Mind over matter cured my migraine

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)