THE PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO PAIN OF ORGANIC ORIGIN: RELIEF OF PAIN BY DISSOCIATION
Posted on April 29, 2009, under Anti Depressants-Sleeping Aid.
Under normal circumstances there is a wholeness about the individual. The body and the mind work as a whole. The different parts of our body and the different aspects of our mind all function in harmony. But in certain conditions this harmony in the working of the different parts of the body may become disrupted. This is what we call dissociation. One part or one function may become dissociated from the rest of the body. Dissociation occurs particularly in hysteria and in hypnosis.
Dissociation can be used in the control of pain. A person may be hypnotized and his arm may be made quite numb so that there is no feeling in it whatsoever. In these circumstances sensation in the arm has become dissociated from the rest of the body. The individual can tolerate any degree of injury to his arm without feeling the slightest discomfort. For practical purposes his arm does not belong to him. Some people can learn to do this themselves by first inducing an autohypnotic state. Others can produce a similar effect by consciously dissociating themselves from the pain or the painful part. If it is a leg that is injured, we hold ourselves apart from it as it were, and we develop the feeling that the painful leg really does not belong to us.
It is easy to see how this works for an arm or a leg, but it can also be used for pain in the abdomen, or the chest, or even the head. We develop the feeling that this pain does not really belong to us. We are dissociated from it. It has nothing to do with us. We can stand off as it were, and think about the pain as if in fact it were some other person who were suffering.
People vary a great deal in their ability to use dissociation to control pain. It is much easier to use in the relaxed state of mind that we attain in our relaxing mental exercises. For those who can do it, it is a very good way for the self-management of excessive pain. But it would be wise to confine the use of dissociation to this purpose. It is just possible that unwise experiments in dissociation could lead a very susceptible person into a state in which he might dissociate inadvertently, from having developed a too great facility in the technique, and so produce other symptoms either of his body or mind.
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