A little three-year-old girl had to have an adenoidectomy, and hypnosis was used. After the adenoids were taken out, the doctor said, “Now, you´re such a nice little girl and that didn´t hurt at all, did it?” The little girl looked at him and said, “Your pupid [stupid]. It did too hurt but I didn´t mind it.” I questioned this little girl about her [tag-tec]hypnotic[/tag-tec] experience, as I have a number of other children. They do not all necessarily say that. Some say that they didn´t feel anything at all. So, what really happened here?

In some way that three-year-old girl altered her perception of pain and made it less meaningful for herself. She restructured it in some fashion just as the businessman with purely imaginary worries restructures those worries into a gastric ulcer. How does the businessman create this ulcer out of his body learnings, his experiential conditioning, etc.? The research approach in hypnosis ought to seek out the means by which [tag-tec]hypnosis[/tag-tec] facilitates the utilization of body learnings, tissue learnings, physiological learnings. What were the learnings, understandings, and the body conditionings that the three-year-old girl had achieved that resulted in her statement, “I didn´t mind it.”

I think that cancer pain is a very severe pain experience. If you can get your patients´ attention in some way so that they can be induced to use their learnings, you can abolish the pain. It doesn´t matter whether you keep them awake, or keep them asleep, or keep them in a state of dual awareness. In some way you need to communicate to patients the desirability of doing something about their pain, just as the businessman does something about his worries and converts them into a painful ulcer with tissue destruction.

Before I begin to induce [tag-ice]hypnosis[/tag-ice] in cancer patients, I explain to them that pain isn´t a simple, pure thing. There is hard pain, there is soft pain, burning pain, cold pain, stabbing, cutting, heavy pain. I think of all the possible adjectives that I can to describe the pain so that my patient will listen to me. Then I point out to the patient, “You know, pain in some part of your body doesn´t hurt you half as much as it does in another part of your body. “ I know from psychiatric practice that people can displace sensations. I also know that patients with cancer pain are worried about the metastases in their body, in their liver, in their spine. The pain that they have in their trunk is the thing that they know or believe is going to kill them, and they know that I know it. Thus sometimes I tell the cancer patient, “Suppose you had all that body pain right here in your left hand. You are not going to worry about that. It isn´t going to hurt half as much as the pain in your body.” I get them to “displace” a share of that pain into their hand. I don´t know what the mechanism of displacement is, but I do know that human beings make use of that mechanism. I know that cancer patients can suddenly find that they have pain in their left hand which they don´t mind, and the pain in their body is considerably decreased.

Is anesthesia a state of [tag-tec]unconsciousness[/tag-tec]? I don´t know, but I don´t think so. I think at times that anesthesia is primarily a matter of amnesia. I know that I can teach a cancer patient, “It´s all right for you to have pain, but why have pain for very long?” And why ever remember pain?” To one patient I explained, “You know, pain for you is made up of three things: anticipation of pain to come, memory of pain you have experienced, and the current experience of pain. Let´s just not remember the past pain. Let´s have an amnesia for past pain and for future pain.” I call it “amnesia for future pain,” an unawareness that pain can be anticipated. Then you have cut down the pain complex by one-third.