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More Healing Tales
One morning, Veronica, a young woman at her reception desk, asked if I had any Tylenol. I said yes. She said she had a terrible headache - near a migraine. In response to my offer of an alternative approach - five minutes of Therapeutic Touch, this thing I did that was helpful for headaches, she agreed to try it. Perhaps she was influenced by the fact that I was teaching this to doctors in the division where she worked, so she thought there could be something to it. Coverage was arranged for the phones and we went into an available room.
Combining Therapeutic Touch with an Ericksonian approach is quite an interesting undertaking due to the fact that Milton Erickson's approach was to never use the same approach twice! He felt that every person and every problem is unique, and that every practitioner is unique, so that you must adapt your approach to the uniqueness of the healee, the unique situation the healee is dealing with, and yourself. He defined a trance very broadly, sometimes speaking of it simply as openness to helpful communication through the unconscious between the healee and healer.
When I asked Veronica where her pain was, she said that her head hurt on the top, and worse on the sides. In response to further questioning, she said that it did not hurt in the back. It hurt on the sides and as she moved her attention to the top, she noted that the top hurt a bit less than the sides. As she moved her attention to the back, she noted that her head in that area did not hurt at all. She was then asked to again carefully move in her awareness from the sides to the back, and to notice the place in her head where it began to hurt less, and then the place where it did not hurt at all.
She was then directed to fixate her attention on a small part of the back of her head. "It might feel odd, different - we don't think about our scalp and skull much, but it doesn't hurt. And really get familiar with that feeling of your head not hurting - on that part."
"OK, now I'd like you to memorize that feeling of your head not hurting, really remember it … and now move your attention to the hurt part, the core of it, the deepest part, right in the center."
In answer to the question was the pain intermittent or constant? she explained that it was constant. Her attention was then directed back to the little part that did not hurt. And then to her toes.
"And how is the top of your head feeling now?"
It was somewhat better. The sides were just as bad.
"So the sides aren't any better yet. But, you somehow made the top of your head begin to get better. And I'll bet, since you know how to make your head begin to get better, you could transfer that to the sides somehow. I don't know how. You don't know how. But I'll bet the same thing could happen on the sides. And remember that good, not hurting feeling, and just kind of move it to the places that hurt."
"It's beginning to fade, the pain."
The rest of the process was simply the gentle suggestion that it could continue to fade, and within a half hour or so, it would be all better. But if it was not, we had Tylenol. We were covered either way. We did not want her head to hurt. It was enough to have to do a stressful job; we didn't want her to have to do it with a headache.
At the end of her five-minute session, Veronica said that her headache was much better. Upon going to her desk, she discovered a mistake she had made. She said, "I must have done that in my headache stupor," meaning that she could not function as well with her head hurting.
Later in the day when I asked if she wanted any Tylenol, she said no, her head was fine.
During this session, there are many hidden healing suggestions at work. When Veronica moves her attention from the place where the head hurts, to where the pain lessens, to where it does not hurt, the suggestion is that by moving her attention, her head can hurt less, and then not hurt at all. When she fixes her attention to a small part on the back of her head that does not hurt, this focuses her attention on a place away from the pain, and offers the hidden suggestion, "the familiar feeling of your head not hurting". This is both a suggestion that the body remember that it is normal for the head not to hurt so that the time of being in pain does not seem never-ending, and a suggestion to take the body to the familiar feeling of its head not hurting so that it can remember what this is like and thus find a way to get back to it.
When she memorizes the feeling of her head not hurting and then moves her attention to the hurt part, the core of it, she is dragging some of that good, stable, not hurting feeling into the center of where the pain is. The non-hurting part can somehow "teach," through the unconscious, the hurting part how not to hurt, so it can learn to get back to normal.
The suggestion that the sides are not any better "yet" contains the hidden reminder that the sides are going to get better.
The technique of having her remember the good, not hurting feeling of the part of her head that is not in pain and move it to the places that hurt, draws on the earlier suggestion that by moving her awareness from the part that hurt to the part that did not, she could go from her head hurting to a place where her head did not hurt. This suggests a different way that she can move her awareness to make her head not hurt, this time by moving it from the part that does not hurt, to the part that does. The profound healing message here is that there are different ways that headache pain can become less and leave. We are asking the unconscious to help us find one that is beyond our conscious ability, and it begins to answer us, for soon she says, "It's beginning to fade, the pain."
There are two apparently contradictory techniques at work here - a moving of awareness away from the pain ("How do your toes feel? No pain? You sure? You've checked out all ten?") and a careful observation of the pain. Erickson, the master of distraction and creator of "the confusion technique," also suggests that a subject's clinical, careful observation of pain can help alleviate it. When Veronica examines her headache carefully, she is probably changing her attitude towards her pain from one of the will, where the pain is calling upon her to DO something, which causes her to rush in to try to help the pain and moves her closer to it, which makes it bigger, to one of clinical observation, where she is standing back and watching it with an air of interest and detachment. This moves her away from the pain. Once she removes her conscious will from the pain, her unconscious can now access the energy that was tied up in consciously trying to DO something, and use it creatively to solve the problem, which is does, beautifully, without pills, without liver toxicity, without side-effects.
The conscious mind can do wonderful things. If your mind says, "Move the hand," the hand moves. If it says, "Get better, headache!" the headache does not get better. This is a job for the unconscious mind and how it works, by its very nature, must remain at least partly a mystery. As soon as you've lost the aspect of mystery, you've lost touch with this part of your mind and go out of communication with it. When this communication can be restored, a great deal of problem-solving brilliance is at your disposal.