Thursday, December 3, 2009

Treating Pain With Flexible Attention

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." That statement, by someone whose name is lost to history, is true wisdom. Pain is something that happens to us, and then we have choices on how to relate to it. How much we suffer is one of those choices.
It is determined by how we attend to our pain.
By learning to pay attention to pain in more than one way, we can change the suffering part of the equation.
Some pain is inevitable. We bang a shin or strain a shoulder and it hurts. But pain that endures for no apparent reason, or even a pain that endures for a known reason, can be localized and dissolved as an experience of and in the body. But pain is actually generated by circuitry in the brain.
Take the case of phantom limb pain. People who have lost an arm for example, years later report pain, often severe pain, in the missing hand or elbow. Why? Because the circuitry of the brain that represents the missing arm become active.
But it’s not just that brain circuitry is active and the pain has a life of its own, beyond on our control. How we pay attention to pain, is something within our control.
We all tend to pay attention to pain in the high arousal mode of attention, we call narrow, objective focus, which is how the attention style we habitually use fights and avoids the pain. If we let pain in, we think, it will hurt more. But the opposite is true – it’s more painful over time to try to avoid it in a rigid narrow objective focus of attention.
The strategy then is to broaden our aperture of attention with Open Focus exercises by establishing a general awareness of space. With our awareness so much larger, the pain becomes a small part of one’s experience and is no big deal. It often dissolves on its own, or we can easily dissolve it.

3 comments:

AICH said...

This explanation sounds very plausible. It's just like having a higher threshold of pain. If a person has a high threshold of pain, she is able to handle it better than another person whose threshold is much less. I'm wondering about 'flexible attention' which would mean that we can train ourselves to actually pay more or less attention to our pain, and when we succeed in paying less or no attention to our pain, by digression I suppose, we may not feel that pain.

AICH said...

This explanation sounds very plausible. It's just like having a higher threshold of pain. If a person has a high threshold of pain, she is able to handle it better than another person whose threshold is much less. I'm wondering about 'flexible attention' which would mean that we can train ourselves to actually pay more or less attention to our pain, and when we succeed in paying less or no attention to our pain, by digression I suppose, we may not feel that pain.
By the way, I am interested to know what kind of open focus exercises would the writer recommend so that one need not suffer in pain despite having some inevitable pain.
Fauziah
Board Certified Hypnotist/ Hypnotherapist
Clinical Hypnotherapist
Master HYpnosis Trainer
www.petrahypnosis.com

Susan Shor Fehmi said...

Dear Aich,

The Open Focus Dissolving Pain technique harnesses the power of attention to dissolve pain. When our attention becomes more diffuse and immersed in and around the pain, the pain dissolves. "Flexible attention" encourages the ability of the attender to move into and our of various attentional states, rather than being stuck in one. Typically, our default attention is narrow and objective, the kind of attention that creates and sustains pain.

In looking for the best exercise to dissolve pain, I would suggest you use our recorded exercises, going through the exercises in order until you get to the Dissolving Pain ones. You can find out more about these exercises on www.openfocus.com.

I hope this helps.

Susan Shor Fehmi