Learning hypnotherapy, weekend 6.1

Today was all about pain management, we spent some time discussing various methods for it using hypnosis. For the practical side of things, we covered glove anesthesia which I found pretty impressive. In a clinical setting, you would use it to remove all sensations of pain from the clients hand then get them to transfer that anesthesia (well, actually analgesia) to wherever their pain is - thus leaving that area pain free. For the practical, the analgesia was just transferred from one hand to the other, and tested by a firm twist of the skin on the back of the hand. It felt very strange being able to feel everything apart from the pain, although when the analgesia was transferred from my right hand to my left, it did leave my right hand stinging a bit from the skin twisting :) A very useful technique though, but I probably wouldn't use it very often. I wouldn't want to completely remove the pain. I'd be more likely to use something like replacing the painful feeling with one of warmth - so that the client would still know that the pain was there (and be able to notice if gets worse), it just wouldn't be as much of a burden to them. But obviously I'm not going to be doing any of those things unless their doctor has said it's ok - I wouldn't want to 'hide' someone's headache then find out it was really a brain tumor.

I've already tried a 'turning down' the pain method a little while ago for my friends mother, which went pretty well. I didn't check with her doctor first for that one, but she was already on the waiting list for an operation as well as taking pain killers for it. If I didn't already know her I would have definitely checked with her doctor first though.