Mind over matter cured my migraine

What do you all think about this?
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Helen Carroll
23 Mar 2011


It's Saturday morning, hideously early, and my children, Daniel, nine, Isobel, six, and Christian, three, are jumping on my bed demanding that I read, paint and bounce on the trampoline with them.

I want to do it all but I've woken up with a searing migraine. My brain is about to burst out of my skull. The slightest noise sounds like someone has taken a hammer to my head, daylight burns my retinas and the whiff of an odour leaves me retching.

As a chronic migraine sufferer this was the start of my weekend for years. Midweek would see a second headache.

Under the care of a professor at London's National Hospital of Neurology, I was prescribed prophylactics, including beta-blockers and two types of antidepressants, none of which made any difference. I even endured steroid injections into the back of my head.

Migraines seemed to be my heritage - my mother had suffered until she reached her sixties and my older sister was similarly afflicted.

So when the idea was first mooted that the cure lay not in pills - or acupuncture, osteopathy, reflexology, massage and feverfew - but in mind over matter, I thought it ridiculous.

However, willpower, namely a system called Resolution Magic, which uses a series of simple mental exercises, is what finally freed me from an agony that had blighted my life for 20 years.

The exercises seem to retrain the way the body and mind react to electrical waves inside you so that physical symptoms reduce, then disappear.

I was openly sceptical during initial conversations with Olivia Roberts, the psychotherapist and neuro-linguistic programme practitioner who devised the system. But after talking to her (she does telephone consultations) about when I had my first migraine (early puberty) and what the initial warning signs are, she began to uncover past experiences in my life that she thought might contribute to my condition.

We discussed the death of my sister, Jane, who was knocked down by a car as we walked home from school when she was eight and I was nine.

Although the experience was devastating I never had counselling and Roberts began to help me to alter the way I felt about the tragedy and its aftermath.

I started the treatment by listening to a CD of Roberts talking me through a special mental exercise, designed to teach the subconscious a new sequence, one that leads back to good health.

She guided me to create an image of a place in my head - "my perfect place" - where I felt wonderful, both physically and mentally, and could go to relax. She explained that the subconscious controls the activity of the body and uses sequences to store all our routines, good and bad, which in my case was creating my migraine symptoms. She showed me how to do a simple mental exercise every couple of hours whenever I had a migraine so my mind would gradually switch to a new pain-free sequence.

In the months that followed, Roberts offered weekly telephone support and told me I could ring her any time.

I had to be alert to the first signs of a migraine developing and act immediately. At the first twinge I had to focus on the pain and repeat aloud, or in my head, "Go away!" Roberts had explained that the automatic part of the brain will only change if there is a very good reason, so the order to "go away" has to be said with real force.

She told me there might be no change at first as my subconscious resisted the sequence. But within a month I enjoyed a gap of two weeks without symptoms.

The gaps between migraines grew longer - first a month, then three, then six. The intensity and duration also reduced with each attack. Now I haven't had a migraine for more than two years.

And, amazingly, there are no foods, drinks or situations I have to avoid.

Roberts has written a book about Resolution Magic, to be published later this year. "Symptoms such as depression, migraine, ME, irritable bowel syndrome and backache are all caused by the same thing - our own manufactured electrical waves," she says. "Neurological wave syndrome is at the root of so many conditions.

"With Resolution Magic, even the most debilitating of symptoms or unwanted feelings can gradually be reduced until they disappear."

Olivia Roberts's regional workshop tour comes to London this summer (resolutionmagic.com)

Well... I will first say that if I offend anyone, I am sorry.

Yes, I believe that the mind is a powerful thing. I think that we can push through a lot of pain and suffering through determination and optimism. I think that if we were to wallow in self pity we would feel much worse than if we held our heads up and tried to fight through it. BUT migraine is a real condition. It is a biological course of events that inflicts pain upon us. We don't have migraines because of past trauma in our lives that we cannot deal with. We may have depression, but I truly believe most of us are depressed because we feel like shit and have migraines. Not the other way around.

I think this person is just trying to be like the faith healers and other people looking for desperate suffering people to rip off.

Like I said, if I have offended anyone, I am sorry.

Guess what? I've tried this! I'm starting to get embarrassed at the number of things I've had to say I've tried on here!

I believe Olivia to be a genuine woman, who puts huge amounts of work into each person (more than you pay for, really). She told me that if it worked for me then I would be her greatest success so far, in terms of number of years affected.

To be fair to her, at the point where I was doing this, I didn't realise the jaw connection with my migraines. With this programme you have to be quite vocal and shouty and that really didn't do my jaw (and consequently head) any good. Plus, if there are underlying reasons for the migraines, I don't believe it could ever work (eg a nutritional deficiency).

Did you see any results? I can see how it could help, but I really don't see how it could eliminate migraines all together. Most of us do have a biological reason to be hurting.

I wouldn't be embarrassed to tell all the things I have tried. I actually told my old neuro "If you can show me that smoking crack cocaine would make my head hurt less, I would do it. I am willing to try anything and everything you think would work." He looked at me kind of weird, but I think he got the point. When you feel as bad as we do at times, there are very few things that we would rule out. I mean, heck, what is it going to do? Make it worse? pfft!

I didn't really feel I was getting any results, and I was finding that it was making me feel more like my life was revolving around my migraines than ever before (not that they were worse, but that I was having to think about them more, y'know?) I could try it again any time (I have all the CDs etc), but I don't think I'm likely to really, due to my jaw.

On another migraine forum I was on, some people were having some real successes with it. But yes, I agree - there's no reason why it *should* work.
But yes, I agree -

I know two people who are now very much recovered from migraine having used this process.

One, whom I have known on line for some years is now back working and has just been on a nice holiday. Something she could not have considered before using the process.

The other, I dont know so well, but she too is in a different place now.

I am not sure if all migraine is the same or not, but following their success I have looked at the web site for the RM.
I see quite a bit of success there, and every improvement is worth investigation I feel.