What the doctor said: “There's nothing more I can do for you.”
A sensitised pain signal can be retrained.
Five-session online hypnotherapy for chronic pain, built for sensitised musculoskeletal pain — back, knee, leg, and ankle pain that has outlasted the original injury.
Most people I work with have already done the sensible things — physiotherapy, imaging that came back clean or only mildly abnormal, nerve blocks or epidural steroid injections, sometimes surgery, sometimes a pain clinic. Plenty have been on OxyContin, Endone, or the Norspan patch. Plenty have lived through the slow taper. Some have done three weeks on Curable or PRT and found the app helped a bit. Hypnotherapy is different. Applied to chronic pain, hypnotherapy works directly with the brain-pain pathway other treatments often miss.
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Before your feet hit the floor, you take a reading. Back, knee, leg, ankle — wherever the pain has made its home. Then you do the medication maths against the day ahead. Base dose. Breakthrough dose. Anti-inflammatory. Lyrica or Gabapentin. The date on the Norspan patch. The Endone count. The Tramadol left in the drawer. You know the numbers because the numbers decide the day before the day starts.
You plan around the body like a person running a small business with bad stock. The chair matters. The cushion matters. Stairs get avoided when stairs can be avoided. An aisle seat gets chosen because climbing over people is not worth the gamble. Heat pack, brace, TENS leads, maybe a spare strip of tablets.
For some of us there are medical rounds. X-ray. MRI. CT. One report says “looks fine.” Another says “age-appropriate changes.” You have physio pages in a folder or saved on your phone. You did the exercises until the exercises became one more job the pain supervised. Nerve blocks helped a little, then less. Facet injections helped a little, then less. An epidural steroid may have bought time, but not enough. Maybe surgery happened. Maybe surgery happened twice. Maybe Curable helped at the edges.
If any of this reads like your day, it isn't a failure of your body and it isn't all in your mind. The pain is real.
What's been running is a protective pain pathway that has learned to fire early and often. Pathways like that can be retrained.
The pain is real.
Pain does not travel from tissue to brain like water through a pipe. Pain gets built by the brain. The brain uses signals from the body, sure. The brain also uses context, expectation, fear, attention, and patterns the nervous system has learned over time.
Central sensitization means the brain-pain pathway has become too ready to protect you. The protector has outlasted the threat. Pain that began with a real injury can keep firing for years after tissue has healed because the nervous system learned the pattern and keeps using the pattern.
Two people can have the same MRI and very different pain. A person can lose a limb and still feel the limb hurt. A back injury can heal in tissue terms and still leave a back signal that fires when you stand, sit, bend, drive, or even think about doing those things.
Doctors may call that central sensitization. Some use the term nociplastic pain. Plain English works fine too: the protector has outlasted the threat.
First: pain does not always equal damage. In acute pain, pain usually points to something that needs protecting. In chronic pain that has outlasted the original injury, tissue has often healed in tissue terms. The persistent pain can be a learned signal pattern, not proof of ongoing damage. That single fact changes the way many people understand their own body.
Second: the mind-body wall is not where most people think. Neurologically, pain only ever happens in the brain. “It's all in your head” is a dismissal. “The brain constructs pain” is neuroscience. Those two statements are not the same. I am not talking you out of pain. I am helping retrain the system that produces pain.
Third: “manage forever with medication and rest” was the honest answer for many people twenty years ago. The honest answer has moved. The American Psychological Association recognises clinical hypnosis as evidence-based for chronic pain. Mayo Clinic uses hypnosis in pain programmes. MD Anderson uses hypnosis in pain care. The 2003 Patterson and Jensen meta-analysis found roughly 75% of cohort participants experienced meaningful pain reduction. NICE NG193 acknowledged hypnotherapy alongside CBT and ACT as a recognised psychological therapy for chronic primary pain.
This approach is not new and it is not something I invented. Lorimer Moseley's Explain Pain, Pain Reprocessing Therapy, and the Curable app all deliver the same treatment. Each one takes the brain-pain pathway seriously. Each one understands the protector that has outlasted the threat.
Where approaches differ is delivery. An app gives pre-recorded lessons. PRT often uses somatic tracking and cognitive reframing. At The Christian Hypnotherapist, I use clinical hypnosis one-to-one, and I calibrate the sessions to your pain region, your history, and the specific cues your nervous system has learned to treat as danger. I will talk more about those sessions in a minute.
Clean imaging can be honest and your pain can still be real. The nervous system can rehearse a protective loop until the loop fires early and often. The pain-modulation system — the brain's top-down control — can learn to turn that loop down and replace the loud instruction with a quieter one. When the over-firing settles, function usually improves.
Hypnotherapy for chronic pain is a structured way to retrain the brain-pain pathway in a focused, relaxed state. Sessions are shaped around your pain region, the cues your nervous system has learned to fire on, and how long the protection has been running. This reaches the brain-pain pathway pain medicine cannot.
A Wednesday in mid-spring, a long way past the work.
He wakes and waits for the usual discomfort from his back. The discomfort has been a companion for years. Today, strangely, the discomfort does not arrive on cue. He stands. He makes tea. He sits at the kitchen table before the twinge comes. The twinge is quieter, and less than he expected.
His grandson is on the floor with a small wooden engine. “Pick it up, Grandpa.” He bends and lifts the engine halfway before he realises what happened. No hand on the bench. No small intake of breath. No bracing for the after-pain he had learned to expect.
This is not the absence of the years. The years are the years. The body is past forty, not twenty. There are mornings still that begin loudly, and walks he still doesn't take, and the meds his prescribing doctor and he have decided about together. It is not complete absence of any pain. It is the absence of the pain that had pre-set itself before the day began. It is meaningful relief — and meaningful relief in chronic pain that has lasted years is not nothing.
How I help you move toward that is the next part of the page.
We meet once a week online. Five sessions. About sixty minutes each. You sit at home, comfortable and in control. No commute. No waiting room. No pretending a flare day is a normal day just so you can get to an appointment. Chronic pain already takes enough out of the house. Online sessions matter more here than they do in plenty of other conditions.
Session 1 is history, measurement, and your first introduction to the focused state. I listen and map the case. When did the pain begin? What was happening in the body when the pain started? What has imaging shown? What has imaging not shown? Did you have surgery, decline surgery, or get told surgery would not help? What are you taking now — opioids, Lyrica or Gabapentin, Cymbalta or Endep, NSAIDs, muscle relaxants? What have you tried beyond medication? Where is the pain loudest? Where does the pain ease off?
Your brain-pain pathway is specific to your life. A back signal is not a knee signal. An old-injury signal is not the same as pain with no clear starting point. A leg-and-ankle pattern has different cues from a shoulder or neck pattern. We measure your baseline with a numerical pain rating and a short activity-impact check. Then I introduce the focused state. People often expect to be “under.” Most people are awake and aware. You hear me. You can reject anything I say. The focused state feels a bit like being absorbed in a good book — narrowed attention, calm, and easy to come back from at any point.
Sessions 2 to 4 are the core retraining sessions. We work with the sensitised protective signal — the pain pathway the nervous system over-learned — and we work on retraining the over-firing. The pain is real; what we retrain is the over-firing, not the pain.
I use imagery and suggestion calibrated to your pain region. Back pain uses one family of images and cues. Knee pain uses another. Leg-and-ankle pain uses another. I also calibrate the sessions to the triggers your signal has learned — movement, posture, time of day, weather change, a stressful conversation, or a memory tied to the original injury.
Between sessions, you listen to audio recordings most days. Those recordings are not filler — they keep training the pathway between our meetings. Many people start to notice shifts by session two or three: a morning that does not begin with the pain check, a walk taken without counting the steps. Some people take longer. The practice still matters. The brain keeps working on what we have started, both during each session and in the days between.
Session 5 is review and close-out. We look at what settled and what still feels sticky. We take the new response into real life — a workday, a drive, the bend to pick something up — because relief has to matter where you actually live. We talk through what to do if the signal tries to lift again. Flares can happen. You will know how to respond. We re-take the measurements so you can see what changed. No subscription. Five sessions, keep the tools, live your life.
Some cases need the seven-session Transform extension instead of the five-session Restore protocol. I usually consider Transform when pain has been running longer than ten years, when several pain patterns have layered together across decades, when post-surgical pain sits on top of the original injury, or when session five shows a partial response and two more sessions clearly make sense. The discovery call decides the starting route. If you begin Restore and Transform becomes the right extension, the additional two sessions are billed at the per-session rate.
Most clients see meaningful relief by session five. A few respond partially — pain reduction that does not erase the pain but makes the day workable again. A minority do not respond. We check progress as we go. On the slim chance there is no movement by mid-protocol, usually around session three, we talk plainly about whether to continue, switch to the longer protocol, or refer elsewhere. If we stop, remaining sessions are refunded. You have a strong chance of meaningful relief.
Hypnotherapy is fully compatible with whatever you and your doctor have decided about — opioids, gabapentinoids like Lyrica and Gabapentin, antidepressants for pain like Cymbalta or amitriptyline, NSAIDs, muscle relaxants, physiotherapy, and any procedures already planned. You stay on your medication. As the brain-pain pathway calms, many clients find they need less medication. But that decision belongs with your prescribing doctor and you.
A note from the practitioner
I am a Christian, and I work as a clinical hypnotherapist. If you are carrying chronic pain alongside your faith, you are not the first I have sat with — and many fellow Christians have found meaningful relief through this work.
For a Christian carrying chronic pain, hypnotherapy is often the tool that finally reaches the brain-pain pathway prayer and Scripture have already been working on. Romans 12:2 speaks of being transformed by the renewing of our minds. The mind has parts you reason with and parts that fire before you reason with them. Automatic patterns — the kind that fire before you think about them — respond to medication, practice, and clinical hypnotherapy. If your first question is whether hypnotherapy is permitted for a Christian, the answer is yes; the longer answer is in the Christian Hypnotherapy Guide.
The focused state is a real and natural state of the mind God designed. Scripture names it — be still, and know that I am God — because the stillness is real, not because the verse is familiar. Careful prayer, meditation on a Psalm, being absorbed in a good book: these all reach the same state hypnotherapy uses for clinical work. In session, you stay awake, aware, and in control. You hear me. You can accept or reject anything I say. Your will stays yours throughout. We are working with a real physical loop in the brain's pain-processing pathway — the kind of firing that runs before you have time to think.
If you have lived with chronic pain for years and your faith is part of how you have carried the pain, you have probably already done a great deal of theological wrestling. You have read 2 Corinthians 12 more than once. You may have read Joni Eareckson Tada. You may have arrived, after years of asking, at a more complicated peace with not-yet-being-healed.
Some healing comes through the reduction of pain. Some 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 those is yours. I offer hypnotherapy as a faithful seeking of relief, not as the answer your years of prayer have been waiting for. If God's answer is the older, harder one — grace within the thorn — hypnotherapy can sit alongside that answer. Hypnotherapy does not require the theology you have built to break.
If you are not a Christian, you are welcome here as well. The clinical techniques do not depend on shared faith. You receive the same care as anyone else.
I have watched chronic pain run the same pattern in faithful men and women for years. The pain is real. The pattern is not a failure of belief or character. The pattern is an automatic one. It fires before you have time to think. Hypnotherapy reaches that brain-pain pathway. We can work on that pathway together to bring about real change.
— Charles
Read the Christian Hypnotherapy Guide →
Charles Lobo
Clinical Hypnotherapist · Diploma, Australian Academy of Hypnosis · Member, ASCH
Curable, Pain Reprocessing Therapy, and my approach sit in the same science family: the brain-pain pathway, central sensitization, and the protector that has outlasted the threat. The Boulder study — Ashar et al., JAMA Psychiatry, 2021 — gave PRT serious attention, and the 2024 five-year follow-up confirmed durability for many participants.
Curable is app-delivered: pre-recorded lessons, somatic-tracking exercises, and journaling prompts. PRT is often somatic tracking and cognitive reframing, sometimes with a coach. I use clinical hypnosis — a focused, relaxed alpha-theta state — one-to-one across five or seven sessions, calibrated to your pain region, your history, and the specific cues your signal has learned. I adjust week by week based on your report. I make the practice audio for you, not for a crowd. Many people arrive after Curable helped at the edges and want something more relational and more precisely fitted.
No. I would not ask that of you.
Medication can dampen the signal in the body. Hypnotherapy retrains the brain-pain pathway itself. Those are different mechanisms, and those mechanisms can work together.
You stay on whatever you and your prescribing doctor have decided together. Hypnotherapy at The Christian Hypnotherapist runs alongside medication, physiotherapy, and any procedures already planned. Many clients find that, as the signal settles, they need less medication. That's a decision you make with your prescribing doctor.
Pain is not a simple pipe from tissue to brain. The brain constructs pain using signals from the body, and also context, expectation, fear, attention, and learned patterns.
In chronic pain that has outlasted the original injury, tissue often healed years ago in tissue terms. Imaging can be an honest report of that healing. The pain pathway can keep firing anyway. That is central sensitization.
Your pain is real. The learned signal no longer matches an ongoing tissue threat. We work directly on the pathway running the pattern.
This page is built around sensitised musculoskeletal pain — back, knee, leg, and ankle — that has outlasted the original injury.
Hypnotherapy has evidence across many chronic-pain conditions, including fibromyalgia, migraine, neuropathic pain, cancer-related pain, CRPS, and pelvic pain. The protocol differs by condition, and the right next step differs too.
The discovery call is where we sort that out. If I can help, I will explain what the protocol would look like. If I am not the right fit, or another modality would serve you better, I will say so. I often have a referral or a question worth taking back to your prescribing doctor.
Prayer reaches God. Hypnotherapy reaches the brain-pain pathway. For a Christian who has carried chronic pain for years, hypnotherapy is often the tool that finally completes what prayer and Scripture have already been working on. It sits alongside prayer, not in place of it.
Romans 12:2 speaks of the renewing of the mind. In sessions, we use a focused, calm state to work directly on the brain-pain pathway — the part of the mind that fires before you have time to think. You stay awake, aware, and in control throughout.
The longer answer is in the Christian Hypnotherapy Guide.
Most clients see meaningful relief by session five. A few respond partially — relief that reduces pain and makes the day workable again, even if every flare does not disappear. A minority do not respond.
We check progress mid-protocol. If by session four there is no meaningful movement, we talk frankly about whether to adjust, pause, switch to the longer seven-session Transform protocol, or refer elsewhere.
If we stop, remaining sessions are refunded. I will not drag you through a package that is not helping.
I do not promise outcomes. But I know from experience that most people have a strong chance of meaningful relief.
Twenty minutes, by video or phone.
On the call, we talk about when the pain started, where the pain sits now — back, knee, leg, ankle — and how the pain has changed over time. We talk about what imaging has shown, what medication you are on now, and what medication you have come off. We talk about what you have tried beyond medication, what wakes you at night, and what a normal week looks like for you. I ask enough to understand the pattern you are living with.
You can ask me anything about what we will do together, the sessions, and what to expect. Ask about hypnosis. Ask about medication. Ask about my testimony. Share whatever you want or need to share.
I will outline exactly what the five or seven sessions would look like in your case. If I do not think hypnotherapy is the right fit, I will say that too. I may point you toward a referral, a different modality, or a question worth taking back to your prescribing doctor or Christian counsellor.
Twenty minutes. The point is clarity. You leave knowing whether hypnotherapy is your next step — and if it is, you leave knowing the plan.
Twenty minutes, online. You leave with a clear next step. AU$25 to confirm — refunded the moment we begin.
You have lived with chronic pain long enough to know what chronic pain costs. Another year costs more of the same — more counting, more planning, more saying no before the day even starts.
Twenty minutes costs almost nothing. At the end of those twenty minutes, you will know whether hypnotherapy at The Christian Hypnotherapist is your next step or hypnotherapy is not your next step.
Let's talk.
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