“There's nothing more I can do for you.”
The pain signal sensitised — and we can retrain it.
Five- to seven-session online hypnotherapy for adults with sensitised musculoskeletal pain — back, knee, leg, ankle — drawing on the pain-pathway-retraining work the American Psychological Association has recognised as evidence-based.
Charles Lobo — Clinical Hypnotherapist (Diploma, Australian Academy of Hypnosis; member, Australian Society of Clinical Hypnotherapists). Working in the clinical-hypnosis-for-pain lineage recognised by the American Psychological Association and used clinically at Mayo Clinic and MD Anderson; consistent with NICE guideline NG193 for chronic primary pain.
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Stephen, 52, back.
It begins before his feet touch the floor. He lies on one side and reads the back the way a fisherman reads weather — what kind of pain it is today, how loud, how high it goes when he sits up, whether it will let him stand without bracing against the bedside table. On the mild mornings he can begin the day. On the loud ones the day is already hard. He has done the reading so many thousands of times that he no longer remembers learning to do it.
The medication is decided next. He has been on opioids for a long time — the good years on Oxy that gave him the second half of his forties, the slow and unconsented taper the GP began when the new guidelines came down, the patches and the breakthrough doses and the careful counting that have replaced the simpler script. He measures out the morning dose against the day he expects, against the meeting he has at ten, against the walk to the letterbox he is going to take or not take. By the time he is at the kettle he has already done more arithmetic than most people do all morning.
That is the cost of any Tuesday. There is also the cost of this year. The hike with the men from church declined in February, declined again in March, no longer offered. The grandson's birthday party stayed for forty-five minutes and then home. The trip to see the daughter in Brisbane reorganised so he could fly business class and have the evening to lie flat. The role at work narrowed twice, by the team's kindness and his own — I think we'll have someone else lead the project this quarter, mate, no rush, take the pressure off — and he agreed and felt the agreement cost him something he could not name. The friend who told him about Curable. The three weeks on the app. The way it helped at the edges and could not reach the centre. His wife's face in repose, last Saturday in the kitchen when she didn't know he was watching her, and what the years have written across it.
And then there is the long arc — the seven years that became this. The slip on the wet timber on the boat, and the disc, and the two surgeries, and the third surgical opinion he did not take. The MRI that came back ordinary and the pain that did not. The pain doctor who said “I don't think there's anything more I can do for you” and looked sorry about it, and Stephen in the carpark afterwards realising he had no one to call. The years of have you tried yoga and just lose weight and it's all in your head and be still and know. The cumulative theological work, Bible open on the kitchen table, prayer through 2 Corinthians 12 once a week for years, the slow arrival at a more complicated peace with not-yet-being-healed.
None of that is a character failure. None of that is imagination. None of that is a body still injured at the place the imaging says it healed. It is what a signal costs when it has been firing too hard for too long, and a man's life has been organised around it.
None of that is a character failure. None of that is imagination. It is what a signal costs when it has been firing too hard for too long.
The pain is real. That is the first thing to say, because most of what follows is at the layer of the brain, and a chronic pain audience has been told “it's all in your head” by enough doctors to want to scream. The pain is not in his head in the dismissal sense. The pain is real, every time, always — a real lived experience produced by a real biological process. Margaret who has fibromyalgia is not imagining anything. Stephen with the back is not imagining anything. The mechanism that follows is not the you're imagining it mechanism. It is the opposite of that mechanism. It is the mechanism that takes the pain seriously enough to ask where, in the body, the pain is actually being made.
Here is what four decades of pain neuroscience can tell us. Pain is not a signal that travels from the injured tissue to the brain like water through a pipe. Pain is a construction the brain makes — drawing on the tissue signal, but also on context, expectation, fear, attention, and the patterns the brain has learned over the years the pain has lasted. Two people with the same MRI can have radically different pain experiences. A person can lose a limb and still feel the limb hurting. Pain that started from a real injury can outlast the injury by years, because the brain's pain-processing pathway has learned the pattern and keeps running it, long after the tissue has done what tissue does and healed.
This is what the literature calls central sensitization — the technical term Stephen has probably read, on a bad night at two in the morning, in the bibliography section of one of the books he has bought.1 The newer term, in 2017 the International Association for the Study of Pain settled on it, is nociplastic pain — pain that arises from altered pain-processing without ongoing tissue damage or nerve injury sufficient to explain it. The shorter way to say all of that: the protector has outlasted the threat. The body's pain system did the right thing seven years ago. Then the threat passed and the system kept firing.
Three things follow from that.
The first is that pain does not always equal damage. It does in acute pain — the hand on the hot stove. It does in injury-pain in the days and weeks that follow. But in chronic pain that has outlasted the original injury, the tissue has often healed years ago, in tissue terms. The pain that persists is a learned-signal pattern, not ongoing damage. This is the single fact that displaces the dominant cultural belief about chronic pain.
The second is that the mind-body wall is not where most people think it is. Pain is, neurologically speaking, only ever experienced in the brain — the brain is the only place pain is ever made. “It's all in your head” is a dismissal. “The brain constructs pain” is neuroscience. These are not the same thing. Working at the brain layer is not “mind work for emotions”; it is direct work at the layer where pain actually happens. The work is not to convince him the pain is not real. The work is to retrain the system that produces it.
The third is the load-bearing one. “You will have to manage this forever with medication and rest” was the only honest answer twenty years ago. It is no longer. The American Psychological Association recognises clinical hypnosis as evidence-based for chronic pain.2 Mayo Clinic and MD Anderson Cancer Center use hypnosis in their pain programmes. The foundational meta-analysis by Patterson and Jensen, in 2003, surveyed the trial literature and found that roughly seventy-five per cent of clinical and research participants experienced meaningful pain reduction.3 Subsequent reviews through the most recent systematic reviews of 2024 and 2025 have confirmed the modality with effect sizes in the medium-to-large range. The United Kingdom's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence acknowledged hypnotherapy alongside CBT and ACT as a recognised psychological therapy for chronic primary pain when its 2021 guideline NG193 was issued.4
This explanatory frame is not new, and it is not mine. The clinical-hypnosis-for-pain literature, the central-sensitization literature, the Pain Reprocessing Therapy work, and Lorimer Moseley's Explain Pain programme all sit inside the same explanatory family. The mechanism is the science. Where the approaches differ is modality and relationship — and that is where Section 7 Question 1 picks up.
What hypnotherapy is, mechanically, is a structured way of working with the brain's pain-processing pathways in a focused, relaxed state — calibrated to the body's pain region, calibrated to the cues the signal has learned to fire on, calibrated to the years the protection has been running. It is not a guarantee. It is a defined-length protocol with a published evidence base. Hypnotherapy works alongside medication, physiotherapy, surgery, and any other treatment the reader is doing. It is not in competition with pain medicine; it is the layer pain medicine cannot reach.
A morning that does not begin with the pain check.
It is a Wednesday in mid-spring, a long way past the work. Stephen wakes. The first thing his mind reaches for is what to make for breakfast, or a phrase from the verse he is reading through, or whether the line on the back lawn will be dry by the time the grandson arrives. The reading of the back, that he has been doing for seven years, is not the first thought. It is not the second. It enters somewhere late in the morning, at the kitchen table, as a quieter check — and finds nothing it expected to find.
Later in the week he walks to the letterbox without counting the steps. The walk used to be a calculation — the two-out-of-ten morning permitting the three-hundred-metre return trip with a small reserve, the seven-out-of-ten afternoon refusing it, the careful pacing that had become reflex. He does not notice the absence of the calculation until he is at the letterbox, with the post in his hand, and then he notices.
On the Saturday the grandson is over for the afternoon. The boy has a small wooden engine on the kitchen floor, and he tells his grandfather to bend down. Stephen bends down and picks up the engine and is halfway up before he realises he has done it without bracing against the bench, without the small involuntary intake of breath, without the after-pain he had spent seven years learning to expect at the end of any movement that involved the spine. He stands for a long time in the kitchen holding the engine. The grandson asks him a question. He has not heard it.
This is not the absence of the years. The years are the years. The body is fifty-two, not twenty. There are mornings still that begin loudly, and walks he still does not take, and the meds his prescribing doctor and he have decided about together. It is not no pain. It is the absence of the pain that had pre-set itself before the day began. It is meaningful relief, in the language the literature uses — and meaningful relief in chronic pain that has lasted seven years is not nothing. It is most of what was missing.
Stephen got back to the life he wanted. Most people can too — see how, next.
These sessions are usually online, by video — once a week, about an hour each. You sit at home, comfortable and in control. There is no waiting room and no commute, which some people find helpful on hard days — and which matters more in chronic pain than in almost any other condition I work with, because leaving the house on a flare day is exactly what this condition has cost you.
The first session is mostly listening. I take a careful history — when the pain started, what was happening in the body when it started, what the imaging has shown and what the imaging has not, what surgeries you have had or declined, what medications you are on now and what you have come off, what you have tried beyond medication, where the pain is highest and where it is quieter. The history matters because the brain-pain pathway your body has learned to fire is specific to your life — a back signal is not a knee signal, an old injury signal is not a no-clean-cause signal, and the imagery work in the next four sessions is calibrated to your pattern. We measure your pain on a numerical rating scale, and we measure how the pain is shaping the day-to-day — what you can and cannot do, what you have stopped attempting, what wakes you at night — so that there is a baseline to compare against later.
Toward the end of the first session, I guide you for the first time into the focused, relaxed state hypnotherapy uses. People sometimes expect to be unconscious, or unable to remember what was said; that doesn't need to happen. You're almost always awake, you hear me, and you can reject anything I say at any point. Hypnotherapy is similar to the state of being engrossed in a story — a focused, narrow attention, calm and centered.
The middle sessions are normally where we work at the core of the issue. We work with the sensitised protective signal — the pain pathway your nervous system over-learned — and we work on retraining it. The pain is real; what we retrain is the over-firing, not the pain. The work is calibrated to your pain region — back signals respond to one family of imagery, knee signals to another, leg-and-ankle signals to a third — and to the cues the signal has learned to fire on. Most clients with longstanding pain have a list, half-conscious, of those cues: a particular movement, a particular posture, a time of day, a weather change, a stressful conversation, a memory. The work speaks to those cues, in the focused state, and helps the brain learn they are not the threats they have been treated as — letting an over-learned signal settle into a new instruction. Between sessions you have an audio recording — I make it for you — that you'll listen to most days. Some clients begin to notice shifts by the second or third session. Some take longer. Hypnotherapy compounds — not only at each session but even in the time between sessions. The subconscious is always processing — always growing.
The closing session is integration. We review what has settled, what has shifted, and what to do if the signal tries to fire again later — because flares can — we talk about how to respond, so you are confident about what to do after the sessions. We re-take the pain measurement. The work has a defined endpoint. There is no subscription.
For some clients the protocol takes seven sessions, not five. The longer protocol I call Transform, and it exists for patterns that have lasted longer than ten years, for multi-root patterns where back and knee have compounded across decades, for post-surgical pain that has layered on top of the original injury, and for clients who at the end of session five have responded partly and where continuing is clearly indicated. The discovery call is where we decide which of the two is right for you. If the right answer is something else entirely — a different modality, a referral, a question for your prescribing doctor — I will tell you that, and we will not begin work the call has already shown isn't right.
A note that needs naming plainly. Hypnotherapy is fully compatible with your medication, your physical therapy, any procedures you have planned, and any prescribing decisions your doctor is making with you. The work runs alongside the medical care you are already receiving, not in place of it. Many clients find that as the work progresses they need less medication; that is always a decision made with their prescribing doctor, never against them. I am an adjunct, not a prescriber, and the protocol holds that line cleanly.
A note from the practitioner
I am a Christian, and I work as a clinical hypnotherapist. Yes, Christian hypnotherapy is not just possible — it has proved to be good and helpful to many fellow Christians over the years.
If your faith is part of how you carry your life, you may be wondering whether Christian Hypnotherapy belongs in the same room as your prayers. The short answer is yes. The longer answer is in the Christian Hypnotherapy Guide, which I would encourage you to read if you would like more depth. In summary: the focused state we use in a session is not a spiritual state. It is the same calm, narrow attention you have probably been in while reading a good book, watching a good movie, or contemplating a Psalm. Romans 12:2 asks us to — be transformed by the renewing of your mind. The mind has layers. Thoughts and talk reach the surface. The deeper layers respond to medication — and hypnotherapy. And unlike medication, hypnotherapy has no side effects to worry about. Just the ability to use your brain to its best natural capacity.
If you have lived with chronic pain for years and your faith is part of how you have carried it, you have probably already done a great deal of theological work. You have read 2 Corinthians 12 more than once. You have probably read Joni Eareckson Tada, or heard her interviewed. You may have arrived, after years of asking, at a more complicated peace with not-yet-being-healed. I will not lecture you on theology you have sat with longer than I have. Some healing comes through the reduction of pain. Some healing comes through a changed relationship with pain. And some, as Paul wrote of his thorn, is grace within ongoing pain — my grace is sufficient for you. Hypnotherapy serves whichever of these is yours. It is offered as a faithful seeking-of-relief, not as the answer the years of prayer have been waiting for. If God's answer is the older, harder one — grace within the thorn — hypnotherapy is held alongside that answer, not in place of it. It does not require the theology you have built to break.
(If you are not a Christian you are welcome as well. Hypnotherapy still works. I am trained, skilled, and I deliver results.)
I have watched chronic pain run the same pattern in faithful men and women — for years. The pain pattern is not a failure of faith. It lives in the layer below your thoughts. That is what hypnotherapy reaches. And that's what we can use to bring about real change together.
— Charles
Read the full Christian Hypnotherapy Guide →
Charles Lobo
Clinical Hypnotherapist · Diploma, Australian Academy of Hypnosis · Member, ASCH
“I had a session with Charles. As soon as the session ended the pain was less. The pain went away soon after and has never come back.” — Anjali L.Pregnancy jaw pain · verified Google review
The same family of mechanism. The brain-pain pathway, central sensitization, the protector that has outlasted the threat. The Curable app and Pain Reprocessing Therapy were both built in the same explanatory frame the page above describes. The Boulder study (Ashar et al., JAMA Psychiatry, 2021) was a milestone, and the 2024 five-year follow-up has confirmed the durability of the response. So the wedge is not that the mechanism is wrong, or that we have a different mechanism. The mechanism is the science, and the science is shared across the field.
The wedge is the modality and the relationship. Curable delivers the protocol app-only — a sequence of pre-recorded lessons, somatic-tracking exercises, journaling prompts. Pain Reprocessing Therapy works primarily with somatic tracking and cognitive reframing, with a coach where one is available. The work I do uses clinical hypnosis — the focused, relaxed alpha-theta state where the brain's pain-processing pathways become directly available for new instructions, in a one-on-one relationship across five or seven sessions, calibrated to your pain region, your history, your specific pattern of cues. Many clients have used Curable, found it helpful at the edges, and arrived here looking for something more relational and more calibrated. If you have used Curable and the work plateaued, the trance-state route reaches a layer the app does not. If you have used Curable and you are now pain-free, you do not need me — and I would not pretend otherwise.
No, and I would not ask that of you. Hypnotherapy is not in competition with medication — they are different mechanisms. Pain medication dampens the signal at the body level; hypnotherapy retrains the brain-pain pathway itself. You stay on whatever your prescribing doctor and you have decided about together. The work runs alongside the medication, the physical therapy, and any other care you are receiving. Many clients find that as the work progresses they need less medication, and at that point the decision is made with their prescribing doctor — never against the doctor, and never on my recommendation alone. I am not a prescriber. I am a hypnotherapist. The boundary is clear and the work holds it.
Because pain is not a signal coming from the tissue to the brain like water through a pipe. Pain is constructed in the brain, drawing on the tissue signal but also on context, fear, expectation, attention, and the patterns the brain has learned. In chronic pain that has outlasted the original injury, the tissue often healed years ago in tissue terms — and the imaging is an honest report of that — and yet the pain pathway has continued to fire. This is the central insight of the last thirty years of pain research, and the reason a clean MRI and a real, persistent pain experience are not a contradiction. The pain is real. The signal has learned a pattern that is no longer matched to ongoing tissue threat. The work is at the layer where the pattern lives.
This page is built around sensitised musculoskeletal pain — back, knee, leg, ankle — that has outlasted the original injury. Hypnotherapy has a strong evidence base across many chronic-pain conditions, including fibromyalgia, migraine, neuropathic pain, cancer-related pain, complex regional pain syndrome, and pelvic pain — but the protocol structure differs by condition, and so does the right next step. The discovery call is the place to talk that through. If your condition is one I can help with, I will tell you what the protocol would look like in your case. If it is not — or if a different modality would serve you better — I will tell you that, and I will often have a referral. The honesty of the no is part of why the call exists in the form it does.
The most pastorally important question on this page, and the one I want to answer most carefully. Prayer can work miracles but we must also do all we can. Romans 12:2 speaks of the renewing of the mind. Christian Hypnotherapy helps you do exactly that — alongside the prayer you have been doing, never as a verdict on its sufficiency. Safely, powerfully, supporting your prayer not replacing it.
Most of my clients respond fully. A few respond partially — meaningful relief that does not eliminate the pain but brings significant reduction. A minority do not respond. In the discovery call we can assess your fit. If by the middle of the package you are not responding, we will have a conversation about whether to continue, switch to the longer Transform protocol, or refer you elsewhere. You will be refunded for the remaining sessions. But it rarely happens. If you are willing and sincere, Christian Hypnotherapy has a great chance of working for you.
We will talk about the shape of what you are carrying — when the pain started, what region, how it has changed, what you have been through, what the doctors have said and what your imaging has shown, what medication you are on now and what you have come off, what you have tried beyond medication. You can ask me whatever you need or want to know. At the end the call you will be confident either yes — this is the right next step for you. Or no — this is not the right next step, and here is what else might be, whether that is a referral, a different modality, or a question worth taking back to your prescribing doctor or your Christian counsellor.
The honest no is the reason this call exists in the form it does. It is not a sales pitch, not a session in disguise, not a hypnosis demonstration. The honest discussion is the reason this call is so helpful for you and for me — is this the right next step for you — answered together.
A private Christian hypnotherapy consultation with Charles. Twenty minutes by phone or video. AU$25 credit to your first session.
You have lived with chronic pain for long enough to know what it costs you. Another year of it will cost more of the same. Twenty minutes of conversation costs almost nothing — and at the end of those twenty minutes you will know whether this is your next step, or it isn't. Let's talk.
Start HereA private Christian hypnotherapy consultation with Charles. Twenty minutes by phone or video. AU$25 credit to your first session.
