My hypnosis teacher Melissa Tiers and I geek out about the brain and how hypnosis and coaching through metaphor can have profound benefits for the body. Melissa Tiers is the founder of The Center For Integrative Hypnosis, and co-founder of the Ethical Coaching Collective. She is also a multi-award-winning author, coach, hypnosis trainer, and a three-time recipient of the International Medical and Dental Association's prestigious Pen and Quill Award for her books. Melissa was featured in many articles, including Marie Claire and More Magazine. She has also been awarded the NGH's 2014 President's Award, for excellence in the field and the 2014 Speaker and Author of the year from the Zurich Hypnose Kongress. She was the 2018 Keynote speaker for the International Medical and Dental Hypnotherapy Association conference, the U.K. Hypnosis Conference and the 2021 keynote speaker for Hypnothoughts Live.
My hypnosis teacher Melissa Tiers and I geek out about the brain and how hypnosis and coaching through metaphor can have profound benefits for the body.
Melissa Tiers is the founder of The Center For Integrative Hypnosis, and co-founder of the Ethical Coaching Collective.
She is also a multi-award-winning author, coach, hypnosis trainer, and a three-time recipient of the International Medical and Dental Association's prestigious Pen and Quill Award for her books.
Starting in March she has an integrative hypnosis training for anyone who's curious about adding this modality to their work.
https://www.melissatiers.com/hypnosis-training
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https://www.instagram.com/melissatiers/
[00:00:00] Welcome to the curiosity cure podcast. I'm your host, Deb Malkin, master certified life coach, body worker, hypnotist trained in pain reprocessing by the pain psychology center, queer elder, fat human on planet earth here to help you evoke the power of simple neuroplasticity techniques rooted in shame free curiosity.
[00:00:29] So you can feel more better. more of the time in the body you have today and build the rich, full life that you want to live. A quick disclaimer, this podcast is not a replacement for medical care. I am here to provide insights and techniques that can compliment your healthcare journey, but always consult with your healthcare provider for personalized advice.
[00:00:57] Deb: Hello feelers and healers this week, I am talking to the one and only Melissa tears, integrative hypnotist, and hypnosis teacher. She, and I kibitz about hypnosis for pain and geek out on the brain. Enjoy listening and picking up any juicy tidbits about how hypnosis can help healing.
[00:01:19] Got a few questions to lead our conversation, but like I'm casual. You're casual. We're just gonna have a fun chat about pain. What do you coach on? I'm like, pain?
[00:01:31] Melissa: You know what? It's better than a Painful chat about pain. So why not?
[00:01:36] Deb: You are my teacher. I've taken your integrative hypnosis class and it's changed my life. I already thought about the brain and body differently than a lot of people, but then. Yeah. Studying hypnosis liberated my imagination and that is like my favorite thing.
[00:01:54] Melissa: I was really fortunate to have been able to craft a career out of what was a fascination, right? So a lifelong fascination with altered states with the mind, which led to the brain and to be able to take something that was, a hobby and almost, you know, an obsession for a while, and spin it into a nice healthy career that allows me to continue to learn and play and develop and be creative.
[00:02:28] This is the curiosity. Um, podcast. Is that what you call it?
[00:02:32] Deb: Yeah. The curiosity cure is the name of the podcast.
[00:02:36] Melissa: Like to me, curiosity is one of my favorite states to be in. I often talk about how exciting it is for me to know that there will never be a cap on this information.
[00:02:49] I will never get to the point, Deb, where you and I are hanging out and I'm like, that's it. I've reached the pinnacle. Like I know everything there is to know about hypnosis or the mind or consciousness or unconsciousness. Like we don't even fucking know what consciousness actually is. And so because of that, I've been in this field for over 25 years. It's always evolving along with me. All the techniques change all of the processes change as I learn and grow. For me, that's 1 of the biggest advantages to our careers is that we don't get bored.
[00:03:27] Deb: Oh, my God. It's the best thing. I really tapped into that when I became a massage therapist and I was like, oh, I can continuously learn and apply what I learned immediately.
[00:03:40] And I don't have to sit in a classroom forever. So that dynamic embodied, learning was so delicious to me and I'm very grateful that I get to continue in that vein, now not touching people's bodies in person, but still being incredibly effective over zoom, which is so magnificent.
[00:04:02] And for me, that really solidifies this idea that there is no separation between the mind and the body. That I can help people feel better without even being in the same room with them.
[00:04:13] Melissa: Yeah. I consider the body to be essentially an extension of the unconscious mind. So when I ask a question, I'm watching the body. The body will tell me before cognition before, the narrative comes. As you know, in our training, I'm always watching. I'm watching you right now, giving me a full bodied yes of agreement. I can see your processing, I can see all of this because to me, there is not just no separation between mind and body.
[00:04:44] I think even just talking about it like that is annoying to me, just 1 system. Let me go over this again and again in the, in the supervision nights, you know, where people will say, well, you know, they were just so in their head. They weren't able to fully and I'm like, God, stop with this dichotomy. It's not real. It's not real. But anyway, I could go on.
[00:05:05] Deb: I think we should start with, your definition of hypnosis. Like, what is it?
[00:05:10] Melissa: Well it's funny because that changes depending on the audience, depending on my mood. Depending on the context. For our purposes, right? I think of hypnosis as a state, marked out by it's an essential ingredient of focused awareness and heightened suggestibility.
[00:05:30] So whatever means by which you get into that state, there's a million ways to, you know, but it is really a type of communication that engages the mind, the belief system expectation in order to shift subjective reality. And in that way we talk about more open to suggestion, meaning not just a suggestion given by a hypnotist to an individual, but the suggestive nature of your own internal processing.
[00:06:06] So we can say hypnosis is a state where you have a, a narrowing of attention, a focused awareness, a pushing aside of that critical factor in the brain, the critiquing default mode network, in order for that heightened suggestibility where you can make a suggestion and your body is listening.
[00:06:28] As you remember from your very first trance with me on the very first hour of my hypnosis training, I'm going to show people how powerful they are. I'm going to take them into even just a light state and show them how you can make a suggestion like your legs are heavy.
[00:06:45] And I'll say you make the suggestion, you're the hypnotist here. All hypnosis is self hypnosis here. So I tell you to make a suggestion that your leg is heavy, and then you find that you're having a hard time lifting that leg because your body is listening when you're in that more open hypnotic state. We dip in and out of these states of hyper suggestibility all day long. This is just a more strategic way of utilizing it.
[00:07:15] Deb: I love that. We're in that state often without any awareness.
[00:07:20] Melissa: Uh, yep.
[00:07:21] Deb: So what I love about doing it on purpose is bringing this level of awareness and we start there and then creating the change and the shift and it's an empowerment process.
[00:07:34] Melissa: About a week ago, I guess, I posted on Instagram just for fun. What's the first thing that pops into your mind when you hear the word hypnosis? And how many people say mind control . And so I'm like, if you said mind control, you're right, more control over your mind than you think. But that's not what they're thinking. They're thinking the old Svengali, you know, the old like manipulation and it's so funny because of all of the therapeutic modalities out there, all of the, you know, complimentary therapies, alternative medicine, hypnosis has the most research and studied in every angle for hundreds of years.
[00:08:22] And yet it's the one that the most popular misconceptions get in because why think about it. Right? Think about the Scooby do episodes we grew up with think about the movies, the Hollywood rendition of the almost Dracula like hypnotist because it's preying on not just our fears, of losing control of being controlled, being manipulated, but it's also preying on our fascination, right? Our idea of the mind and power dynamics and what we're capable of. And so because of that, I think that priming gets in, in a way that, that no amount of research seems to unstick, you know? I used to get angry, like years ago, I would get annoyed.
[00:09:10] One of the coolest things about being a hypnotist is you're almost always guaranteed to be one of the coolest professions in the room. You're at a party, you go to a network meeting, whatever, and you go, Oh, I'm an accountant. Oh, I'm this. Oh, I'm that. You say I'm a hypnotist and people don't just say, yeah, you know, and I'm this, they will stop and step back or take a step forward. Right. That's an interesting thing because it's, it's a gauge, but I used to get really annoyed when I would say that and people would be like, oh, is that real? And I'm like, no, my entire life is a fucking sham.
[00:09:48] The more I learned about the brain, the more I learned about the constructive nature of reality, really we don't fucking know, but it used to be one of my pet peeves.
[00:09:57] Deb: And you, you got over that. What's so interesting for me is because, I love mystery and I love weird things. I'm not very woo. So I like the weird of neuroscience, right? So hypnosis kind of fits perfectly in that Venn diagram. But in my heart, I'm a pragmatist. I want things to be of use to people, not that I don't care why, because I'm not into taking advantage of people. But I think that, belief and expectation is so powerful when we're talking about helping people change their embodied state.
[00:10:34] Melissa: Not just powerful. It is essential, not just for hypnosis. I would say it's essential for any therapeutic modality to work, even medications to work. If you really look at the vast array of research on the placebo response, you'll see just how much belief and expectation play, not just in these kind of subjective modalities, but, you know, how it can block the histamine response or change the inflammatory response in the body.
[00:11:07] It can change the hormonal response in the body. Belief and expectation can actually thwart the actual chemical interactions of a drug, right? When they give people, you know, uppers or downers, but tell them they're getting the opposite. They will experience the opposite of an actual drug interaction in their brain and body. So, you know, we say belief and expectation, but I honestly think that people don't really dive deep into the implications of that.
[00:11:41] Deb: I think they think that it is subjective, that it is an idea of a thing rather than it's playing in your physiology without your conscious awareness.
[00:11:53] Melissa: Yeah. It will turn on or turn off gene expression down to the goddamn cellular reality of what is happening in your body. And that that's something. So like people that really look at the research in let's say, medical hypnosis and pain management, in my classes. I used to when I had a center here in Manhattan, show, doctors, nurses, videos of people having operations with nothing but hypnosis for anesthesia. The jaw dropping expressions on people's faces as they see a woman having a cesarean section while she's singing through it because she was allergic to anesthetics. Yeah, someone having their nose broken and filed and the real fascination. Right. I was having a conversation with a student who was a doctor he was like the fact that they can think I don't want blood to flow to the operation site and that stops the blood flowing is 1 of the most fascinating things, because you and I know that pain is in the brain. You don't really have a felt sense of it until it gets to the upper parts of the brain, you know, and that's why anesthesia works, but when you see things like blood clotting or not, blood flowing or not.
[00:13:16] There used to be this doctor who was known for walking through an emergency room. He was trained in hypnosis and this was like, I think in the fifties and he would walk through and he would see people that were like bleeding all over the floor and he would go and he would say, has somebody come by and told you to stop bleeding and they would stop bleeding .
[00:13:37] Deb: Wow.
[00:13:38] Melissa: 1 of the people that talks about this was, Kate Thompson. She was a hypnosis instructor. She was a student of Milton Erickson. She was a dentist and she would use hypnosis, to work on people with hemophilia so they would not bleed excessively. But then she filmed her own operation. Because she had a deviated septum and needed rhinoplasty, she just kind of talks you through it. She had, a group of dental students around, the first thing she showed them was how they, you know, they put a needle through her, whatever vein and then pulled it out and she would stop the bleeding just on one side of the wound. And explain to them how she's doing it.
[00:14:23] She would say, it's not really anything, except me looking and having a desire to kind of not bleed. A lot of them would experiment with themselves in order to feel more confident and congruent doing it with their patients. Right? Which was also my methodology in class. How many times were you in and out of trance in and out of every 1 of the processes? Because once you feel it yourself, there is an internal congruency that is transmitted. Because of the millions of bits of information we are exchanging even now you and I Deb right?
[00:15:01] Deb: That was 1 of my questions was, can you really have surgery without anesthesia?
[00:15:06] Melissa: Not everyone, but yes, many.
[00:15:08] Deb: What I think is interesting because I'm usually working with people about chronic pain and we have now research, right? That shows that pain moves to a different part of the brain when it becomes learned.
[00:15:20] And that's one of the foundational pieces that helps people unwire these pain behaviors. But I love that story about hypnosis and surgery because that's not chronic pain. That's somebody cutting through your body right there in that moment.
[00:15:36] Melissa: It's not like this idea that most people classify, especially chronic pain, right? And I too find it really useful to explain to clients when they're having chronic pain, what's happening in the brain and how it is not just in their head, it's, it's a full bodied process in that it is a feedback system and a loop of communication. Once you start to explain, look, okay you have these regions in the brain and in all of these many regions, there's like, I don't know, 9 regions, actually 13, I think, but 9, which we can more easily affect using our methodology, but only 5 percent of that region is supposed to be devoted to reading pain signals, but what happens through repetition is, as you put it, it's learned, We start to give up more and more real estate of those regions to the processing of pain.
[00:16:36] What gets lost along the way is all the other shit those regions are supposed to do. Planning, executive functioning, you know, empathy. All the things that if someone is suffering chronic pain for a long time, start to fall by the wayside, right? Emotional regulation, sensual touch, all of these things start to just get dwindled down.
[00:17:01] So when I'm working with clients that have chronic pain, I often refer to it as just taking back the real estate.
[00:17:09] Deb: I love that.
[00:17:10] Melissa: Quite often because so many of the practices are simple, too simple for people to think that it's really effective or important. When I start to explain to them, when you are imagining changing the color of this pain, you're lighting up this region and this region, you're taking some blood flow and activation away from the pain receptors and throwing it over here. You're taking back the real estate. While it might seem fanciful or just imaginative, it has a direct neural correlate, has a direct neural effect and through repetition, you'll be taking back that real estate , and people need a description like that because we're thinking creatures because we do want to know why what's happening.
[00:18:06] We do need to construct a narrative that makes sense enough to practice it.
[00:18:12] Deb: Because of our Cartesian model of the body and pain. We think that pain can only be remedied through doing something to the body. So surgery, medication. We do need a narrative. I don't think don't worry about it, I'll just do something to you kind of approach of hypnosis doesn't really help because people really need to feel empowered and understanding and also need to shift that belief system about how the brain really controls all of it rather than these things are separate or like a remedy of pain only exists in applying it to the body directly.
[00:18:55] Melissa: Right, and also, you know, and that is the thing, it is practice. People that come to a hypnotist with the stereotypical idea, even the old traditional authoritative style of hypnosis that is in a lot of people's minds.
[00:19:11] They are expecting something to be done to them. And yet, any decent hypnotist who's working with pain issues is going to be teaching the client different self hypnotic techniques to practice it through repetition to rewire the brain.
[00:19:30] If you and I had the power to put people in a zombie like state, snap our fricking fingers and say, you'll be pain free. Right? Yeah. We'd be bazillionaires. Quite often I get this question and it's, it's so funny. It typically comes from one of the doctors that I teach or the nurses that I teach where they're like, once they experience the ability of making their hand numb and then transferring that numbness to the place where they had had pain and going numb. They all get that same kind of, I wanna say incredulousness, they're like, why isn't this taught? Why isn't this required in medical school, right? There's like almost an anger there that they've been practicing medicine their whole life, their career, and they never knew that in five minutes they can help someone to absolutely drop into a deep, profound state of comfort, they get angry over it. And part of it is the priming we talked about earlier, hypnosis, is that real?
[00:20:39] You know, but other parts are like, who does the research. We are talking about a billion dollar industry, the pain industry. Using your mind to stop your pain doesn't really benefit the powers that be. Here's the thing about all of this in my mind, there is that piece, pharmaceutical industry it's about the top dollar, that's it. Bottom dollar, bottom dollar, top dollar, both, all the dollars, all the dollars. But what then happens is it trickles down so that the doctor, he's not wanting you to get addicted to opioids he's wanting to help you to get out of pain. And this is the only way they're taught to do it. Then it goes to the people. They don't get that first prescription thinking, Ooh, good. I'm going to become a junkie. I'm going to be dependent on this shit for the rest of my life. No, they just want to be out of pain. Then there's the aspect of society, which is we're in a culture that would much prefer to just give me the damn pill, man.
[00:21:40] Mm-Hmm. don't make me have to practice something, in the same way that it's like meditation beats almost any drug for affect regulation for controlling moods. Exercise will beat out in every single clinical study it beats out antidepressants and anti anxiety. And yet that's a billion dollar industry. So I think rather than just say, oh, it's because of the pharmaceutical industry. It is the culture we live in, that we thrive or don't thrive in that kind of creates this the system where people don't get the help they need, they don't know what's out there. They don't know that you don't need to practice for 45 minutes every day. I get it. I don't have a meditation practice like that, which is why, you know, you've taken my training, almost all of my techniques that I give to clients as homework can be done in under two minutes.
[00:22:39] Deb: That's the perfect segue. I would love, to talk about some of your favorite hypnosis for pain client stories, or even your own story and what you do with hypnosis to help people.
[00:22:54] Melissa: There's many different ways to come at this, right? And it depends on the type of pain and the type of client and all of those things. I can share my chronic pain story, which helped me to develop my chronic pain protocol. I am always, the first guinea pig of almost all of my protocols. And it's funny because, you've heard me talk about, life as graduate school, and what have you majored in? I like to put my degrees to work so I did major in chronic pain for a very long time. I had chronic migraines from age, 14, 15, on till I guess, I developed my protocol and really solved the problem. I want to say when I was maybe 36, 37, and for that, what I had to do is not just learn hypnosis for pain management, but learn practical tools to let go of unexpressed, or ongoing or chronic emotional states. Mm hmm. So, once I realized that a big part of a lot of chronic pain syndromes, and here I studied the work of Dr. John Sarno, and while I don't agree with his view of the unconscious mind, it's very Freudian, I can't argue with his results.
[00:24:17] When you've treated A hundred thousand people and the doctors you've trained in your methodology have treated hundreds of thousands of people to stop their chronic pain, I was made aware of Dr. John Sarno by somebody who said, Oh, yeah, I used to have chronic pain, but then I read this book and I'm like, what? You read a book and your chronic back pain stopped. What book? So by putting together a bunch of different things I had been doing with clients to focus on emotional relief, whether that was, like tapping or bilateral stimulation or hypnosis or NLP, all of those things to let go of unwanted, now, Sarno says it's all unconscious emotions. And I would argue that it's more unexpressed emotions, you know? And for me, it's more about where in your life are you being incongruent, not speaking your truth? Where are you saying one thing but feeling another?
[00:25:20] And for a lot of people, they work for other people, they're, they're unhappy in their lives, their relationships, but are powerless. If you have a boss, that's an asshole. You can't be congruent. You can't say fuck off. So they have to suck it up.
[00:25:35] And what happens is your unconscious mind doesn't like incongruency. It can't stand it. It can't tolerate it. And eventually you're going to feel the pain of that, in one way or another. So sometimes it's that sometimes it's just not listening to the body, pushing through things. I used to use this metaphor where you imagine a woman in the workplace and she's working and it's 5 o'clock, but she's still working, right?
[00:26:01] Because, you know, as a woman in the workplace, you have to work just a little bit more, a little bit harder to where men can be at much more easily because of their gender. And that is still a reality. Anyone that wants to argue with me, just look at the research. Look at the stats. Look at the dollar number, what women earn. Don't get me started. That's a tangent. I could easily go down.
[00:26:20] Deb: It's not a tangent with my audience.
[00:26:23] Melissa: So let's just imagine that woman it's five o'clock, she's got a life other than work, but you know, she's gonna stay a little extra time and do that.
[00:26:31] She starts to get a little pain in her neck, right? We won't talk about, or we could talk about the metaphor of who's the pain in the neck in your life. But she's ignoring it keeps working and that pain gets a little louder, right? It gets a little louder. And now she has to stop and kind of move her neck.
[00:26:48] And she goes back to it and ignores again the signal, right? Pain is a signal. And instead she keeps working until BAM, she gets a full on frickin migraine or headache and now she can't work and she has to go home, right? And I always say if you would have just listened to the whisper, you could have avoided the scream but we often don't.
[00:27:11] And it's our unconscious mind saying, Hey, you worked enough. And so one of the things that I always say about treating my own migraine headaches and basically curing them for good, because I had hard core migraines, I would go into a migraine cluster that could last months. I was on every medication known , at the time I tried everything.
[00:27:38] And then I hit on this combination of using integrative hypnosis, which brings in a bunch of other modalities that have the same effect of changing unconscious processing. You know it would be like a week, two weeks later, and it really was looking at when the pain started. What's happening in my life emotionally at the onset. What's happening in my life today that I'm not expressing. Right? Anger, shame, grief, all of these. And systematically releasing those things. And I will tell you that I ran this as an experiment because I look at life as an experiment.
[00:28:22] I sat down. I want to say for an hour, 2 hours tops. And did the work of thinking, when did it start? What might I have been feeling at that age? What, what was going on emotionally that I wasn't expressing? Oh, there's something that comes to mind. Oh, shit, this comes to mind. And who was I angry at? Oh, well, there it is. And I did use tapping. And then I use a few other techniques and self hypnosis. A week or two went by and my husband at the time was like, Hey, you haven't woken up with a headache. And I was like, Oh my God, that's right. And then a month or two months go by and it's like, at this point, I don't even want to jinx it. Three months mark, I started to teach it.
[00:29:04] A lot of this stuff started to come almost naturally. Before I actually, did the experiment on myself, I remember one client came in for, I think weight loss. And started with, you know, I'm an emotional overeater. Of course, I'm going to go straight for give me some specifics of when you're feeling emotional and then you eat. I remember we spent the whole session working with EFT to just clear a lot of the emotions. Then, I teach the rapid self hypnosis so that she could start to see herself clear of those emotions.
[00:29:39] And she came back two weeks later and says, I don't know what kind of magic you did. I have not had even a trace of my back pain in two weeks, and she didn't tell me she was a chronic pain sufferer. She came weight loss. We didn't even mention pain relief. But just clearing those heavy duty emotions that were going on in her life that made me really stop and think hmm that's interesting.
[00:30:10] With chronic pain typically I have found especially with chronic pain syndromes and what that you know And honestly, I think most chronic pain in terms of syndromes at this point, regardless of how it starts, it could start with an accident, it could start with a medical condition. But as you know, the brain takes the shape of what we do. And if what we do is pain, it starts to take the shape of someone practicing pain.
[00:30:37] So anyway, that's my chronic pain story, it really did change everything for me. Now, if I get a migraine, and very rare, I know it is a direct response to me being incongruent. And so I'm a very honest person. I always say this, I speak my mind not to be in any way an enlightened or advanced being. I speak my mind and I'm honest because I don't want a fucking headache.
[00:31:08] Deb: mmmmmmmmm so loving to yourself, it really is.
[00:31:15] Melissa: I mean, I say that, or it's just, you know, it's just self defense.
[00:31:20] Deb: Well that's one of the things that I work on with my clients is after we've getting some embodied shifts going on, starting to really strengthen that inner conversation.
[00:31:30] What is it that you're not hearing? What are those whispers that you're not hearing from your subconscious? And it's different for everybody. That's also what I love is, It's very personal. We can't generalize like, oh, this neck pain means somebody is a pain in your neck. Like, I get that, but it's not as...
[00:31:55] Melissa: Not if you've been in an accident and you've had an injury in your neck. Yeah, no, I get it. I get it. And while it's funny, and it could be quite metaphorical, and sometimes it often points us in the direction. Someone has sciatic pain and you're like. You got any pain in the asses in your life and what it does is it brings them to the awareness to shine a spotlight on relationships that have some sticky emotions that we need to clear. So while it's not really a direct because of this, it can be a fun little way to.
[00:32:30] Deb: Oh, absolutely. I think that it's fun in the way that it brings people into that world, into thinking about that inner conversation, the relationship, to what they're feeling and what they're not letting themselves feel all of these things.
[00:32:45] When I was doing massage, people would generalize it to this place where they're just this pain equals this reason. And I just like, I'm not saying you're saying that I'm going on my own pet peeve tangent.
[00:33:01] Melissa: It is also 1 of my pet peeves because I look at that when people are like, I had this dream about water. Let me go look up in a book what dreaming about water means. And it's like, you know what, if I almost drowned, my dream about water is going to be very different than your dream about water, which is you love going to the beach or you love sailing, you cannot do that. And in the same way, people used to say, Louise Hay says, or this one says that this means you're taking on too much, this is anger if you've got stomach, it's like, fuck off. How do you know? Stop trying to put us all in a box.
[00:33:39] If anything that working with people has taught me is we are unpredictable and we are far more complex and varied than, any practitioner wants to think because it would be easy, right? If we could look up in a book, what this meant.
[00:33:54] Deb: I think those books are a form of hypnosis in some ways, right? They're priming us to have this simplistic belief, which is not to say that it's complicated. That's always my work, like I'm not trying to fit the client into the book, but I'm helping my clients become congruent, self aware, self empowered, finding their agency, both physically and emotionally so that they are their own expert. Yes, and I'm the guide. I don't know why you're having stomach pain, but then we find out like when you were 5, you know, we start to peel back these layers and find,
[00:34:41] Melissa: but let me interrupt you because I really want to shine the light on a couple of things you just said, which are really vital. That number one, it is a form of hypnosis. Number two, the brain hates uncertainty, but we like to have an answer. Yes. So when we're given a model that seems intuitive. Oh, yeah. You know, shoulder pain, you're holding too much responsibility. Right. That rings true in our narrative, right?
[00:35:09] In our metaphorical mind, we like things like that. It makes sense. It's poetic. The unfortunate thing about that simplistic hypnotic exercise is that it shifts our filtering system so that we start to fit our clients as you said, into that kind of pre prescribed box, and we might miss a lot of the essential individual ingredients.
[00:35:40] We really do get what we look for, you know, and we start to shape the reality of our cognitive awareness. Our filtering system, what we are actually perceiving in the client is shaped by our belief, our expectation. So if you are only sorting for that, you're going to miss certain things. Now, it's fine if you can get that client on board with this delusion, you can move together through it and it'll work. And a lot of these things do work. People are like, oh, well, I needed a rebirthing, but you know what? It's like, you believe that and the practitioner does that for a living and so they're looking at you through this lens you buy into that lens and that rebirthing session is gonna flourish right well what is the placebo response the belief the expectation, it's a hypnotic circle right?
[00:36:37] But if that stomach pain that you were just describing was from a fucking ulcer, then that rebirthing is going to make you miss something vital that could be treated by a doctor.
[00:36:51] Deb: I think one of the reasons why pain reprocessing works is because of the conviction of the practitioner, so obviously we've ruled out, we've ruled out infection and tumors and other things. Right? So when we're sitting down to work, we are in this open frame of all pain is created by the brain and we believe that this is a kind of brain habit of why you're having this pain. So that sense of conviction in that science is part of the therapeutic process and then there's so much room to play. Right.
[00:37:32] Melissa: You know, I'm a bit of a stickler, I think a little bit of neuroscience goes a long way. I don't think you should ever be in a helping people field without knowing at least even the basics of neuroplasticity, it's one of my pet peeves, you gotta at least be curious to look under the hood because really you're, you got one hand tied behind your back if you're trying to help people without understanding how the brain changes.
[00:37:59] Deb: Sure. I think I even just like to start by explaining that the brain changes. Yes. Before we even are like, getting into how and just like, let's just even start there. Cause that is still even a new belief among science.
[00:38:16] Melissa: I'm 56 years old. Right. So I grew
[00:38:19] up. When it was, you're born with a certain amount of brain cells and every joint you smoke, Melissa, you're killing off your brain cells. They don't grow back. Well, that's not true. Or, the brain is always creating all these new connections up until you're no longer a child and then it's all downhill from there. So I grew up with the old paradigms, and I watched it shift. Just kind of fascinating. Yeah.
[00:38:45] Deb: Interesting. That's fun. If you could share 1 thing for anybody experiencing chronic pain about, why they might want to work with a hypnotist, what would that be?
[00:38:56] Melissa: Just to learn how to have more control. Right? Just to learn how to go into states, not just states of comfort, but states that will allow you to rewire this chronic pain , so to me, while there's many modalities that can do these things, hypnosis has a direct line to the unconscious processes. It's the fastest way for you to jumpstart neuroplasticity. I can't think of any faster way to jumpstart the rewiring of the brain.
[00:39:35] Can you do it without a hypnotist. Yes. You'll have to be tenacious and it's going to take a hell of a lot more time and repetition, but of course it can be done. But if you want relief fast. You go to a hypnotist. Totally.
[00:39:48] Deb: I also think, what I love about hypnosis is that it is more fun and creative, right? That we're not just pounding at a problem. The ability to go into metaphor is so profound. Would love for you to just explain hypnosis for pain the role of metaphor, I think is something that I think is pretty powerful. So I'd love to hear you talk about that.
[00:40:16] Melissa: There's different ways of thinking about metaphoric pain intervention. One is what's happening in the brain, right? You're firing off the brain in very different ways when you are thinking metaphorically. The other is the metaphor becomes, a placeholder for the pain. So whatever you do in the metaphor, especially with hypnosis, then naturally transmits or maps across to the actual pain. So I think there's this element of what's happening in the brain when you shift into metaphor.
[00:40:50] As well as the fact that the unconscious mind is quite metaphoric. Besides the almost investigative curiosity that an internal metaphor, an organically arrived metaphor, not one that I give to you, but one that you come up with in hypnosis is so rich with information, so rich for interpretation by that client, because the unconscious mind speaks metaphorically on many levels, but there's also these other layers to therapeutic metaphors, not just the, what I do here in this metaphor is going to carry over into the actual discomfort. And as a vehicle for creating new narratives and understanding around the pain issues.
[00:41:42] But there's also things that you can only get at through story or metaphor. I posted on Instagram and a story, these two women are in the front of a marathon and one starts to lose it. She can't keep running. She starts to collapse and the other one keeps helping her up and literally guides her across the finish line. And between that and the music playing, you feel this chemical rush of emotion.
[00:42:11] And I couldn't get it that emotion directly if you paid me a million dollars, I couldn't say to a client, let's come up with something that combines a feeling of hopefulness, sadness that will refresh your view of human nature, affects your heart and releases oxytocin ,makes you sad and makes you wistful. Like how do we get at this directly that comes so immediately through that visual story.
[00:42:46] There's something because we work with emotional states. There's something beautiful about a story and how it allows us to feel things that are just too complex to derive that in any other way. And I think it's an aspect of metaphor that most people don't talk about this chemical cocktail of emotions that that can happen in a flash. And so I shared it today with a simple request to just notice how you're feeling.
[00:43:22] Like I have this bizarre compulsion, which God, it's just not always great that I watch these like animal rescues and I'll just sob. At a certain point, I've got a client and I've gotta be like, pulled together and I'm sitting here like crying over this dog that finally has love.
[00:43:44] You know? It's like, why? Why do I do that? It's like I seek it out almost. I'll seek it out. Mm. I've watched a video that made me cry and I will show it to my sister to make her cry, what is that?
[00:43:59] Deb: You know, it has that kind of drug like quality, right? It really gets you into this emotional frame. And instead of thinking, you're just in this deep feeling state.
[00:44:11] Melissa: There's that, and yes it keeps me asking the question and my whys are really just open, it keeps me in curiosity. And it also keeps me marveling at the ridiculousness or beauty or quirkiness of our species that we do these things. That we seek out those moments of connection because empathy, our brains are wired for it.
[00:44:41] And in that moment, we get to straddle perceptual positions. We are the fly on the wall perspective, we're the perspective of the recipient of that care, but we're also in the perspective of the person helping the runner, so we get to be in three different perceptual positions at once.
[00:45:03] You know, I, I came at that, kind of idea when I would read these like damn you autocorrects. Have you read those?
[00:45:11] Deb: Yes. My God. Those are amazing.
[00:45:14] Melissa: For beginners, just Google the 50 best damn you autocorrect dot com. So much of them are like raunchy. They made me laugh like nothing had made me laugh in a long time.
[00:45:27] And I remember the moment because I was grieving the loss of my dog who died suddenly and it was the worst morning I had ever experienced and somebody sent me the, this list of damn you autocorrect. And I laughed so hard that the back of my head hurt. It was like my skull, like something was happening to my brain that I was laughing so hard, tears were coming and I'm sharing it.
[00:45:55] I remember sharing it with John Overdurf and watching tears come out of his eyes as he was laughing hysterically. But then I would meet someone who didn't think they were funny. And I'd be like, how can you not laugh at that? I don't understand you at all. And I started thinking, why the fuck do I find these so funny that I could read the same one five times and still laugh. And I realized it was one of those rare moments where you can indeed straddle those perceptual positions because you are at the same time, the person who sent the text and the person who received the text, as well as the person observing that interaction. You are at those perceptual positions at the same time.
[00:46:42] Yeah, I don't know. You know, I overthink things.
[00:46:45] Deb: I think that that's a brilliant piece of thinking and I kind of love how you enjoy something and then you re enjoy it by perceiving the experience, perceiving the you who had been experiencing that and exploring it.
[00:47:02] I love your brain so much and I appreciate you. Thank you for coming on here. I do feel like we could probably have 17 more conversations about the brain and pain, but I think that. This has been, this was a good one, you know, this was a good conversation. Thank you so much. I appreciate you and your time.
[00:47:24] How can people learn more about what you do?
[00:47:27] Melissa: You can go to melissatiers. com that's my main website. I have trainings. I'm not sure when this is coming out, but I have a integrative hypnosis training coming up a two month course starting in March that people might wanna jump onto if you're a practitioner or wanna be a practitioner.
[00:47:45] Instagram is at Melissa Tiers.
[00:47:47] Deb: I will link to all of those things as well. I'll let you know when it comes out.
[00:47:52] All right. Bye.
[00:47:53] If you're not on my email list, hop on there because I started this email called Musical Mondays, I'm sharing a song with everybody from a musical that helps evoke a certain feeling state, and there's some prompts to invite you to be curious and to notice the feelings and sensations and the thoughts that are coming up when you're listening to this song.
[00:48:17] One of the things that I believe is having a guide through this process can absolutely make it less confusing, more clear, giving you very personalized steps for your mind body healing process. That's what I help create with my clients. It is personalized because everybody is different. Everybody's life experiences are different and it's important to treat yourself with love and curiosity and having a coach can help you reflect back what's working and what's not working and help you create your own bespoke way forward and way through, right? Alan Gordon calls it the way out. I might call it the way through.
[00:49:09] Feel free to book a curiosity call with me. I would love to hear your story and talk to you about mind, body healing and how we can work together. And for each podcast, I post a specific Instagram post, so you can just hop on there on that post and share with me anything that's been helpful, or any questions that have popped up from this conversation, because I would love to hear from you. Thank you. Bye.