My grandmother used to tell me, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". I never thought this made a lot of sense until recently. Looking back on it, I'm sure there's things I could have done differently but... well that's hindsight.
The story really starts with my wife. Kay is a wonderful, loving, sexy, smart woman and I've never had a day of regret in marrying her. The only problem in our marriage is her health. Specifically, she suffers from terrible migraines. She's often incapacitated for days on end because of them. Neither one of us is happy with the situation but despite thousands of dollars spent on treatments and doctor's visits the problems have only persisted and, in fact, gotten worse. I began to turn to various alternative treatments. At first it, was acupressure and massage. Later, we moved on to deep breathing exercises all without success. Then, one day, a friend of mine suggested hypnotism. When I brought this up to my wife she reacted with surprising vehemence, "You want me to let some stranger mess with my head?"
"It was just a suggestion. Dave said it really worked for his mother and I thought it was something we could try." I told her.
"Well the answer is, 'No!'" she yelled as she stormed off.
I probably should have let it die right there but I can't let things go. I did some more studying on the subject and was eventually directed to the concept of subliminal messages. I'm a techie guy at heart so the idea of subliminal messages appealed to me. I did a little poking on the internet and found lots of less than reputable websites and for-pay offerings. This being the internet era, I was unwilling to settle for anything less than free. So I wrote my own. It was just a little script that popped up some basic messages at random places at random intervals on the computer screen. I kept it simple and specific:
-Headaches are manageable-
-When a headache is coming you relax in response-
-You are relaxed around Jay [me]-
-Relaxation greatly reduces your headaches-
-The pain of headaches is not to be feared-
-You can conquer your headaches-
Like I said, I didn't have a lot of confidence in this working but I was willing to try anything. I loaded up the program on her laptop and promptly forgot all about it. A week went by and then another and another without any real change. About three weeks later Kay hit a particularly good patch and only had two headaches in a week (sad that that's a "good" patch). Our life actually returned to some semblance of normal for a brief period. Our sex life really picked up and we had spontaneous sex four or five times. It was in that post-coital bliss that she said the thing that changed our lives forever. "Honey, my headaches have seemed much better lately. I feel so relaxed around you... I feel like the headaches are completely manageable."
This wasn't verbatim from the program but it was awfully close. It got my mind wandering and the next day I went back to the software for the first time in weeks. I couldn't believe our luck. If this worked it would be great news for us. I figured the program needed a bit of reinforcement though so I decided to add a few more lines of text:
-The computer helps you relax-
-Kay can beat her headaches-
-Migraines can be beaten-
-Relaxing is the weapon to beat Migraines-
Then, for reasons that I can't answer, I added another line: