes both pain perception thresholds, and pain tolerance levels, to be strikingly increased.

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Why use hypnotherapy to treat chronic pain?

Hypnotherapy is safe, drug free and also works to support other medical and alternative therapeutic approaches you may be using in your multidisciplinary approach to healing. My own experience of utilizing a range of health options to holistically manage my own chronic pain is a valuable resource that I bring to the sessions. I can help you navigate those choices to find what’s right for you, so that you gain real improvements in well being and quality of life.

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Science has discovered that thoughts, emotions and physical movement create chemical reactions in our body, which either calm down our central nervous system or turn the alarm volume up. By changing your response to pain and the way you think about pain, you can in fact change your pain state.

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How we focus our attention can have a significant impact on our experience of pain. Research has shown that being able to focus attention on a task, activity, or experience – or to distract yourself – reduces pain and distress for people in chronic pain. The more we can divert our attention from pain, the less signal we create in our pain pathways. The less signal in our pain pathways, the less pain receptors and sprouts our nerves create, and the less sensitive our nerves become. When engaged in or focus on enjoyable experiences, we increase our production of good chemicals (neurotransmitters), such as endorphins. And, as you know, these ‘good’ chemicals help to calm pain pathways even more. Because hypnotherapy is a state of focused concentration it can create and absorb you in a desirable and comfortable state, and your brain can start to pay attention to that instead of pain.

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Pain and the brain

Pain is an output our brain makes to defend us. It is what alerts us to danger and it acts as a protective mechanism to make us stop and do what we need to, to take care of ourselves. Our brain decides if something is painful or not. This is hard to comprehend because we feel pain in parts of our body, therefore we believe the pain comes from those parts, but in fact pain is determined by the brain.

However, when pain is ongoing the body’s danger response to sensory input becomes over sensitized and the alarm system stays on red alert causing a process called ‘Central Nervous System Sensitization’; then fears, thoughts and beliefs become involved and start contributing to the chronic pain state. Chronic pain sufferers end up feeling as though pain has engulfed their life, feeling helpless and hopeless. The good news however, is that hypnotherapy can change that. It can let a chink of light into the prison that chronic pain holds you in, thereby letting in the possibility for change and new perspectives.

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A Multidisciplinary approach

A multidisciplinary approach is required in order to address the different facets of physical and emotional health involved in the treatment of chronic pain. Once you decide to get involved in your own healing, as captain of your team, you will need to find the team that works best for you.

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The evidence indicates that hypnotherapy enhances the outcomes of other treatment therapies that people undergo, for example psychology, physiotherapy, and drug treatments. There is also a broad range of allied health modalities that form part of the holistic treatment of chronic pain, all of which work well in conjunction with medical treatment.

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Clinical trial findings and MRI studies support the fact that hypnotherapy is a valuable tool that will support your ability to learn new ways of dealing with the impact of pain in your life. You will decide how to incorporate the right treatment tools for your best health outcome, some of which may include:

• Nutritional and naturopathic support to restore important biochemical balance for the healthy function of your body and its systems;

• Physical movement and exercise that is designed specifically to retrain your body and gradually increase your levels of activity and endurance;

• Bodywork therapy from a range of modalities such as Physiotherapy, Osteopathy, Chiropractic, Cranio-Sacral Therapy, Visceral Manipulation, Acupuncture, Bowen Therapy, Trigger Point Massage; and

• Meditation practice and relaxation techniques, to reduce stress hormones, calm the mind and the body, which in turn calms the pain, to gain clarity of thought and awareness, and to connect with your deep inner wisdom.

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What the research tells us 

• The brain is flexible! The brain’s neuroplasticity means that it is not a fixed and final thing; it can change the way it works and the way your body responds to its messages. “Neruo is for ‘neuron’, the nerve cells in our brains and nervous systems. Plastic is for ‘changeable…modifiable’” (The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge MD, 2007).

• The neural pathways that take messages to and from the brain can be altered, and new paths can be created. The latest brain research shows that our brain has the ability to change its function and structure through thought and activity, but only when it is in a state of openness, creativity and freedom from stress. Because hypnotherapy helps you reduce the significant levels of stress that occur in your body as a result of experiencing ongoing pain, it creates the necessary open and creative space for your brain to begin changing its responses. (Neuro Orthopaedic Institute Australasia, August 2011)

• Thoughts are one of the most powerful influences on your mood and emotions. The way you think about yourself, your situation, and your future is extremely important in chronic pain, for a number of reasons. The more you can reduce your own distress with your thinking, the more you reduce your adrenaline levels, which in turn is good for desensitizing your nervous system. The more you can generate helpful thinking patterns that improve your mood, the more helpful neurotransmitters you are likely to produce, such as opiates. These are your body’s natural ‘feel good’ chemicals. When your body produces ‘feel good’ chemicals, they help to reduce the level of signal in your pain pathways. 

• Research has shown that being able to focus attention on a task, activity, or experience – or to distract yourself – reduces pain and distress for people in chronic pain. An important point about attention is that we all only have a limited amount of attention to allocate to various aspects of our experience. If much of our attention is taken up by a particular thing, then there is less attention to be allocated to anything else. 

• There is growing recognition that hypnosis is helpful for altering the thoughts and beliefs that contribute to the pain state.

• The findings suggest that self hypnosis training for chronic pain has two primary effects (a) it creates a long lasting (possibly permanent) change in the way the person and brain processes pain information, so that they experience a decrease in ongoing daily average pain, and (b) provides skills that they can use on a regular basis to experience periods of comfort.

• New sciences such as New Biology, Quantum Physics, and Molecular Science, all recognize that human beings are a dynamic organic process. These scientific perspectives contend that it is not the individual parts, but the whole that provides for in-depth understanding. The human organism is not perceived as isolated or compartmentalized, but rather is studied as a living system. No longer an “it “ – an object – the human being is recognized as a dynamic ever-changing process, embedded in a field of relationships and information. (from Changing the Language of Body: from Object to Process article by Liz Koch). This relational field moves between your thoughts, emotions, and body and is intrinsically linked. Hypnotherapy works with the whole person in a powerful way that harnesses their mind, body spirit self to achieve healing and transformation.

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You can utilize hypnotherapy to break out of the prison of chronic pain. Doing so will empower you and free you to find a way of engaging again with life, in a way that is fulfilling and meaningful to you.

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Jake Rubin, M.A. is specialized and certified in Pain Management by the American Hypnosis Association.  Click below to schedule you complimentary phone consultation and take the first step in reduced pain, more comfort and a better quality of daily life.