HPC - Transcript-Manual - DVDs - Part 1

Hypnotic Pain

Control

DVD Transcript Manual – Part 1

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Table of Contents

DVD #1 - Hypnotic Realities & Hypnotic Pain Control Demonstration ... 4

Introduction ... 4

Hypnotic Realities ... 6

Hypnotic Pain Control ... 12

Demo 1: Russ ... 15

Discussion ... 26

Pain Perspectives ... 30

Natural Pain Control ... 35

DVD #2 – The 7 Step Hypnotic Pain Control Method – Part 1 ... 48

Meet The Clients ... 48

Step 1: Medical Referral... 56

DVD #3 – The 7 Step Hypnotic Pain Control Method – Part 2 ... 70

This Is Covert Hypnosis ... 70

The Art Of Healing ... 79

Step 3: The Pain Scale ... 81

Step 4: Reframe Permanence ... 84

Step 5: Reframe Sensation ... 92

Step 6: Reframe Message ... 96

DVD #4 – The Four Principles Of Pain Control, More Demonstrations & 3 Different Techniques You Can Use ... 107

Demo 2: Liz ... 107

The Four Principles ... 120

Demo 3: Ralph ... 123

Q&A Session ... 131

The Fourth Principle ... 139

Technique 1: Classic Dissociation ... 140

Technique 2: Cognitive Dissociation ... 143

Technique 3: Mindful Body-Scan ... 146

DVD #5 – Covert Communication, 13 More Pain Control Techniques You Can Use & Final Demo ... 147

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DVD #1 - Hypnotic Realities & Hypnotic Pain

Control Demonstration

Introduction

Igor: We may as well start this formally, which is to welcome everyone. This is the pain control session, pain management, pain alleviation, discomfort management or whatever you want to call it.

It’s going to be a very relaxed day. I know you have worked hard, so it’s going to be a very relaxed day. Of course how many hypnotists do we have in the room right now? It makes, right?

It would be very strange to turn up to a hypnotic pain control seminar if you don’t even know hypnosis because you need some fundamental skills to work with that, right? What I will endeavor to show you today is that given the skills that you have, whether you learned them from me or someone else, you have the core skills necessary to help someone who’s suffering from pain reduce that suffering.

I use that word reduce on purpose because pain control is an interesting field where the results differ according to the individual or their needs. I think most people you can mute their pain to a certain degree. In other words, when they’ve gone to the place where they really can’t cope anymore, you can diminish it all the way down to the place where they can get back on the horse and live life without any incapacity. Does that make sense?

With some people you can reduce this all the way down to zero or like a token experience. And really, it depends on the individual, the time and

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So today I want to explore what pain is, how it works, how to break it down and how to use your hypnotic skill to help alleviate the unpleasant part of pain, the part of pain that limits people and makes their life harder. Does that make sense to you?

At the same time, I recognize that you have had a busy week. So I’d like to take it at a much gentler pace. I will be introducing to you a lot of ideas. Once again all the notes that we will be putting up here, you will get a copy of. We’ll email that to you, so you can feel good about that part of it.

You will have some experiences of it, but given the nature of today it’s really a one-day seminar, I can’t give you an experience of all the different things around pain, in fact, I could probably never give you an experience of all the pain control methods. What I can give you is an insight into how every single pain control method works and demonstrate to you with some key ideas, experiences and so on. Is that cool?

Before we begin, we have a bunch of you who came up and gave me medical referral forms. The ones that I can actually use and I’ll explain later on once we get into the seminar what I’m looking for in a medical referral form to be able to work with someone. We’ve reserved some seats up here and I’m going to ask you to come forward.

First, we’ve got Roland Berg. Do you want to come up and sit in the front please? Liz Zed, where are you Liz? Just come and sit in the front. Russ Hendrick, do you want to come up? And Gary Collier, do you want to come up and sit in the front here?

One of the most fundamental principles, something we’ll come into more is you can’t work with someone as a hypnotist who’s in pain unless you have a medical referral. The main reason for that is you don’t know what’s wrong with them. You can’t diagnose a condition and if you were to mask

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You have to take care of your clients and the best way to take care of them or the first thing you do to take care of them is make sure that they’ve been through adequate medical treatment first, so whatever is left is something that medicine is incapable of dealing with. Does that make sense to you?

Something you should know is apart from Gary, who I had a brief chat with, I really don’t know what experiences you’re having, so I can’t make an promise in terms of who I’ll use or how I’ll use you. I will talk to every one of you to get a sense of where you are and then my priorities in terms of what we’re doing here, I’ve got to let people see how the whole thing works, so I’ll probably choose the best person.

If there’s time to do another person, then maybe we’ll work on another person as well, but please accept my apologies if you’re not the one for today. It’s nothing personal. It’s more to do with making it easy for people to understand how pain control works. Is that cool with you? In the meantime, just chill out there and be a regular hypnotist like everyone else, so that you can see it from both sides of the coin.

Hypnotic Realities

Igor: The best place to start is with a realization. It will sound somewhat metaphysical when I begin but it’s not. Everything you think is real does not exist, at least not in the way you think it does. Right now you’re sitting here, you’re looking at me, you’re hearing my words, you know you’re in this room on this ship, you feel the chair and all these different things.

You have a million associations to your own lifetime to know what chairs are for, what shoes are for and all these different things. But right now

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Has anyone here ever had a dream which felt so real that you didn’t realize you were dreaming until you woke up afterwards and thought my God, I was dreaming? Anyone had that sort of thing? Most people do. Some are fortunate enough to do it on a regular basis because when you do it and you realize you’re dreaming, hell you can do whatever you want. There are no consequences. It’s called lucid dreaming.

For those of you who have had a lucid dream like this, would it not be fair to say that when you have one of these dreams, it actually seems more real than your everyday life? It’s like you look at the floor and the floor is filled with significance, even though you can’t quite make sense of it would that be fair to say?

Well, if you have those kinds of dreams where you can touch things, smell them, taste them see them and hear them more clearly, more sharply with less interference than when you’re normally awake, then it’s really easy to see that everything’s that happening right now is the same kind of hallucination as we would call it. Or, as more traditional people Shamanism would say, you’re just having a different dream right now.

This is a dream just as the other is. Those dreams are all fed by things. For example, you’re falling asleep at night and the phone rings. What happens inside your dream? Does someone call you? Is there a big telephone there? You lie in bed at night and you’re thirsty. What happens inside your dreams? Don’t you go searching for water?

So there is interplay between your physical mechanism and your psychological experience, but that goes both ways. You’ve all had days where the worlds batted you around a bit, haven’t you? Would that be fair to say, you come home licking your wounds? Typically, what’s the one

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It’s a healing practice it really is. But what happens whilst you’re asleep? Have you ever noticed that there comes a point where you let go of everything, all the things that happened to you in that day and you’re a cocooned safely in whatever sleep does for you, whatever it brings to you. The warm glow surrounds you, you forget about the troubles of the day, you forget about the aches and the pains.

Your body could be sore from physical activity or something else, but you lose track of that. Would that not be fair to say? So it’s a two-way feedback loop. The things that happen in the outside environment – there’s no way you have any concept of what’s going on right now, except for how it impacts upon your body – your eyes, your ears, your skin, your muscle, your nostrils, your tongue.

It impacts upon these things and sends a little electrical signal. It turns into a little chemical that jumps across the synaptic gap and another electrical signal comes. It’s a relay race up your spine into your brain. It’s such a complex thing it’s a surprise you get to feel anything at all, it works. But the system can get confused sometimes. It can work too efficiently or go the other way.

You wake up in the middle of the night, you’ve heard something, you get startled, the noise does not belong, your heart starts racing, doesn’t it? You get a physical reaction. You’re lying in bed and you’re straining your ears as though it were another person you could send downstairs to check things out for you. You’d rather have your hearing do that than take the risk physically, don’t you?

You’re straining and now every little creak in the house is amplified. You’ve increased your normal senses because something caught your attention this way. Eventually you have to get up. You walk downstairs cautiously. No one’s there to see you, so you may as well just creep

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Your whole behavior has changed because of something you think is going on, whether or not it is, and here’s the best part. You walk into that room and you see someone standing in the corner and you are terrified, until the light comes on and you realize that’s just the coat you left there.

The whole scenario, the fear, the stress, the creeping around all happened in your mind first, and you perceived exactly what you expected to perceive. We’ve all done this, haven’t we?

To understand how to help someone diminish pain, reduce it, eradicate it, you must fundamentally understand that to even be aware that pain exists is such a complex procedure that there are many things that can happen in between.

The body will tell the mind that something’s wrong. That’s what the pain does. It’s a signal. The mind then tells the body what to do with it. A friend of mine loves wolves. He’s a conservationist. Maybe 10, 15 or 20 years back as a young man, he’s out on the mountains of Slovinia or Slovakia, I forget which. There are still wild wolves living there out in the mountains.

He’s out with a friend of his. They have their backpacks and their gear. They’re wading through knee-high snow. His back goes out. He can barely stand. They have a simple choice – lie there and die or walk out. It wasn’t easy but at some point the experience he had switched and he was so busy walking through the snow that he forgot to experience any pain.

Was his pain still there? Maybe; probably, who knows? The point is every experience is malleable and all it requires is an extreme enough situation for experience to shift, to open the doors to things that are not normally allowed. Our brains need to keep reality stable so that we can make sense of things, so we can predict things, so we can move through the world in

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We also have a mechanism that destabilizes our mind because we need it. A soldier is in combat. He loses an arm. Is that the time to go ouch, sit down and cry about it, give up? You’ve the stories, haven’t you?

Many of them don’t even realize that they’ve lost their limb until long after it’s over. Some actually have to ask the question do I still have a foot, an arm because they’re sensory capacity does not know. Something kicks in that changes the way they perceive even their own body. It’s a survival mechanism and it’s a wonderful thing to have that.

The reverse is also true. The mind can create sensations. You’ve heard of phantom limbs. A man loses his arm in an accident. For years afterwards not only does he feel his arm is still there, but there’s pain in the arm that is nonexistent. His mind rationally knows there is nothing there, and yet his body feels it. How can you relieve a pain that’s in a limb that isn’t there?

You have to remind the mind what is really going on and what it needs to be doing. Of course in hypnosis we can do this, but we don’t even need hypnosis to achieve that outcome. There’s a great example of this. There’s something called a mirror box.

A man puts the stump of his arm or his hand is missing, his hand is in pain. He puts it in the box with a mirror inside. He feels the arm that isn’t there but he can’t see it directly. He puts his other hand right next to the mirror, he moves his left hand and it looks like his right hand moves too. That’s how light works, isn’t it?

He does this and after a few minutes, he feels the hand that doesn’t exist begin to move. Here’s the interesting part. After some time doing these things, the brain catches up. The pain in the hand that does not exist disappears and very often most usually at the same point that the brain

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People think and they’re so convinced that their experience is real, it has to be this way because that’s my day-to-day reality, isn’t it? What they forget is that experience was stabilized by the mind in order to keep them sane, to help them function in the world. If the mind happens to stabilize the wrong thing, the experience becomes less pleasant.

When it catches up to a better way of functioning, it all transforms. This is kind of making sense to you, isn’t it?

It’s really important to understand this as a hypnotist if you’re going to help people who are in pain because when you understand this, you’ll realize that fundamentally there’s an illusion going on here, an illusion that they are holding onto.

They don’t know they’re doing it because our brains are designed to hold onto illusions to help us navigate through the world. It’s designed to make this feel real to help us navigate through the world.

Have you ever met someone who’s had, shall we say, slight psychotic break or maybe they’ve taken drugs and they really don’t function in the world the way a normal person does? Have you met someone like that or seen someone like this? I’m not going to ask you if you were that person at any point.

What do these things do? What they’re doing is they are dissolving the barriers inside the mind that stabilize your reality, so that things that could not be real become real. Walls can talk to you because the mind is so fluid it can make these things happen. There’s nothing wrong with it. Actually it can be very therapeutic.

There’s a recent study now in one of the medical schools with LSD, doing nothing but putting nice music, goggles and giving them a nice mushroom.

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Mainstream psychology thought that personality profiles are genetically programmed, and yet they shifted completely from one end to the other on the level of openness. That was with no instructions, with no frame of reference on what to make of the experience. It happened automatically. Why? Because the machine inside the mind that keeps things stable switched off for a while.

Things were allowed to run loose, and when they came back they realized that this is not the only way to be. In hypnosis we create realities and a reality is this only over here. It can seem just as real or it can seem partially real. It does not matter because when the mind has a choice, a genuine choice and makes a transition from one to the other, then all of the experience shifts no matter what the body is saying, and then the body responds.

Hypnotic Pain Control

Igor: You all know that it’s possible to relieve pain and maybe even eradicate pain with hypnosis, do you not, right? The literature pretty much supports it. My experience supports it. How many people here work with pain control? Your experience supports it, doesn’t it?

So where does it happen? If reality is such a complex process with so many things feeding into it, pain is only one aspect of that reality, so it’s just as complex. Pain control happens at several levels at once. On the one level, your biochemistry changes when you pain control.

In Italy they did a little study. They induced hypnosis, gave someone a painful stimulus under the pain alleviation suggestions – no sensation as you’d expect, right? In a control group they had people getting the same

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So far so good, pretty standard, right? Then they did something interesting because they wanted to where is the pain stopped? They gave everyone a dose of Naloxone. Naloxone is a drug that inhibits the function of morphine. If you get a shot of Naloxone and a shot of morphine, morphine can no longer do its job because it resets the blocked for it. Does that kind of make sense?

If you get a shot of Naloxone, some get saline solution instead of Naloxone so no one really knows what they’re getting. Hypnosis induced again in some and not in others just to keep a control. The pain stimulus comes again. This time they feel pain despite the hypnosis. It appears that your body is creating morphine because you expect it to.

In another study they watched what happens in the brain during pain alleviation suggestions. They noticed an increasing amount of theta waves in the lower brain centers. You know how we have the reptilian brain – the most basic fight or flight; the limbic system – the more mammalian sort of brain, the emotions and the neo cortex – our thinking and planning skills?

The lower centers have increased theta wave functions. They’re inhibiting, blocking signals. So not only is your body manufacturing chemicals to block the pain, but your mind is closing the door on the experience as well. So, whether it is your body that’s shutting the signal down or your mind it’s a moot point, because there are many different steps at which your mind and body system as a system can totally transform the experience for people. This is where we come in. This gives us a tremendous amount of choice, and we need choice because there is no cookie cutter approach to this stuff.

You can’t say use this magic technique, it works every time. It can work on a lot of people, it can even work on most people, but what I’m going to

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We do have a room full hypnotists do we not? It’s very difficult to teach a hypnotic pain control program to people who can’t do hypnosis. What I’d like you to do is spend about five minutes standing up in a moment’s time. I want you to just do a real quick induction with everyone in this room and place their mind into a reality in which learning becomes easy, in which they’re in a reality in which the skills they already have will fluidly adapt to achieve something they did not realize they could.

Being a hypnotist, you get to invent the right process for that. Being in this room, you only get five minutes to achieve that with at least 10 people. That means you better work quickly. Is this familiar in any ways? Everyone please stand up and spend the next five minutes or so meeting everyone in the room in a hypnotic way. Off you go.

Did you enjoy that? It’s not to be in a room full of hypnotists, isn’t it? This is why we should have more annual conventions and stuff, if for nothing else it’s a personal holiday.

[Applause]

The next thing I want to do is we’ll talk about the procedures and processes for pain management, pain alleviation and pain control a little later on today. The first you want to get used to though is – well, there’s no point in doing pain control unless you have a person to assist through the process, is that correct?

The first thing I want you to get used to is the idea that you have to talk to your clients and find out a little bit about what’s going on. So would it be okay with you if we had a little chat about whatever’s going on with you right now? Is that fine?

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Demo 1: Russ

Igor: Let’s start over here with Russ. Do you want to grab this and just stand up if possible; otherwise, if you’re going to sit we can catch you that way too. It’s already on. How are you doing, Russ?

Russ: I’m doing great.

Igor: Great. Can you all hear him okay? You may want to stand sideways a little bit so then they can see you a little bit too and I can see you a little bit. It just makes it more personal, plus you may spot things in terms of how Russ’s stance is, but you can direct your attention here in terms of what we’re doing. Okay? It just means that it’s a little bit more engaging. There you go.

Tell me, Russ, what’s going on? I mean I have no idea apart from carrying out a brief two-minute conversation with you before we began. I have no idea what’s going on with any of these people, so I need to have normal conversation like I’d have with any other client to find out what’s happening.

What’s happening?

Russ: Okay, thanks Igor. For six months or so I have had trouble getting my leg out of the car and back into the car, and I have a doctor who’s actually my friend and he finally said it’s got to be a slow healing or an injury just like the Cowboy’s defensive back has and it will not heal.

I have a lower back injury that comes and it’s chronic. It’s not bothering me right today but I was almost crushed in an accident when I was a laborer actually. Also in my upper back, back to 1958 I remember when that started. It comes and it goes.

Then as we started, I hadn’t thought about this but I approached you with a question. When I’m in the courtroom where I am quite a bit, and even

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Igor: Sure.

Russ: That’s my aches and pains.

Igor: Let’s take the idea of the bladder to one side because that’s really not germane to what we’re doing here. We can absolutely work with it but that’s not the main purpose we’re here.

In terms of your experience right now, it’s the three main areas. You have sort of the leg/groin injury. You have something going on in the lower back and something up on your shoulder. Is that correct?

Russ: Right.

Igor: Very good. How do you experience this now? Are any of them uncomfortable right now? Are they okay? How are they going?

Russ: The groin thing manifests itself on the inside of my thighs, and last night even when I sleep, when I try to roll over I can even get a hip pain to where I think someone else would say gee, I might even think about a hip replacement. It’s not a whole lot of fun.

Igor: Can you experience it right now?

Russ: I can feel it here, but if I get up on the stage I’ll feel it.

Igor: What about in the lower back?

Russ: No, no problem there at the moment?

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Igor: Excellent! Very good. What is it you’d like to see, as a result, of all the work we’re doing today?

Russ: If I can get rid of the pain in my groin area and the hips that would be wonderful.

Igor: Excellent. Have a seat again for now. This is a kind of an introduction. One thing just as a general comment, just as aside I would definitely make to the client here is you realize that – actually you may as well keep this because I’m going to have a little quick chat with you as well.

You realize that the sensation you’re having in your leg, your groin area, it has a function, right? You’ve possibly injured yourself in some way and your body’s telling you that there are certain ways of moving that you don’t want to be doing, and we’re gauging it because it’s going to prevent your body from healing properly, right?

Russ: Right.

Igor: So it has a purpose. Therefore, removing it entirely or removing it without leaving something in its place to remind you of keeping yourself healthy, that’s not necessarily a good thing either, right?

Russ: So they say but I don’t really care about what the true medical problem is. I’ll live with that.

Igor: Perfect. Now do you see – a lot of clients will have that because when they’re in pain, they just want it gone, right? That’s exactly why the pain is still there. That’s exactly why the pain is still there, and I understand why you’re saying that. I really do. I really understand why you’re saying that because it’s really not a nice thing to be walking around with that kind of sensation, right?

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Igor: It makes the smallest thing difficult, coming up stairs, sitting down for breakfast, going to be at night, getting up in the morning, going to the toilet in between, right? Every single action you have to be more cautious, more careful and slower. I can understand that it’s really an unpleasant way to be living your day-to-day life, right?

Russ: Right.

Igor: Which is why you’d rather have it just disappear.

Russ: That’s true.

Igor: So, aside from all the reasons you have for it to disappear, what are all the reasons for it not to?

Russ: The reasons for it not to? Oh, I’ve considered well, maybe I’ve got bone cancer or some such thing. I don’t think so, but if I do okay, so be it.

Igor: Your doctor’s already checked those things out, right? You’ve got a medical referral right here.

Russ: have a medical referral, right.

Igor: So would it be fair to say your doctor’s checked all the possibilities out?

Russ: He doesn’t think there’s any chance in the world that that’s it.

Igor: Right, so if I understood you correctly, the diagnosis from the doctor – not from me – was that the most likely thing is you strained a muscle and it requires time to heal. It’s just taking extra time to heal.

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heal will be slowed down or retarded or even prevent. Would that be fair?

Russ: That’s fair.

Igor: Here’s something for you to think about. Just consider this now. You can have anything you want in life provided you pay attention, and if you don’t pay attention you’ll pay with pain. It is a simple signal to remind you – to remind you to pay attention and to the extent that you haven’t, I am not surprised that you have.

Now I have a feeling that something’s already beginning to shift inside as you make that realization because to the extent that you pay attention and make a genuine commitment to yourself to pay attention, to take it a little easier for a while, will there be any reason left for that pain?

Russ: Less.

Igor: Much less, right?

Russ: Much less.

Igor: You can teach your body to move in slightly different ways that will accommodate the healing of that particular part of the body, right?

Russ: Right.

Igor: In doing so, aren’t you paying attention?

Russ: I’m paying attention in that way.

Igor: How is the groin doing now?

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Russ: It was sensitive.

Igor: It was sensitive. So you’re telling me it’s already changing?

Russ: I would say it might be changing. I think it’s changed.

Igor: So it’s already changing, but you don’t quite know how it’s changed, do you?

Russ: No.

Igor: There it is, right?

Russ: Right.

Igor: The only thing you do know is that you did one thing differently in the last five minutes that you weren’t doing before, right?

Russ: That’s right.

Igor: And what’s that?

Russ: Paying attention.

Igor: That’s right.

Russ: Focusing upon it so I can alleviate it.

Igor: That’s right. You’re learning to focus on yourself in a new way, in a very important way. In the past you were focusing on the sensation because you wanted to get rid of it, and your body increased the sensation because there’s no way it wanted you to ignore it, but now that you’re paying

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Russ: No need.

Igor: Now I realize from time to time the sensation may return. It may return as just a sensation or as a mild experience of pain, and you know why that would happen, don’t you?

Russ: Yes.

Igor: To get your attention, to remind you that what you’ve just engaged in is something you should probably not be doing for a little while, right?

Russ: Right.

Igor: So you’re maybe lying in bed at night, you feel like turning one way and suddenly you have a sensation. Nothing unpleasant but something that reminds you that you best keep lying the way you are, or maybe turning a different way and you know what I mean by that, don’t you?

Russ: I do.

Igor: As you’re thinking of all these things, check back in with your groin and notice how it feels different. How is that?

Russ: Feeling comfortable.

Igor: It’s feeling comfortable already. How do you do that?

Russ: By telling it I’m paying attention.

Igor: That’s right. That’s right and it feels good to pay attention, doesn’t it?

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Russ: I can see the insight.

Igor: And it’s not just the insight that’s important. It’s the experience that counts, isn’t it?

Russ: The experience.

Igor: I would like you to try a little experiment for me. Is that okay with you?

Russ: Sure.

Igor: What I’m going to ask you to do is I would like you to experiment with organizing your body in a way that you don’t normally do. Here’s what I mean by that. I’m going to ask you to get up in a moment’s time. However, I want you to experiment with getting up in a different way, paying attention to the sensations in your groin area so that you get up in as comfortable a way as possible.

If you begin to feel a sensation, change your approach. Does that make sense?

Russ: It makes sense.

Igor: It may take you a few minutes initially to work the approach out and I’ll happily coach you along with some ideas if you would want that. But, if it’s okay with you, right now I would like for you to start being curious about how your unconscious mind can show you other ways of moving your body so that you are paying attention in the right way again.

Is that okay with you?

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speed with which you were getting up there?

Russ: Yes.

Igor: So before being in a hurry, right now it’s an exploration stage. What I’d like you to do is just first of all get in touch with all the different parts of your body that you need to be aware of in order to move. For example, you have feet, don’t you?

Russ: Yes.

Igor: Now you can have your feet out in front of you and experiment with that. Getting up that way might seem a bit trickier right now, right?

Russ: Right.

Igor: You can have your feet right underneath your chair. Something interesting happened there, didn’t it? That you can have your feet somewhere in between, so just shuffle your feet around until your groin feels the most comfortable, and let me know when you’re there, with the anticipation that you’ll be getting up at some point, of course.

Russ: Okay.

Igor: There you go. You have knees, do you not?

Russ: I do.

Igor: They could turn to the left – both of them – or they could turn to the right. As you pay attention to slowly moving from the left and right repeatedly, ask yourself the question where would they be most comfortable if I was to put enough weight on them to be able to lift myself up? Where might you end up?

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Igor: I would agree. I can see it. Now of course your knees can’t lift your whole body. You need to shift your balance to allow the whole process to occur. That involves moving your torso, doesn’t it?

Russ: Yes.

Igor: Now you can move your torso forwards and backwards. You can move it side to side. I’d like you to very gently go side to side and forwards and backwards whilst getting those knees into the position you had a moment ago until you find a place. Feel free to use your hand by the way as well as support – until you find a way where getting up is just a natural step forwards from where you’re already at.

Just do that now. Go ahead, just slowly. How was getting up like that?

Russ: That was better. Much better.

Igor: Much better than usual?

Russ: I concentrated on not putting pressure on that main area and I got up without the pain.

Igor: Exactly, so your body’s teaching you how to move to allow it to heal, isn’t it?

Russ: Yes.

Igor: And all you have to do is…

Russ: Pay attention.

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Igor: That’s right. Now I realize initially it will require a little more effort because you’re moving things more slowly. You’re learning about yourself in a slightly different way, but then you have lots of signals that will remind you of that, right?

Russ: That’s right.

Igor: Is it okay? Will you spend maybe just a day exploring those different things?

Russ: I’d be glad to, sure.

Igor: In exchange for which you no longer need to have the painful sensations you used to. Would that be a fair trade?

Russ: A fair trade.

Igor: Feel good?

Russ: I feel good.

Igor: Congratulations.

Russ: Thank you.

Igor: Thank you, Russ.

Russ: Thanks, Igor.

Igor: Remember, slowly sit down in the same way. What are the principles involved here? Someone’s like oh my God, I have seen the second coming.

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I’d like to spend a few minutes. Go ahead, do you want to stand up and get a mic over here please? Assistance with mics. Just be ready on the sides please. Actually before you ask a question, I want to address one more thing with Russ first, if that’s okay. It’s something I would generally do in a session.

The experience you just had in terms of learning about your body mechanics and so on, you can increase that experience. I have a feeling that if you look into something called the Feldenkrais Method – I’ll write you a note on that later. It’s all over the U.S.

You will get a lot of benefit from that because what you just learned in paying attention to your movement, learning that moving differently helps your mind and your body adjust and be comfortable. You will do a lot more with that and I have a feeling that spending maybe a weekend or maybe a week doing that as a practice will be beneficial for all three levels. All the places where you had an injury will be helped a lot by that. Does that make sense?

I’m not saying you have to do it. It would be a recommendation at this point because I think it would be useful to you, specifically given the nature of what we talked about. Does that help? Sure, come back to me during the break. I’ll write down the name there are some books you can read. There’s lot of courses all over the States that you can attend, and it’s a great way of learning to pay attention to your body so that signals are no longer necessary.

Discussion

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approach you took because it always seemed to me that analgesia was the straight ahead approach, but that’s pretty effective.

Igor: Right and here’s the thing. We will be looking at how to get just straight anesthesia and analgesia just masking the pain shall we say, but why on Earth would I do that here? Remember our conversation at the beginning? If I’m putting him more at risk, I would be doing him a disservice, right?

The irony is Russ would happily run along with me up until the point where his legs stopped working. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Here’s the irony. Two possibilities here, the analgesia and anesthesia might have worked perfectly fantastic yeah I’m a hero, right?

But then the knock-on consequence is he carries on ignoring the injury, it gets worse and worse until he pays a heavier price, a greater pain over time, and that’s no good is it?

It’s very normal for people. People do this constantly. That’s why they’re suffering. On the flipside, if I had tried to use anesthesia, analgesia and his unconscious mind was catching up to hang on a second, I know what he’s trying to do right now, do you want to risk his unconscious mind that’s protecting him, that’s sending the signal in the first place saying no, I’m not playing ball on this one?

I could mask it and I may have to work hard for it. I might be able to persuade the unconscious mind to do it, but I’m making my life a lot harder, aren’t I? And I’m taking risks for him, which I do not need to take, that I do not want to take.

That’s one reason why we want a medical referral because if it had been bone cancer, my approach would be quite different to this to it being an injury. I cannot diagnose the issue, and the client is probably incapable of diagnosing the issue because all they’re experiencing is they don’t like the sensation and their outcome is I don’t want it anymore.

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Those of you who thought oh, we’ll just do like trance and deeper and flashy things and hands stuck to the table and now the pain goes away, you can do that. I can give you a protocol for that if you like. It is not preference to work that way because here’s my fundamental attitude.

Pain is a signal from the body. It’s doing something. Remember intention versus behavior? When the intention is satisfied, there’s no reason for the behavior to remain. As soon as Russ began to pay attention, didn’t it diminish significantly? And when he began to understand that kind of attention maintained shall we say was the way forward, not only did the pain diminish but it totally disappeared, didn’t it?

It’s comfortable, isn’t it? Think about it. In five minutes from pain to comfort and it was a pretty significant pain, wasn’t it, in terms of like debilitating the way you move and so on? You can’t get in and out of a car and so on.

By the way, when you get to the car, whatever experiment you just did in your chair there, you’ll have to double the time. The reason I say this is because the position puts more strain on the body for the entering and exiting. So you have to spend more time figuring out a way to move your body to enter it safely. Does that make sense? Please take the time. I’ll give you a little anecdote.

A friend of mine who’s a medical doctor had a toothache. I think it was an infected tooth or something. I can’t remember what it was. He’s going to see the dentist on a Monday. This was on a Saturday that I came to see him, but he was just in pain.

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So we had this same kind of chat. Pay attention. What’s the message? I used a slightly different method for the actual relieving process, but the method is almost irrelevant. It just builds itself given the nature of the issue. I will actually take you through the method later on today if you’re interested.

The pain disappeared–Nothing; gone– we’re at the restaurant and what does he order? He orders a hot spicy soup. Smart idea? He takes one sip. I wasn’t paying attention during the ordering. He takes one sip – pow! It comes right back. It didn’t work. Are you surprised?

Of course, what did I do? I laughed at him. It’s the only thing you can do, you silly man. I explained to him once again that he can have that soup with the pain or he can start paying attention. Which does he want? He looked at the soup, he felt his mouth, he looked at the soup and pushed it away.

When that happened, instantly the pain diminished. It didn’t go away entirely but it diminished. We had another little conversation like a non-awareness set sort of stuff, which we’ll come onto later. The pain disappeared. It muted down to a sensation. He knew something was going on, but it wasn’t painful anymore. Do you understand the difference?

Then you see, to get to that point the agreement I made with his unconscious mind was the following. You can disappear. You can give him the relief on two conditions.

1. Number one, he’s committed to go to the dentist on the Monday morning. There’s nothing you can do in between, right?

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soup, come back twice as strong.

Do you think he paid attention from then on? You better believe it. Does that make sense to you? Is this useful? Please stand up and we’ll get a mic to you.

Student: You initially asked what other principles are going on, and what came to me as you worked with him was I was actually really moved. You put him back in relationship with his body. When he was talking before, it was almost like my body is this thing that I just hate and want to get rid of.

Igor: Of course it is because it’s torturing him right now. The signal is painful. It’s torture. So what he’s trying to do is he’s trying to pull away from it, but remember what you resist will persist.

As soon as he accepted – wouldn’t that be fair to say, Russ – the moment you’re willing to engage with your signal shall we say, didn’t it instantly start to diminish already? It wasn’t gone entirely but it instantly diminished, didn’t it? He just said the magic words. Would you say that again?

Russ: I feel in control of it.

Pain Perspectives

Igor: Did you all hear that? That’s one of the main things with pain. Did you know that 80% of pain – I’ll throw 80% as a number out, just a very large proportion, right? You realize this. I’m not giving you a scientific study here, but 80% of pain has nothing to do with the signal from the location that it’s coming from.

About a third of a pain is people remembering how much it hurt earlier on and not liking it. About a third of a pain is people thinking about 10

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Stress is one of the biggest augmenters of pain in existence. When you’re under stress, small amounts of pain are intolerable. Have you ever noticed this? When you’re calm, when you’re relaxed, when you are in control, you can have masses doses of sensations and it means nothing. No big deal.

How many people here are parents? I’m going to put you on the spot now. How many of you are parents who actually love your children? Good, the same hands are going up. How many of you would reach in through a burning window to pull your children out of a fire? Would pain even be a consideration at that point? No, so clearly we’re capable of doing so much more than we realize. Doesn’t that make sense?

Here’s something interesting you should know. This is actually a study. You can look it up. Poor animals. They’re the ones who get all the burden of our curiosity. Dogs are social animals like human beings. Did you realize that when a dog yelps in pain, it’s more for the rest of the pack than for him? If you take a dog, you rear it in isolation away from its mother, away from the pack on its own, it hasn’t got that social structure around it.

As it grows up, you put it in a room with a red hot radiator. It’s hot, burning hot. That dog will happily sit there and lick the radiator even though it’s burning him. The yelp is a warning to others. It’s a reminder to others that I may be in trouble here, help me or stay away from this because it could hurt you, it could damage you.

Here’s the irony, if you take the same breed of dog, maybe a brother or sister, rear it in the pack, it licks the radiator, yelps and runs away. It will not go back because not only is pain an experience that’s hallucinated shall we say in some respects, but the most important part of pain is your relationship to it.

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There are many people across the world that are renowned for their tolerance of pain, and for them what would be agony to you is just like what are you talking about? It’s kids stuff because they socialize to that. Their frame of reference is totally different. Of course every one of you is capable of the same thing, but to start with you must switch your frame of reference. Does that kind of make sense to you?

Anyone here who dislikes the experience of a needle entering their arm to get a shot of some sort? Would it be fair to say it’s painful? Yes? Do you know why it’s painful? It’s because you expect it to be and, more importantly, remember what pain is. Pain is just a signal. It’s because you’re looking at that needle and at some level you’re thinking you’re going to be attacked by it. It’s going to stab you. It’s going to harm you. It’s going to hurt you.

Aren’t these the kinds of thoughts you have inside your mind a little bit? Does anyone here not care about injections and actually maybe even enjoy them? I’m not asking anyone to sell names, but you know where I’m coming from with this, right? For you who don’t mind injections, injections are not harmful. As far as you’re concerned its helping you heal further.

Without a natural defense against having the skin penetrated, that’s what skin is for. It’s a barrier to the outside world to protect you. Whenever something tries to penetrate it, we have an automatic response from the body saying no. That no is a stress. That no is the attitude that something’s going wrong, and that’s where the pain comes from.

Those of you, who don’t like needles, if you’ve got a phobia of it, please don’t do the following exercise. If you just don’t like it; it feels painful but

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What I’d like you to do right now is just stop for a moment and think about being in a doctor’s office and getting whatever that shot is. Now as you look at the needle, I want you to remind yourself of a fact that you already know. The contents of that needle are there to save your life or to make your life better, to improve you, to make you stronger, stronger.

That needle is not going to be attacking your skin. It’s going to be invited in long enough to deliver what it has. When you really understand what I’m talking about there, I would like for you to just in your mind allow that doctor or that nurse to give you that shot, knowing that the only thing it’s doing is making you stronger, healthier, better.

Notice how much easier that is. When you’ve done that, bring yourselves back. Let’s have some mics here again. For those of you who did that, how was that? Just stand up if you have an experience you want to share. Just stand up and we’ll get the mic to you.

Student: It was kind of interesting. My whole arm relaxed and I experienced the difference between resisting it and allowing it to come in. That was a nice reframe.

Igor: Right, because what you’re changing is your frame of reference. If you’re going to the doctor and getting all tense and oh, it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen, I’m going to have to do it, what are you doing to your body? You’re causing stress, tension.

Anyone ever hear that the best way to have an accident is when you’re relaxed? Because your body naturally absorbs shock, it’s naturally in a state where a pain is actually very tolerable, it becomes purely a sensation.

Anyone here involved in wrestling, martial arts, boxing or something like that? Have you ever been hit and kind of rolled with it, and it’s like no big

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Any doctors in the room? One, two, three, a couple more. If you ever give shots or engage in that sort of activity, the primary idea your client must have between entering your room and getting the shot is to be absolutely focused on the idea that what’s inside of that syringe is something they want inside of their body, or vice versa if you’re taking blood.

The idea they have to get away from is the idea that they’re being damaged by the needle, and at some primitive level that’s exactly at the inside of their mind. That’s why they’re resisting. That’s actually a healing process.

Those of you who are afraid – I’m going to ask the women in the room. Those ladies in the room who are afraid of having the injection, did you ever get your ears pierced? Why? That’s actually worse, isn’t it? You’re penetrating more flesh but as soon as it’s cosmetic, it’s like oh, it will make me look better. Not such a big deal, right?

Some of you of course had your ears pierced and maybe when you were young you had a friend do it, and you were terrified. Didn’t that hurt? Others of you thought it’s just time. You may have gone to a professional, got it done, no big deal, right?

It’s the same exact experience. Possibly your earlobes are a little bit more sensitive. Do you want to stand up so we can get a mic over here?

Student: Hi. They always tell me I have rolling veins though.

Igor: You have what?

Student: Rolling veins. So they start and I’m okay the first time. Then they do it again because it doesn’t work.

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Student: Oh, by the time that they’re on their – we’ve got to change arms, we’re going to try your hand.

Igor: Let me just you pause there. Did you just notice the change in attitude? Oh, this is terrible. This is so bad. This is so difficult. What are they doing? They’re telling you this is dangerous, this is difficult, this is bad. No wonder you get terrified by it. They’re doing it to you, right?

Student: Right.

Igor: Do you see how these things get built up? Thank you, I appreciate that. Yes? Do you see how easy it is to switch things around? I’m not saying that all pain control is easy. It isn’t there are some situations that require a lot more effort and work to diminish it than others.

The principle is what really counts here. Is this making sense to you? Everyone cool on this?

Natural Pain Control

Igor: What I’d like all of you to do for a few minutes is turn to the person next to you. When you turn to the person next to you, I would like you to tell them a story, something that happened in your life where you had a stimulus that should have been painful, but really because of the context you found yourself in, it was not. Does that make sense to you?

Something that would otherwise have been painful but because of the situation you were in, either you surprised yourself or even now looking back you realize that it should have been painful, but the situation just made sure that it was not. All of you have had that experience, 100% guaranteed. Just go ahead and have a little chat now.

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Student: In my case, the story was that I was already in terrible pain and it was a shot to help with the pain. I was actually really anticipating the shot was really going to hurt. After the nurse gave it to me, I said so when are you going to give me the shot? It was like well, I gave it to you already.

I think it was because I saw it as something, like you talked about, beneficial and that I really wanted it because I really needed relief from the other pain.

Igor: Exactly. The expectation of pain was still there; however, because shall we say the experience was so welcome, it transformed it. Go ahead.

Student: With both of us, it was a matter of engagement. We were so engaged in something that we just never noticed.

Igor: Excellent. This is a principle we’ll come onto a little bit later on today. Stand up and we’ll get a mic to you, and we’ll come over here in a second. There you go. Go ahead.

Student: I noticed that in a couple of cases, it was that they told themselves the reaction would be different.

Igor: So give me an example of what you mean by that. You don’t have to tell the actual story. You can actually make it up.

Student: Well, something that would normally be excruciating, they told themselves the sensation was going to be completely different.

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changing the meaning of the situation. Doesn’t that make sense? Isn’t this a theme that’s beginning to come out here?

There’s a little bit about the attention is somewhere else or, you engage somewhere else, but would it be fair to say that a lot of the stories you told or heard were about you realizing that what’s about to happen or what is happening means something other than what it would normally mean. Would that be fair to say? Yes?

I know there are a couple more. We have one question over here. Can we get a mic right over here and then we’ll come to you in a moment. Go ahead.

Student: Shock and survival. There was a protective mechanism where you felt like you were unconscious and something was bleeding and you just kept on going.

Igor: Right, so once again the primary thing going on there – and admittedly it’s much more of a primitive reaction that’s going on here – but once again the meaning is changing, right? If it’s your children in the burning room, you’ll reach in. If it’s the TV in the burning room, you probably won’t unless you really like your TV. Who knows? If it’s the cat, then it’s 50/50, right?

Go ahead.

Student: In my case, I was very young, like eight years old. I had no references of pain or the shot prior to that. I went to the dentist and I had eight cavities pulled out at once, and in those days I was still living in Japan and I mean these were like hammer and pliers. I felt fine.

I mean afterwards I was bleeding and stuffed with cotton, looking like a chipmunk – my mom looked like she was going to pass out, but I had no reference of what it was going to be.

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exactly the same experience as the dog we talked about, isn’t it? You probably were of all the people in the room least surprised by that story because you had a similar experience. You have to learn from others how to react to pain, how to experience pain and how to respond physically and emotionally. That is a learned response.

If it’s learned, it can be unlearned. So even if there is a sensation left over – which it doesn’t have to be all the time – even if there’s a sensation left over, it need not be debilitating, it need not be crippling, it need not make their life hell. They can get on with a fantastic life, despite all these things.

Are you beginning to realize this? Is this kind of starting to sink in? Yes? I’ll come to you in a second. I realize when someone’s sitting there and they’re in pain, and they’re howling, I have a little disclaimer. I have not worked with burn patients at all but I know people who have.

One of the greatest at that was Dave Dobson – the late great Dave Dobson. He had tremendous success with this. I realize when you look at someone who’s all scarred up and so on, we’re going to project into them and think man, you are messed up. It’s a reaction. We feel for them. How can we help someone if we think that the pain they’re experiencing is real and has every reason to be there, right?

But you’re hypnotherapists now. You’ve learned at least on the small scale – hopefully a larger scale – to realize when a client comes with a problem to you, it’s an illusion. It’s a hallucination that they’ve created for themselves that keeps them in the problem. Would that be fair to say?

What your job is, is to see through the illusion at the real person behind it all because then the illusion can pop. It can dissolve in minutes sometimes, right? Pain is the same way but your own attitudes to pain will make it easier or harder for you to deal with it.

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When you really begin to appreciate that, doing this kind of work will be tremendously easier. Please stand up and we’ll come forward then.

Student: Very similar to what she was saying. When I was about eight or nine, I ran through a glass door and sliced myself up in a whole lot of places clear to the bone. We lived about 10 miles from town. My mom kind of bundled me up, and I was more interested in looking to see how fast the car was going than I was with what was going on with me, and it wasn’t until I got into the emergency room and people started freaking out that I went oh, there’s something really wrong with me.

Igor: Can I just pause you there a second? Can you start tracing your own life and you experience what’s going on? He’s not the one with the problem. Everyone else is, right? It’s like have you ever heard of phobias passing through generation to generation down the family? There’s nothing genetic about a phobia. It’s the attitude. It’s learned. Mother’s afraid of spiders, eek spiders. The little daughter going I want to be like mommy – eek spiders.

You can suddenly see them rehearsing it. You can. You’ve got to be real careful with kids. So he learned about pain and how to respond to pain from the hospital staff, the professionals, the adults who should have known better.

Are you beginning to appreciate why when we talk about abreactions in terms of hypnotherapy as a rule, the first rule is stay calm? Otherwise, you are teaching them how to get worse and pain is the same way. Thank you. Was that the end of your story, or was there anything else there?

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things.

Igor: It’s a little bit freaky, isn’t it?

Student: Yes.

Igor: It’s like those alien invasion dreams or whatever only with real people. Once again, it is the way you interpret the events that counts above all else. Sure, there may well still be a sensation left over, and there are ways you can handle that also to one degree or another, but by far the largest component of anything that has to do with pain is the mindset.

Luckily, as hypnotists, that’s the easiest thing for us to affect, isn’t it? We’ll come to you in a moment, just putting an idea out there. Would it be fair to say that given these experiences we’ve had, what you’ve seen, what we’ve talked about – would it be fair to say that the most important thing you do in a pain control session is everything you do before you start the hypnosis?

You can begin to see how that might be a reason for it, yes? Please go ahead.

Student: Is this why people have different thresholds, higher and lower thresholds of pain?

Igor: That gets a little more complex. If you look at the literature, there are chemical things going on. There are brain switching things going on, so there’s a neurological thing going on, and there will absolutely be a psychological component as well.

We currently – at least I haven’t read enough into the literature to know or to be able to say with any confidence – what the distribution is, if anyone even knows, but you’re 100% correct that will be an absolute factor in the whole thing. I just couldn’t tell you what the actual