Working with Pain

The experience of physical pain, especially acute and long-term pain can be different from emotional pain, but they are so closely related that in our thinking and in our language we can work with them in a variety of ways and on a variety of levels.

Milton Erickson, MD, tells the story of his working with a woman who had a terminal illness. It was in front of a group. A year later, Erickson received a letter from a man who had witnessed the demonstration. The man said he had weighed over 300 pounds as he listened to Erickson’s hypnotic induction. In the following year he lost some 130 pounds. was happier than he had ever been and was about to get married.

Erickson said “To one person his pain is overweight, to another that he is too short, or too tall or has a severe illness. Everyone will hear what he or she needs to hear.”

Once when Feldenkrais had worked on my painful back, he touched some emotion and and I left the room sobbing. He followed me into my room , sat on the floor and held me. I said, “Oh Moshe, you don’t have to comfort me, You have helped me so much already.” He said to me,
"We are all in the same boat.” Several years later, when I sat with him in Tel Aviv every afternoon after he had had his subdural hemorrhage and his brain was not alert I thought about what he said and how many hundreds of people those wonderful hands had helped.

Story about Moshe. When he was a kid he saw a man with no legs crawling on his elbows along a road. Moshe ran into a barn and sat there for many hours and when he came out he had lost the power of speech. He didn't talk for many months. I often wondered how that affected his subsequent work using touch, and rarely speaking in his silent communication with people who were so disabled.. He often said, “When you are touching a body you go right up to the pain gently and hold it until the body relaxes into it.” And this is how I think we hold pain as we work with people in pain We stay with them and help them relax into it. We have to hold the context of the possibility that the pain can be relieved. And if we are clear it will help them.

Kay Thomson said about pain:“When everything that needs to be done and should be done and HAS been done, there Is no longer any reason for the pain.”

I remember one moment in time with my analyst Dr. Bernie Fein. After a particularly painful session for me I staggered to my feet and as I walked out the door I turned to look at him and I saw such compassion in his eyes that I have never forgotten it…and it goes with me whenever I see a person in deep pain. I think the alchemy of healing occurred in that moment .and I thought of it in the hours that I was with him the day before- and then right after he died.




***

With everyone I work with as soon as I can (sometimes I have to wait until the right time if they are in crisis) I set about accessing as many resources as I can directly or indirectly to remind them of all the times they are not consciously aware of that they have healed themselves. I do a resource induction tailored to all the times they have consciously and unconsciously healed their own pain.

Resource induction I want to bring alive to them that part – ego state, subpersonality or the inner healer, whatever we want to call it that has always been able to heal us even when we are not aware of it – the day we thought we were coming down with a cold and then mysteriously the next day it went away…Some part of me knew what to do. That is the part Erickson said to trust and that is the part we want to talk with as much as we can.


***