Hypnosis for Pain Management

Hypnosis for chronic pain

By Katerina Tsernou | Hypnosomatics

A pain signal and the experience of pain aren't the same thing. The body sends information that's the signal. How much of it becomes what you actually feel as pain happens separately, in the brain, which weighs the signal against stress, sleep, past experience, and whether the nervous system feels safe or on guard.

Why the same injury hurts differently

This is why the same injury can hurt differently in different people and why pain can persist long after the injury itself has settled. Sometimes the nervous system stays on high alert after the danger has passed, a process called central sensitization. This doesn't make the pain less real. It means the nervous system is still doing its job, past the point of usefulness.

How hypnosis can bring relief

Hypnosis doesn't convince you the pain isn't there. It changes how the brain processes pain. In a focused, absorbed state, the alarm system becomes less reactive, so pain signals are processed with less urgency. It's the nervous system recalibrating, learning to stop responding to something old as though it were still an emergency.

How I work

Hypnosomatics blends clinical hypnosis, guided imagery, somatics and nervous system regulation techniques. Not all pain should be quieted. Pain telling you to stop, rest, or get something checked deserves to be heard. This work is for the other kind. Whether it is post-surgical pain, chronic pain or migraines, the pain protocol is a series of 4 and 8 eight sessions, online worldwide and in person in New York and Miami by request.

Common questions:

Can hypnosis reduce pain?

A review of 85 controlled experimental trials with 3,632 participants found meaningful reductions in pain. With direct analgesic suggestion, highly suggestible people reduced pain by around 42%, moderately suggestible people by 29%. Most of those trials used laboratory pain, not long-standing chronic pain.

What if I am not very suggestible?

Suggestibility sits on a spectrum; most people fall in the medium to high range. In that same review, relief at the low end was smaller but real. We would also work with sleep, stress and movement, which shape how much of a signal becomes pain.

Does relief mean the pain disappears?

Not always. It can mean less intensity, more movement, better sleep, and a body that feels like an ally again. Some people get large shifts, others get moderate ones. I would rather say that plainly than promise something I cannot know in advance.

Part of pain can change even when the injury cannot. Not the signal, but the nervous system's response to it. I've watched that shift happen with clients again and again, often smaller than people expect, and more real than they hoped for. It runs alongside whatever your physicians are doing, never in place of it. If your pain has outlived its message, tell me where it started.

Pain that's been present for years usually takes more than one set of sessions. Most people start with the first four, and we look at where you are together at the fourth. This work sits alongside your medical care, never instead of it.

If now isn't the right time, this is the recording I give clients to use between sessions.

-Katerina

Thompson et al. (2019), Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30790634/ Mayo Clinic, Hypnosis — https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/hypnosis/about/pac-20394405