In the classic Erickson story on pain control, they brought in a woman who was dying of cancer. They brought her to Erickson in an ambulance, put her on a gurney, and rolled her into the office. The woman looked at Erickson and said "This is the dumbest thing I've ever done in my life. My doctor sent me here so that you could do something about the pain. Drugs don't help my pain. Surgery doesn't help my pain. How are you going to be able to help my pain with just words?"
Erickson, sitting in a wheelchair, swayed back and forth and looked at her, and paced all her beliefs by saying "You came here because your doctor told you to come here, and you don't understand how just words could control your pain. Drugs don't even control your pain. Surgery doesn't even control your pain. And you think this is the dumbest thing you've ever heard of. Well, let me ask you a question. If that door were to burst open right now … and you looked over and saw a great big tiger … licking its chops hungrily … staring at only you … how much pain do you think you'd feel?"
The point is, he presented a context in which nobody is going to be aware of pain. Pain simply doesn't exist when you're about to be eaten by a tiger. An experience where there is no pain is something that can be anchored and continued as a particular altered state. Erickson said "Later the doctors didn't understand her when she said she had a tiger under her bed and she just listened to its purr."
There are lots and lots of ways of approaching pain control. You have to think of what it would take, if you had physiological pain, to get you to not notice it. Going to the dentist and having him drill through your tooth hurts. When he hits a nerve, physiologically the signals go through your nerves and your brain goes "Uggh!" That happens. Yet there are people who go to the dentist, get no novocaine, and feel nothing. They don't do hypnosis, either. Dentists will tell you about them. The dentist drills right into their nerves, and they don't respond. The last dentist I went to said "I can never understand this. It hurts me, but they don't feel a thing!"
Who are the people who can do that? They are people with no consciousness of kinesthetics. They are people who haven't got any feelings, so they can't feel pain. The only thing that will get through is putting their hand on a hot plate. By the time it burns up to the elbow, they may notice, These are people who typically get hurt a lot. They have a tendency to get skinned knees and bump into things, because they have no consciousness of their kinesthetics and haven't learned to be cautious. As a strategy to work with pain, you can make somebody into someone like that.
The questions you always need to ask yourself are "What is it that you want?" and "Where would that happen naturally?" There are contexts in which you can move around and feel things but not feel pain. Have you ever hurt your hand? Have you ever cut your finger so that it really hurt? Or have you smacked it with a hammer so it really throbbed with pain? And during the period of time when it was throbbing, did you ever forget about it for some reason? In what context would that occur? Man: In an emergency.
Sure. An emergency is one classic example. For most people it doesn't even take an emergency. All they have to do is be distracted by anything else. Humans have such a limited amount of conscious attention. The rule is that 7± 2 chunks of information is all people can attend to. So give them nine chunks if you want to distract them. Give them something else to do–anything else.
Once I worked with a man who had severe pain. He had been in an accident that had resulted in a back injury. I don't know the medical details, but there was some physical reason why he ought to have pain. He came in and said he wanted hypnosis. I said I didn't know if I could help him with his pain, I had a procedure that worked very well, but only on people who are mature and intelligent, and frankly, I didn't know if he was mature enough.
I told him "Look, the most mature and intelligent people arc the ones who are able to see things from different perceptual points of view." By the way, according to Jean Piaget, this is actually true. So I explained Piaget's theory and test of intelligence to this man.
According to Piaget, being intelligent means being able to tell what things would look like from different perspectives. If I wanted to test a child, I could use a block of wood and a thimble. I'd bring the child over, show him the thimble, and place the block of wood in front of the thimble to block the child's view of the thimble. Then I'd ask "Is there anything behind the block?" If the child says "No" he's not very "mature." The "mature" child can visualize the thimble when it's hidden, and he can also see what the thimble, the block of wood, and they themselves would look like from the other side of the table. The testers literally ask "What would it look like if you were over there on the other side of the table?" The better you can see things from different points of view, the more "mature" and intelligent you are. One consequence of that kind of visualization is that you become dissociated from your feelings. This is what some modern methods teach kids to be able to do. They teach kids to grow up and be dissociated from their feelings, because that's what it means to be "mature."
I told this man that there was something I wanted him to go home and practice, because I was going to test him extensively on it the next week to find out how mature and intelligent he was. What he needed to do was to find out what he would look like lying in his bed, first from the perceptual viewpoint of one corner of the room, then from the viewpoint of the opposite corner, and then from every point in between. I told him that next week I would pick one viewpoint at random, and have him draw it in detail. I would measure it and find out exactly what the angle was, and by looking at his drawing I would be able to compute his intelligence,
He went home, and when he came back a week later he had done this task. He had worked on it methodically. He was highly motivated; he wanted me to treat him and thought I could help him. And when he came back, he said "You know, the strangest thing is, I haven't had much pain at all this week." Giving someone an appropriate task is another way of going after the same outcome.
There are other bizarre ways to deal with pain. You can do anything in trance as long as you presuppose it. Once I told a man who came to see me "I want to speak to the Brain. As soon as the Brain is ready to talk to me, and no conscious parts know anything about what is going on, then the mouth will open and say 'Now.'" He sat there for twenty minutes and then he said "Nowwww." I said "All right, Brain, you fouled up. Pain is a very valuable thing. It allows you to know when something needs to be attended to. This injury is already being attended to as well as it can be. Unless you can come up with anything else that needs to be done, it's time to shut off the pain." It said "Yessss!" I said "Shut it off now, and turn it back on only when it's needed: not before." Now, I have no idea what all that means, but it sounds so logical, and presupposes that the brain can do what I ask. After that he had no pain whatsoever.
Amnesia
I want to comment on something from one of the exercises. One man did something that can be used to get amnesia. He did the exercise, and as the woman he had induced into a trance returned, he looked at her and said "Notice how quiet it is in the room." When a person returns and opens his eyes, if you look at him and immediately comment on anything other than the experience he just came out of, you will abruptly direct his attention elsewhere, and you will tend to get really profound amnesia. This is true whether he is coming out of a deep trance, or whether you are in the middle of an ordinary conversation with him. For example, you could be talking about hypnosis and suddenly you turn and begin to talk about the necessity for checking your brakes before you go down mountain roads, and very congruently go into extreme detail about it. If you then ask "What was I just talking about?" he probably won't remember. Since there's no continuity, the probability that what happened just before the interruption will be consciously remembered is really small. So you get amnesia.