Suppose you were alone in a house 10 miles from any other habitation. You are sitting with your back next to a curtain and you are reading a tremendously exciting suspense story. In that suspense story a hand came through the curtain and stabbed the victim in the neck. Just at that moment, as you are reading that line, a tiny little bug steps off your collar onto your neck, and as a result you hit the ceiling, not because that little bug tramped so hard on you but because of the general psychological situation. A reinterpretation of the stimulus took place, a magnification and intensification of a minor stimulus.?



I usually ask my patients, ?This short, cutting, stabbing, blinding pain of yours, could you make that into a dull, heavy pain?? In the hypnotic state, subjects are open to ideas. They like to examine ideas in terms of their memories, their learnings, their conditionings and all of the various experiential learnings of life. They take your suggestion and translate that into their own body learnings.

There was a cancer patient who had transformed the sharp stabbing, blinding pain into dull, heavy pain, and I then suggested that he take the dull, heavy pain and transform that into a feeling of relaxation and weakness. In other words his attention was redirected again, but this time into heaviness, weakness, and relaxation. I think that a great deal of research remains to be done on the matter of pain, on its transformations into nonpain or decreased pain situations, so that we can better offer suggestions and frames of reference which patients can utilize in terms of their own body experiences.

In the control of cancer pain I teach my patients to listen carefully to my words and to follow my train of suggestions closely. I can direct their attention to the shoes on their feet, the glasses on their face, the collar around their neck, and the way their hand is on their thigh, or to sounds outside the room, etc. As they follow my train of suggestions, it is not long before they forget about the shoes on their feet and the cloth around their neck, etc.

In their effort to constantly redirect their attention from one idea to another, there is a more rapid slipping away of earlier suggestions. I explain to the cancer patient: ?While you're thinking about this or that particular happy thing, you won't have enough energy left over with which to feel the pain of your cancer, because all of your energy is going to go into this matter of thinking over all the nice things that you ought to say to your wife, your grandchildren, or something of that sort.?

I get their attention focused. What does focusing of attention mean? I know that you can get certain types of physical behavior and certain types of psychological behavior during the hypnosis session, which is a state of special awareness and special responsiveness. Cancer patients have much activity going on within them. But you know that they also have a lifetime of body learnings that are available within them for therapeutic application. Reinterpretation of pain is a great mechanism you can employ by hypnosis.