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If you're like most of us who have known chronic pain, you've tried one thing after another to ease your suffering. Here are three reasons why working with your subconscious and having a well-defined strategy may increase your chances of success.

When you're in pain you're willing to try almost anything to ease it. So you end up tracing a zig-zag course from doctor to doctor, drug to drug and therapy to therapy. Hopefully you gain some relief from all this but most likely you don't gain nearly as much as you want or need.

Having a clearly defined strategy offers advantages that may change your results for the better, particularly if you engage your subconscious mind as your partner in pain relief.

The Role of Visualization Statements

When creating your strategy, it's useful to consider including visualization statements as one of the components.

Visualization statements represent the specific language that your subconscious wants you to read back to it to help ease your pain. They're simple and are targeted directly at the main factors that could bring you relief.

You can obtain these statements by learning how to communicate directly with your own subconscious mind. The process is straightforward and can be done at home by working with a facilitator over the telephone. You you need no special skills and no previous experience in working with the subconscious.

Here are three reasons why having a strategy makes sense:

1 A Strategy Allows You To Address The Complexity Of the Problem

The process by which a pain signal is transmitted from the periphery of your body to the brain is highly complex. The signal is generated, relayed, modified and amplified at many different places that can be called pain leverage points.

The first goal of pain relief is to interrupt the signal, or at the very least to reduce its frequency. You can try to do so at only one or two leverage points and it may work. But you have a higher chance of success if you use your subconscious to attack the signal pathway at many leverage points.

The only way to do this is by having a clear strategy. The problem is too complex to address by a hit or miss methodology.

2 A Strategy Allows You To Choose Your Battles

If the bad news is that the pain process is complicated, the good news is that not all of it may apply to you. Some of the pain leverage points may not matter in your case, while others may be crucially important to the transmission and amplification of the pain signal to your brain.

By having a strategy that calls for you to use your subconscious to carefully inventory every leverage point, you give yourself the ability to focus your efforts where they most matter.

For example, if you can identify three or four of the pain leverage points that most matter to your perception of pain, you can use visualization statements to attempt to reduce the signal at those points.

3 A Strategy Allows You To Take Ownership Of Your Situation

Too often chronic pain leads to a loss of control. This can add a layer of emotional distress on top of your pain, actually making it seem worse.

A strategy puts you in the driver's seat. It gives you an intelligent plan for dealing with your situation, one that your conscious mind understands and your subconscious may be able to use as a tool for reducing the pain signal. This builds a sense of self-confidence that in itself can help to ease pain.

A Solid Value

For the three reasons given above, having a strategy can bring you real value in your search for pain relief. Whatever components you put into that plan--therapies, drugs, specialists, and so on--is up to you. But the important thing is to have some kind of a strategy.

As we've seen, visualization statements offer several benefits that may be able to make your strategy more effective:

• Scope. Visualization allows the subconscious to range freely over the pain leverage points. The subconscious may be able to address most or even all of them, while drugs, for example, may be currently available for only a few of them.

• Focus. Visualization can probably help the subconscious identify the leverage points that make the most difference in the transmission of pain signals to your cortex. This allows you to focus the subconscious on reducing the signal at the most critical junctures.

• Initiative. Visualization is a proactive process that you personally engage in to try to establish control over your pain. Unlike drugs and other therapies that are "done" to you, visualization allows you to take the initiative. This helps to reduce the sense of helplessness and build a feeling of self-confidence.

This may be true regardless of whether you have back pain or pain in other extremities, arthritis pain, fibromyalgia pain, or neuropathic pain (nerve pain).

Ben Plumb is CEO and President of The Visualization Group, Inc. The company's service is delivered by people like himself who personally suffered from years of chronic pain, and used the visualization method described in this article to obtain relief when nothing else worked.