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Ten Years of Pain — and the Day He Found the Volume Knob.

  • rob2475
  • Jun 8
  • 3 min read

Marcus had lived with the same low back pain for ten years. He'd tried the physiotherapy that helped and didn't hold, the injections, the surgery that was supposed to be the answer, the medications whose side effects he weighed against the pain like a grim accountant. When someone suggested hypnotherapy, he nearly laughed. How is thinking differently supposed to change a body that hurts?

It's a fair question. The answer begins with something most of us were never taught: all pain is created by the brain.

That doesn't mean the pain isn't real — it is absolutely, physically real. It means pain isn't a simple signal travelling from an injury to your awareness. It's an experience your brain constructs, using the signal plus everything around it: your attention, your mood, your memories, what you expect, how safe you feel. It's why a soldier can run on a broken leg and not notice until the danger passes; why the same injury hurts more on a bad day; why distraction provably dulls pain.

In the 1960s, the researchers Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall described a kind of gate in the spinal cord that can open to let pain signals through or close to damp them down — and showed that emotion, attention, and expectation all help work that gate. Pain isn't only input. It's interpretation. And interpretation can be changed.

This is where hypnotherapy comes in — not as magic, but as a way of reaching that gate. In a focused state, we change how your brain attends and responds to the signal: less alarm, less amplification, more room. The signal may still arrive, but the volume comes down.

The evidence here is genuinely strong. A 2019 review pooled 85 controlled trials and found hypnosis produced moderate-to-large reductions in pain. The size of the effect tracks something called hypnotic suggestibility: people who are highly responsive saw pain fall by around 42 percent, those moderately responsive by around 29 percent.

I want to be straight with you about what that means, because this field is full of people who aren't. Hypnotherapy doesn't make pain vanish. It changes your experience of it — and for many people, that change is enough to hand back a life. Roughly one person in ten is highly hypnotizable; most sit in the middle and can expect meaningful, if more moderate, relief; a few respond less. It works best as part of a complete pain plan, alongside your medical care, never instead of it — and only once a doctor has ruled out anything that needs treating directly.

For Marcus, the shift was gradual. The pain didn't disappear; it loosened its grip. It stopped being the first thing he felt in the morning and the last thing he negotiated at night. He started sleeping. He started planning again. The volume, after ten years stuck at maximum, finally had a knob.

If you've been told you'll simply have to live with it, that may not be the whole story. Since all pain is, in the end, a brain experience — that is exactly where it can be reached.

At HypnoHealth, I work with people in long-standing pain to change how their brain carries it. If you're ready to explore a different kind of relief, let's talk.

Marcus is a composite drawn from common client experiences, not a specific individual. Hypnotherapy for pain is intended to complement — never replace — proper medical diagnosis and treatment; always have new or unexplained pain assessed by a physician.

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