Illness and Its Message

A light begins to flash on the dashboard of your car. You groan: something's obviously wrong with the engine. You call a mechanic. He arrives - but all he does is take the light-bulb out!

"But you haven't fixed the engine," you protest.
"But the bulb's no longer glowing," he replies with a grin.

You get stomach-aches repeatedly. The doctor tells you to take Zantac and you're fine. For a bit - till the next time your stomach hurst...To take Zantac is merely to take the bulb out..

The body is neither ill nor healthy: all it ever does is give us messages. By and large, Western medicine has almost wholly been preoccupied with squashing the symptoms - killing the messenger, in effect, without hearing the message. Taking the bulb out.

Which works in the short term - Aspirin will get rid of the head-ache. But for the long term you'll need to do something entirely different if you are to avoid having the headache turn into something far more nasty. You'll need to decode the message your illness is sending you.

The key that hypnotherapists like myself use to decode the message concealed within an illness is to ask what the symptoms are preventing the client from doing - or, equally valid, - what the symptoms are forcing them to do. So, for example, a flu prevents the workaholic banker from working: it forces him to rest. He could of course pop a few Paracetamols and go back to work but chances are he'll end up with something worse.

The seriousness of the illnesses we suffer are perfectly correlated to how soon we sit up and take notice. It all turns on how much we need provocation before we are prepared to listen.