Hannah: [00:00:00] My name is Hannah, nurse and Hypnotist, and I am joined by Christy Cowgill another nurse and hypnotist among other things. It's so nice to talk to you again, Christy.
Christy: I know Hannah. I always enjoy our conversations. They're so fun.
Hannah: I know I'm excited for today and I figured since we've had a few conversations now, it would be a great time to learn a little bit more about you and led you to where we are today into this conversation. Would love to hear a little bit of backstory.
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Hannah: You can go back as far as you'd like, but at least starting with your nursing journey.
Christy: Yeah. Yeah. I think I was obviously like many nurses, maybe just destined to be a nurse. I can't remember a time except for a short snippet when I wanted to be a respiratory therapist. And then it flipped back into nursing, like ever since I was able to declare a vocation and so I went straight from high school into nursing and in short order, I actually ended up in urse anesthesia training. I didn't know what a nurse anesthetist was initially. I actually had considered doing the nurse practitioner route and I was in the ICU and it just led me into the world of anesthesia, which I trust the universe and there's no mistakes there. So in 2003, I became a CRNA.
At the age of 27 [00:02:00] and that's where I started. My career in anesthesia and was very quickly introduced to this concept of hypnosis by a fellow nurse anesthetist who had been using hypnosis alongside his anesthesia practice for decades. So he was a coup, obviously a couple decades ahead of me career wise, but it was as that baby nurse anesthetist that I really learned from him the power of language and day to day, I would see how powerful language could be. So I'll give you a clinical example because as a fellow nurse, you know, sometimes we give pain medications or local anesthetics and we inject them, or we have the person take a pill and we see the amazing effects of pharmacology day in and day out, right?
We can't deny that we have some amazing drugs that we really need [00:03:00] in our world. And what I found to be true is I could have a conversation with somebody in the pre-surgical area right before we even went through the threshold into the operating room, and people are very oftentimes anxious in that situation and sometimes.
They're in a lot of pain or discomfort. That's why we're going into surgery. And it was more often than not, after maybe three to five minutes in a conversation, they would look at me and they said, "Christy, did you already start the medication? I'm feeling so relaxed' or they would say,"wow, did you start the medication because my pain is really, it's so much better now. I feel like I'm in a better place." And what I learned is I hadn't yet given them any medication. And so as I learned how to really craft my language around, oriented towards what the client wanted, which was usually [00:04:00] calm and comfort. That's what we actually want.
Even when we're in a sea of pain and disarray and fear, we really desire calming comfort when I could orientate my language that way I could lead them into. Having this release of endogenous neurochemicals and endogenous endorphins that would interact with their body in a way that they actually thought that I had given them some medication already.
And I just thought that was so powerful. And, and I always pause here and I say, and I still did give them their anesthesia drugs as well. But it just helped me realize that our mind is way more powerful than we give it credit for, or that we, in this day and age than we allow people to have the agency to take control over.
So that was my first introduction to that. And I think it just shaped how I would talk to my patients and talk to fellow nurses [00:05:00] around the conversations of just that in-hospital experience and how we can shift that.
Hannah: Thank you for sharing that. As I'm sitting here and I'm assuming many of our listeners are also experiencing this, you do have a very naturally hypnotic voice, and you're so well studied in this that a couple times as you were talking, I was just sitting back and forgetting that I have a role here to continue to interact with you.
So I, in my mind, I was like, Hannah. Pay attention. That's great. But I just love that example that you gave and I think it's one that everyone can relate to whether or not someone has personally been in a surgery themselves or had a family member witnessed it, but we know what that pre-surgery anxiety can be like or that pre-surgery pain or discomfort.
So it's just amazing to hear that this tool exists. In conjunction with things that we're already doing. Absolutely. I wonder if you can indulge me and tell another, give another example, and it's one that I know you've [00:06:00] given before, but I think this is one of my favorite examples that you've given with the power of hypnosis and language specifically.
And that's in the post-op setting that you've experienced when you would be with patients after surgery. And I don't know if you know where I'm going this going with this, but it relates to pain and do you know where I'm going with this?
Christy: I'm not sure yet.
Hannah: You ask patients after surgery it's so common that the first thing that patients are asked is they're woken up is, oh, are you in pain?
Christy: Yeah.
Hannah: And you discovered that there's another question that you can actually ask. And so I'll let you take it. Take it from
Christy: here. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really understanding how the mind works, right? So I'm gonna give you a nonclinical example. 'Cause I think this works for everyone.
If I were to tell you, you know what? I don't want you to think about a blue elephant. So whatever you do while we're in conversation, do not think of [00:07:00] a blue elephant and check in with yourself and how is that going for you?
Not well, because our, there's part of our mind that doesn't understand negatives.
And I give you that example, don't think about a blue elephant. We have to think about a blue elephant in order not to think about a blue elephant, right? Then we're like, okay, if I think about an elephant, it's gonna be pink. Or if I think of a animal, it's gonna be a giraffe and maybe I'll make the draft blue.
Like we do these funny things like really quickly in our mind. And the same is true if we're going in and we're asking the patient or the client what is your pain score? Don't get me wrong, when the powers that be right said that we really do need to pay attention to pain. And it is a subjective experience of the client and we need to measure that was our moment where we could have declared that language had a power, right? So now when we go in and we say, what's your pain score? And we said, zero to 10, ten's the worst pain [00:08:00] of your life. Where are you on that pain score? The mind has to go into the body and ask "what is my assessment of pain?"
So if we can change that language to "how comfortable are you?" We could still say, are you amazingly comfortable? And are you as comfortable as you ever could be and still get this a likert scale score? And we could still assess somebody's discomfort based on their comfort.
But when we ask this that question, how much pain do you have, right? Person has to actually start to scan their body and do the exact opposite of what we would like them to do. Another example is, we gave the surgery example, but oftentimes. Childbirth, right? The woman has a surge. We have to have those muscle contractions for baby to come out and healthcare professionals be like, oh, how bad was that one?
[00:09:00] Right? And that just makes us check in with our body and we have to then assess, oh my gosh, I, something just happened. Maybe it should have been painful and. So kind of, just we've made some mistakes there. We have an opportunity to fix 'em and we can fix them. One, one nurse at a time, one interaction at a time.
Yeah. And the other thing that we often ask too is like how's your nausea? Postoperatively, we know that anesthesia lends itself to that nauseous feeling. Sometimes just discomfort in the body can create nausea. And again, we're asking. We're asking them to assess like something that we don't want them to actually have.
So I would always also say ask the client if, or ask the patient if they're hungry, right? Because I don't know, did anybody here go to college? You know that from your days of maybe being a little hungover from alcohol. And you were a little nauseated. You were not hungry at the same time.
So there's like this physiologic impossibility [00:10:00] of those two existing at the same time. So if you just ask somebody, Hey, are you feeling hungry? You can still get at the same end result. 'cause if they say, no, I'm not hungry at all, actually, my stomach's a little upset. At least we're letting them lead with that experience instead of us coming with the language.
Assessment upfront, right?
Hannah: Yeah. You're essentially giving them the idea that they could be in pain or that they could be nauseous, and if they weren't actually thinking about that. It's reminds me of that classic example when a child falls in a playground and they look to their parent or adult to see what they should be feeling.
And I think there's this expectation that surgery is painful. Surgery will cause me to have pain after surgery even, or I will be nauseous from anesthesia. And having that expectation, I think also can influence influence things. But I think that's so amazing that. [00:11:00] You have these other ways of communicating with patients and you're not ignoring their pain, you're not ignoring that they maybe have nausea.
You're just not promoting it to them. Which I think is, I just love, thank you for sharing those. I just love those examples and I hope listeners do too.
Christy: Yeah, I hope so. Because I think some of our listeners are gonna be nurses and nurse coaches. Like how can we be more impeccable with our language?
Hannah: Absolutely. We mentioned pain and I wanted to now pivot to a book that you recently
Christy: Yeah.
Hannah: Wrote and I have several questions about your book. It's titled Befriending Pain. And so my first question is, why this book? Why now?
And. Yeah, let's start there.
Christy: Yeah. So it's befriending pain, it's practical guide to the mind body connection and reclaiming control.
And I think this book was in me for quite some time. And why now is, [00:12:00] I'm transitioning away from full-time practice in anesthesia as a CRNA, more into psychiatry mental health as a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner. And. The overlap there is chronic pain and depression and a little bit of anxiety and trauma as well.
So I wanted to highlight those four diagnoses that oftentimes will interplay with one another. So part of the first part of this book is unpacking what is pain and also. It's a co friend, which is usually depression. And in anesthesia I would work with chronic pain.
I was credential and nonsurgical pain management. So I would work a lot of times with chronic pain and interventions, different epidural or nerve blocks to help with chronic pain. And oftentimes the patients would ask, "Am I crazy?" " Is this all [00:13:00] in my head?" And they would also be very depressed.
They'd be avoiding social situations. I don't know if it was 'cause of the pain or because of depression and I don't think it really matters of what came first, but there was some overlap there. So my vocational career in anesthesia has, I've spent a lot of time working with clients with pain and three years ago I had my own pain journey, I herniated an area of my back that had previously had a back injury. So by before I was age 50, I entered the operating room for my third back surgery, and this was a double level spinal fusion. And there was a horrendous amount of neuro neuropathy, and meaning like nerve compression from that particular injury.
Plus I had my own experience of now being in that operating room preoperatively and then in recovery and waiting sometimes impatiently for my back [00:14:00] to mend and to heal for the bone to start to establish itself so my comfort level would increase. So part of the book was my own journey. So each chapter I unpack a little bit more of my, how I applied some of these mind-body tools to self.
So tools that I had been giving long time to my. My patience and to my clients I was now having to utilize on myself. I just felt like it was time. The second portion of the book goes into different tools that I found really effective for myself and that I know are really effective for me to teach quickly to clients and for them to.
Use on themselves. And I know in our last conversation, we talked about tools that you use for running. All hypnosis is self hypnosis, right? I can help guide a client there, but [00:15:00] ultimately them being able to rehearse it or use those tools is the practice that they can invite and it only has to be two or three minutes a day, can really make a huge difference, and that's what I was doing. That's all I had capacity to do when I was really trying to recover from surgery was two to three minutes a day would make my day. Far better, right? I would have, I would consume less pain medication, I would be able to walk further. I would have more attention for my kids instead of being irritable.
It was really just a game changer to be able to use tools. That were quick and efficient. They were far more effective than some of the other medications that I could use. And so that was why I wrote the book. I think mostly because I had a lived experience of knowing that these worked and being three years out.
I [00:16:00] will tell you that was my own personal journey. It took me three years to get back. Into the gym. It took me three years to, for my body to feel comfortable sitting on a bike and pedaling for an hour. It was a lengthy recovery. And. I am so grateful that I am where I am today and back to hiking and snowshoeing and backpacking and doing the things that I really love with my family.
"Befriending Pain" became the title because I really did have moments where. I would call my back all sort of of things. And sometimes there was a lot of four letter words, even if it was just in my head and I would just be Rrrrrah! And then I turned the language to 'my nerve is really spicy today.'
To actually just changing that to ... my body's just letting me know it's had a little bit much today. And then being able to pause and that gentleness [00:17:00] really, being kind and gentle and loving to my body, and even in the language, made all the difference, right?
Hannah: Wow.
Christy: Yeah.
Hannah: Thank you so much for sharing that with me and with our listeners.
I think that's so ultimately inspiring that you used your clinical, your professional expertise and then a deeply personal and moving story and transformed it into something that. Ultimately helped you, and then it's gonna help a lot of other people as well. Yeah. Can you, I'm wondering if you can take us into what, for someone who maybe is struggling with pain?
Christy: Yeah.
Hannah: And for someone who is really in the thick of it, how do they start? How, what do those two minutes look like? Or even if it's one minute, can you give us an example of is a good starting place for people?
Christy: Yeah. I think the ultimate starting place is with the breath.
Okay. [00:18:00] Oftentimes, if we are experiencing pain in our body, we are breathing with just a little itty bitty part of our upper lung. Because to breathe deeper, we're it. We're almost just bracing ourselves for the next surge of discomfort. So it first starts with being able to find your breath again.
And when we think about that as hypnotist, right? We're talking about the conscious and the unconscious parts of the mind, right? And the conscious part is that lo logical analytical part, that's making decisions that's doing our day-to-day prefrontal cortex task. Our unconscious mind is breathing For us, it's keeping our heart beating.
It's it's all our habits and beliefs and patterns that we're not always aware of until we are. So the breath becomes a bridge from that logical prefrontal cortex, a analyzer to just. Temporarily [00:19:00] taking control over something that your body's gonna automatically just continue to do when you stop focusing on that.
So hypnosis is all about shifting our focus and our attention. So when we take a breath and we're paying attention to it, we're automatically downregulating our nervous system to change its attention from being out there paying attention to the cast of the world. I'm just gonna pay attention to one breath.
And feeling it in the body. 'cause then once we take that one breath in and that nice long exhale, we're shifting the nervous system to allow us to pause, reset, and nourish. And that's when we can really invite in the power of the imagination, right? So now we can start to spend that other.
Two and a half minutes if we're going for three minutes, really starting to do things that can help turn down that [00:20:00] pain noise. Right. And I think the reason that the book title is a Simple Dial is because. That was the most accessible for me was to just now see a dial in the inner parts of my cranial vault, right?
That I could close my eyes and just get in tune with and just turn the noise of that experience down a notch. Like I would never turn it off. Or I could try, I could see it like, can I just turn it all the way off? Can I make the noise louder? Can I really amplify it? And then I could really get a sense of how I can, in my mind's eye, just turn it down a little bit and maybe a little bit more, maybe dial it down to a one or a two and just sit with a one or a two for two to three minutes.
And by practicing that, what I found is that I could easily do it. When my body was saying, Hey Christy, you're really tired. And I was like I'm about 15 minutes from [00:21:00] home, right? And maybe my body was starting to let me know, Hey, you need to rest. Now it's at its capacity. I could say, alright, I'm gonna turn it down.
I hear you body. I'm gonna turn it down a little bit and as soon as I get home I'm gonna tend to it. So then I would, I was dealing with a back injury, right? So then I would get home, put my legs up. And then relax and rest, put ice on my back if it needed ice or heat and kind of take care of it.
But having that internal dial became something that I knew I could control, right? And it might not take it all away, but I could turn it down. And that gave me so much agency, and that is a really quick thing that. By initiating the breath 'cause it's the bridge into the unconscious, right? Then I could easily imagine a dial and just get my mind's eye around that and just turn it down a little bit.
And maybe if it was a day where my body was really asking for a [00:22:00] lot of attention, I might have to use that dial, once an hour, once every 20 minutes. But that's okay because I could get to it really at the speed of thought.
Hannah: That's amazing and probably I imagine gave you a sense of empowerment that you had agency use that word, and I know control can feel like a negative word, but have more power, more control over your experience and I bet that felt really empowering.
Christy: Yeah. And the other thing about pain is oftentimes we try to escape from it, right?
So we could talk about physical pain in the body, or emotional pain, right? If we're, or stress of our work week, right? We're trying to escape from, it comes Friday, Hey, we're gonna head to the bar and we're gonna drink our sorrows away, right?
Distance ourself from the discomfort di distance ourself from the stress when that pain is physical. It doesn't [00:23:00] feel safe to be in the body, so a lot of times we'll just try anything to distract ourselves away and not pay attention. I love that you said agency and control because it reminded me that one of the important things about having the dial inside of yourself is that you're in your own body again instead of distancing away from it.
So that does give you a sense of control from the inside out instead of having something else be that thing that's helping you control it, distraction or drugs or alcohol or, something like that. So
Hannah: that's wonderful. I'm wondering if you could just briefly share for someone who maybe is listening who.
Wants a little more support in how to go through this, how hypnosis and working with a hypnotist can be helpful. And then if you could shamelessly plug where people can read your book and how people can get in touch with you, I'm sure we would all really [00:24:00] appreciate that.
Christy: Yeah. I appreciate that question because sometimes we're too close to our own problems to be s upportive to ourselves, right? That's why we have tea with a good girlfriend or seek outside support. And this mind-body thing is no different, right? I knew what I knew, but I still hired my own hypnotherapist at the time to really help support because I was in a pattern of. Focusing on the pain.
And that person just helped me to realize, to take my power back. So that's where working with a hypnotist is powerful because they can see beyond your blind spots. And hypnosis is one of the tools that is pretty efficient and effective quickly. So it doesn't take 8, 10, 12 sessions. Sometimes it does, but on average three to six, you get as much power there as you would [00:25:00] with three times as many talk therapy sessions.
And that's what we know. We know that when we combine hypnosis with cognitive behavioral therapy, for example, we get like an 80%, 85% success rate compared to just China. Think our way through it alone. You and I are part of a team of nurses who know and have, are all certified as hypnotists, right?
So I think for these clinical experiences, like somebody with pain should reach out to a trusted healthcare professional, a nurse who understands the mind. Power and how to utilize this thing called hypnosis. And all of us as nurses also teach our clients self hypnosis, right? Nurses are in a wonderful setting to be that educator and that model of empowering the client.
Here's how you can apply self-hypnosis, right? Here's how you can do [00:26:00] it and it's gonna work for you. Because we wanna make sure that it's personalized. We wanna make sure that our. Our hypnosis is personalized to the individual. That's why some people will call us and they'll be like, Hey, I've tried hypnosis and it doesn't work for me.
And you'll be like what were you doing? And they're just listening to an app that's maybe generic, but their problem is unique to them. And when a nurse can hear their language and then bring it back to them in a way that their mind body connects, that's gonna be magical, right? That's gonna be where we get the most influence.
My book I've decided to publish it with Lulu. Lulu Books. It's an indie publisher, so you can go to lulubooks.com and look up "Befriending Pain" and you can find it there. And they just, they print copies and send them directly to you, like Amazon, but it's not Amazon. It's a smaller company and I appreciate working with those smaller companies by design.
It takes a couple more days to get your [00:27:00] book, but the printed copy is just so much more beautiful, to be honest. You can go to Lulu, you can get the book, and then if you're working with one of the CCC members, our Calm Collective Care and you're working on -pain. I will order a book for you.
If you're listening and you have chronic pain, I will order it for you, and that way you can go through it with your nurse hypnotist and go through the chapters. And I'm happy to send that to anybody who's like me, has had that chronic pain journey because I think that we deserve to feel better.
We deserve to stop refilling bottles and bottles of medicines that aren't helping our pain and reclaim our joy in life. Look for a nurse - who knows hypnotherapy and come to the Calm Collective Car e because we have nurses with all types of backgrounds. So if it's, if pain isn't your thing, we probably have a nurse who [00:28:00] does specialize in the area that you want support in.
Hannah: Christy, thank you so much for plugging that, for giving us all that great information and for sharing a little bit more about your journey and experience. I so thoroughly enjoyed getting to hear everything you shared today.
Christy: Yay, and thank you, Hannah. I really appreciate it.
Hannah: We will see you again for another conversation at some point soon.
Sounds good, and hope you have a great rest of your day.
Christy: Bye.
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