Thirty-two-year-old Jim Bell of West Palm Beach, Florida, had suffered for years from agonizing tension head-aches. Only constant medication could deaden the pain. But at the local Wickershaw Counseling Clinic, therapists taught Jim to use his imagination to relieve his pain.
Whenever a headache strikes, Jim lies down and goes into a state of deep relaxation. Then he asks himself what his headache pain feels like. His answer is the first thought that enters his mind.
“My headache feels like a knife plunged through my temple,” he may tell himself.
“What would soothe this pain?” he asks himself. “A block of ice,” his mind may reply. Jim then visualizes a knife plunged deep into his aching temple. On his inner video screen, he “sees” and “feels” the knife being slowly withdrawn from the painful area. As soon as it is withdrawn, he “sees” the upper part of his head encased in a block of ice.
“These images always stop the pain within a few minutes,” Jim reports. “The painful area in my head becomes numb. And in fifteen minutes, the headache is completely gone.”
Jim is one of thousands of former chronic headache sufferers whose pain has been relieved by a visualization process known as Creative Imagery.
C. Norman Shealy M.D., founder of the Pain and Health Rehabilitation Center, La Crosse, Wisconsin, has stated that he found relaxation and visualization techniques to be the single most important therapy pain clinics can offer to chronically ill individuals with a wide range of problems.
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