Featured Therapist (March 2008)
Five Natural Remedies For Chronic Pain
By Maggie Phillips, PhD
For the last 25 years, I have specialized in the treatment of mind-body health problems including chronic pain. Although I have helped many people reduce or resolve their pain, recently I have developed a 10-point program that has more universal effectiveness - that is, the easy-to-learn methods have proven successful with all types of pain, regardless of the initial cause or the location in the body. They are all-natural, which means they do not have the side effects of many medications prescribed for pain, and they are portable, which means they travel with you wherever you go. Another guiding principle is that all treatment in the RCP program is self-treatment. That is, we teach you how to be your own expert and healer of your pain.
One of the foundational skills in the program is breathing. Although no one can deny the importance of conscious, aware breathing, a mistake many people make is to believe that one specific kind of breathing will help any chronic pain patient. Typically, I teach 5-15 breathing techniques to determine which ones bring the most benefit to a particular individual.
Circular breathing is one of the 10 types, helpful with many sorts of pain. I believe this is because it helps to regulate the nervous system by working with the pendulum rhythms inherent in the most primitive part of the brain, the reptilian brain or brainstem. Circular breathing involves imagining that you can breathe in along one side of the body, crossing over at some point to the other side of the body, and traveling down that side of the body on the exhale.
Marty, a man who has had several motorcycle and car accidents that created pain in his lower lumbar, shoulders and thoracic spine, and his neck. As we began a recent session, most of his pain was on the left side of his body. I guided him in breathing up the left side of his body, connecting many of the "hot" spots with his breath, crossing over at his shoulders, and feeling the breath go down the right side of his body as he exhaled. After about 10 cycles of circle breathing, Marty reported that both sides of his body felt more similar, and that he felt more relaxed and comfortable. With practice, he was able to use circle breathing on his own to reduce his pain levels when he had flare-ups.
A second natural remedy for chronic pain is to learn the impact of stress on your pain and how to achieve reliable stress reduction. Cortisol is one of the stress hormones that influences pain levels. Quite simply, a significant rise in cortisol can slow healing. Although short-term stresses, such as getting stuck in commuter traffic, can have this effect, unresolved past trauma due to abuse, loss, injury, accidents or even surgery can create stress that is locked in the body due to the freeze response to threat.
Another tool I teach includes pendulation, a method created by Peter Levine as part of his Somatic Experiencing model of resolving past trauma. Circular breathing, described above, is one example of a pendulation technique. What is important here is to understand that, if pain does not respond to reliable methods of treatment, there is most likely an underlying trauma component that needs to be treated. Sometimes, the trauma predates the pain condition by many years; alternatively, a pain condition becomes traumatizing in itself when the person with pain becomes helplessly trapped in a downward spiral of pain, fear, more pain, constriction in the body due to the freeze response, followed by more pain, and so on. Anxiety and somatic freezing are natural responses of the organism to the threatening event that initially caused the pain, yet over time, if unresolved, can perpetrate chronic pain reactions.
Energy Psychology (EP) provides a gentle approach to reduce pain levels, clear past trauma, and increase comfort and relief. One type of EP approach is meridian-based therapy. In Reversing Chronic Pain, I include several EP protocols that work well with pain, including EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) developed by Gary Craig, the WHEE method, developed by Daniel Benor who edits this eZine, and the TAT (Tapas Acupressure Technique) created by Tapas Fleming. I have had excellent results with all three of these methods.
EP tools are exceptional in their efficiency, their portability, and their unifying emphasis on self-treatment. Every pain patient with whom I work at some point benefits from EP methods. I usually begin by teaching EFT, using it as an assessment as well as a treatment technique.
After taking a full history and discussing Energy Psychology methods as a valuable treatment technique with Nick, I suggested we explore the 8-point protocol of EFT to see if we could shift some of the nerve pain he experiences, stemming from an industrial accident, in his neck, shoulder, and leg. After completing the preparation or set-up,' he stimulated the eight acupoints for three rounds, changing the reminder phrase for each round to reflect differences. We cleared several intervening reversals, and his pain level decreased one or two points. Nick was pleased with the results, and I printed out a protocol for him to practice on his own. At the next session, he reported that he had tried EFT with different aspects of his nerve pain and felt he had had consistent, though subtle success. I noted Nick was motivated to practice, was able to follow the protocol and gain success, and that he had achieved modest confidence in his results.
Two sessions later, as his pain levels became less intense, Nick was struggling with feelings of shame because he had been on disability for more than nine months, since he was not able to work. Nick did not believe that he could return to work any time soon, and felt upset that he was not a good role model for his children. Although we could have continued to treat this problem with EFT, or even added WHEE, I chose TAT because I have found that this tool works well with issues of guilt, forgiveness, and spiritual healing. Nick again had a very positive response and found that the TAT helped him to expand on feelings of self-acceptance and self-love that had been building gradually from the affirmations used to correct psychological reversals, which are often indicators of inner conflict.
He had been repeating often the general affirmation, "I deeply and completely love and accept myself even with all my problems and limitations." Nick had also used more specific affirmations to correct specific reversals such as "I deeply and completely love and accept myself even though I'm afraid I'll never go back to work." The seven steps of the TAT seemed to aid further in clearing other such reversals in a more permanent way.
The next tool we added was WHEE (Whole Health - Easily and Effectively), a 'hybrid derived from EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and EFT, created by Daniel Benor. Nick had told me he wasn't sure when to use EFT and when to use the TAT on his own. He had become aware of different kinds of symptoms as his nerve pain had settled down in its intensity. Now he was more concerned about feelings of tension in the back of his head and neck and soreness in his right groin. Although I recommended that he discuss these 'new' symptoms with his doctor to rule out other problems, I told him that I thought that, after focusing for our first six sessions on the complexity of his pain condition, it would be best to focus now on simplicity. I introduced WHEE as an EP technique that could be used for virtually anything that bothered him without the effort of remembering which point to stimulate or what statement to focus on. This idea appealed to Nick and we used WHEE to focus successfully on each body symptom in turn. He used the butterfly hug to tap his shoulders alternatively for bilateral stimulation while focusing on appropriate statements. The first was "Even though I have this tension in the back of my head, and I'm afraid it will get worse, I deeply and completely love and accept myself." Nick was surprised that the neck tension shifted almost immediately. He told me that he was aware of a memory of a time he had been hit in the back of his head with a soccer ball as a teenager. Though it had knocked him out briefly, he recovered completely in a few days with no lasting symptoms. "I guess I don't really need to worry about this," he said. "I just need to relax more." In this session, I believe that the simplicity of WHEE allowed Nick to focus more on the shifting in his mind as well as in his body, while the bilateral stimulation derived from EMDR seemed to help him reprocess a past traumatic event and related cognitions and emotions.
Nick's success is a good example of how Energy Psychology methods can be used to focus on different aspects of a pain condition. Because the shifts are often so rapid in working with this approach, various EP techniques, including those presented here, can be easily introduced and quickly applied. Once an overview of EP is presented, and the preparation steps (which I call the 'three boosters') have been learned, it is easy for an experienced EP practitioner to shift back and forth to different techniques as the client's responses shift. And, once pain patients find one of these EP tools to be consistently effective, it is often possible to identify the acupoints that create the most benefit, and create an even more streamlined personal protocol. In addition, many of the Energy Psychology techniques are stand-alone tools for rapid stress reduction and can also be used to rebalance the energy system and create a positive energy field.
Another important tool in my toolbox is the use of imagery and self-hypnosis. There is evidence to suggest that these techniques can speed up the healing of painful conditions. For example, recent studies at Harvard have shown that people with bone fractures healed at an advanced rate of 2 1/2 weeks faster than those without self-hypnosis. Many of my pain clients learn to use imagery and hypnotic suggestion to potentiate the effects of breathing, to facilitate site-specific healing in different parts of the body, and to interrupt negative thoughts and fears that can disrupt the healing process.
Finally, one of the most powerful all-natural methods of healing results from creating a positive and powerful mind-body partnership. Many people in unrelenting pain have minds that judge and resist their bodies' experience. For example, someone with chronic pain might push their body to exercise more than is helpful, or to work longer hours, or to resist gentle healing methods. I find that pain clients do not achieve lasting results unless they are able to use their minds to support somatic experience, and to use the wisdom of their bodies to influence mindfulness and other mental states. Without alignment between mind and body, no tool will produce consistent results.
Reversing Chronic Pain presents these and other natural remedies in much greater detail. In addition, I am launching a new, multi-media website, www.reversingchronicpain.com, which offers an online learning program as a companion to the book and an extension of its methods. Please come for a visit soon to find out how these resources can help you reverse your pain condition.
The entire 10-point program is presented in my new book, Reversing Chronic Pain, published in October, 2007, by North Atlantic Books. For more information, reviews, and to order, go to Click here.
Maggie Phillips, PhD
www.reversingchronicpain.com
www.maggiephillipsphd.com
