You're standing at a stoplight and suddenly you're lying in the pillow of your airbag. Some idiot has parked his car in your trunk and now you have whiplash. It's a scenario that unfortunately happens more often than you'd like. A stupid accident can have dire consequences if it has caused you to use your neck violently, or actually has been used because your head has been shaken back and forth with great force.
As a result, you can experience an awful lot of pain symptoms and some people even suffer from chronic pain due to whiplash. If this is your problem and if you want to do something about it read on.
What is whiplash?
Whiplash is actually the action that causes you to suffer from pain. Usually you get into a traffic accident that causes your head to move forward and backward at speed, bending your neck in a way you usually don't.
As in the example, whiplash is often thought to happen only in rear-end collisions, but you can also suffer whiplash in frontal and side impacts.
What symptoms can you get from whiplash?
With whiplash, many people think that your shoulders and neck will be bothered for a while. This is generally the case, but unfortunately, you can have chronic symptoms from whiplash that can turn your life quite upside down. However, many complaints do involve pain:
- Chronic pain
- Hypersensitive to pain anywhere or in certain areas of the body (often the neck and shoulders)
- Pain in a place other than the neck
- Pain from stimuli that do not normally cause pain
- Lesser reflexes, such as when your kneecap is tapped under and then your leg comes up.
- Pain that cannot be properly reduced by pain in another place in the body.
- Pain is picked up better after stimuli that are supposed to cause pain than in people who do not have whiplash.
Because of all the pain, many people with whiplash also have secondary symptoms, such as:
- Depression
- Negative thoughts
- Fear (of moving)
- Post traumatic stress (can also be due to the cause of whiplash)
Treatment of whiplash injuries
One of the first tips doctors give for most symptoms is to live a healthy life. Pay attention to your diet and adequate exercise. With whiplash symptoms, you have to be careful with this. Research has shown that people with whiplash often experience more pain when they exercise, so the pain does not diminish as in healthy people who suffer from pain.
Therefore, it's best to eat super healthy, so being athletic is not necessary for a healthy weight. Exercise is still important, but you don't have to totally sweat yourself out.
If you've just had whiplash and the effects are not yet clearly chronic, Swedish massage can also help well with the pain symptoms.
In the process, psychological treatments for pain have also been shown to help one suffer less from fear of pain, move more and also feel less pain while moving. In the 2014 study Chronic whiplash: evidence for altered central pain processing and treatment implications, people with chronic pain from whiplash were given some kind of lesson on pain from whiplash and psychological support what produced this effect.
Research also shows that people with chronic pain benefit most from a combination of psychological support in which one is taught about the pain combined with hypnosis and practicing self-hypnosis at home. According to the 2015 study Efficacy and cost-effectiveness: A study of different treatment approaches in a tertiary pain center, this combination of self-hypnosis and psychological support helps to reduce the intensity of pain, lowers the impact of pain on the client's daily life, reduces anxiety and depressive symptoms, and improves quality of life.
Why does hypnosis help against whiplash?
Hypnosis helps with the pain of whiplash in multiple ways.
Hypnosis actually affects how the brain works. It can literally change the structure of brains and, as a result, it can even alter pain perception in the brain. It is not yet clear how hypnosis does this, but MRI scans show that hypnosis does.
Then hypnosis also helps you in the psychological way. For example, hypnosis is often combined by psychologists with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Indeed, results are then achieved faster, especially if the client uses self-hypnosis.
Hypnosis also plays on the subconscious mind. In fact, your subconscious is controlled by the beliefs you have about how the world works and how you function in it. If you actually want to walk, but something is blocking you, it is usually your subconscious responding to an unconscious belief. For example, the unconscious fear of pain during movement can result in this.
To find out what your beliefs are and what the hypnosis expert can use to help you suffer less from whiplash symptoms, you first have an interview. In this, questions are asked about your complaints and about what you like. Like your favorite color or a nice place you have ever been on vacation.
This information is then used to apply later during various hypnosis techniques.
Hypnosis techniques against whiplash symptoms
There are multiple techniques that can be used to reduce symptoms. From experiences of our members and clients, we know that even the check of being in hypnosis, armlevitation can be enough to get rid of whiplash symptoms. This does depend on the severity of the pain symptoms. There are also other techniques that can be used.
Armlevitation
Arm levitation is used to remove unconscious blockages. When the hypnotist does this properly, you will notice that your arm rises at his command. This means, among other things, that you are in hypnosis and can let go of control and thus change the problem.
There are all kinds of ways you can do this with the arm levitation. You can make the levitation a symbol of change and shift of the problem. The levitation can also be used to change the focus from what once went wrong to the possibilities of what all can go right.
So it also makes perfect sense that armlevitation may be enough for some people to suffer less from whiplash symptoms, but sometimes you may need an extra push.
Disentangling visualization
Once you have performed the arm levitation, the hypnosis expert also knows you are in hypnosis. Then other techniques can also be used to reduce pain and the like.
Many people with chronic pain after whiplash often feel that all the nerves in and around the neck have become tangled, making the pain difficult to treat in mainstream care.
Some people go so far as to have their necks stretched, with all kinds of risky treatments.
Fortunately, you can also perform a disentangling visualization. After the arm levitation or another hypnosis induction, you will then get a guided visualization in which you visualize how all the nerves in your neck are neatly straight and combed back into place.
This disentangling visualization can help tremendously to eliminate the feeling of the knot in the neck and also experience more freedom of movement as a result.
Visualization can go as follows:
"You are floating in the clouds and lying on a warm cloud. The light of the sun shines on you and warms your body. A thick ray shines on your neck and the knot in your neck. The warmth of that ray penetrates deep into the knot and untangles it. Like a brush going through your hair or a comb detangling your beard again you feel stroke by stroke your neck relaxing and you feel the knot getting smaller and smaller until all your nerves are neatly back in place."
This is just an example of a guided visualization. Depending on your symptoms and feeling in the neck, the hypnosis expert may give you a different visualization.
Changing beliefs with hypnotic suggestions
Pain is 1 part of the symptoms after whiplash. Another component is the fear of the pain and beliefs about how the pain prevents you from performing your daily activities. Above all, a lack of freedom of movement is perceived as a major complaint.
Hypnotic suggestions can be used to change beliefs. These cause helpful beliefs to come to the forefront and non-helpful beliefs to be directed more to the forgetting corner in your brain. You also repeat these suggestions at home during self-hypnosis. You practice this first with the hypnosis expert.
These may include suggestions such as:
"I still have a lot of potential."
"Pain does not define me."
"My friends also want to meet with me when I'm in pain."
"My friends and family help me."
These are just examples of suggestions. Depending on your beliefs, you may receive other suggestions from the hypnosis expert.
Want to learn more about how hypnosis works and if you can help other people with it? Then come to a hypnosis playshop or other event.
Sources:
https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/4291307
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1529943015012346
http://www.forskningsdatabasen.dk/en/catalog/2390644676
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejp.674
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6fa7/7a01c25557ce5ec024898aae715582fd4fd2.pdf
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ch.34
