HYPNOTIC PSYCHOTHERAPY
According to Milton Erickson MD, hypnosis is an altered psychological state of consciousness characterized by greater receptivity and responsiveness to ideas and suggestions, as well as greater access to unconscious sensations, ideas and memories, without the usual biases and other mental sets limiting factors that normally characterize the everyday consciousness of any person. The trance state is also characterized by certain physiological attributes, such as relaxation, changes in muscle tone, reduction in blood pressure, heart rate, and slowing of breathing.
Hypnotic psychotherapy, unlike consciously oriented psychotherapy, uses the altered state of consciousness that the hypnotic trance provides, to allow the subject to respond and reorganize their own life experiences, separate and apart from consciously acquired response patterns. By accessing unfiltered unconscious memories, emotions and learnings, a person can be guided to reorder and reorganize their understandings and behavior. Conducted in this way, the therapeutic outcome can be more nearly tailored to each person’s own unique personality needs.
Central to this therapeutic process is the unique opportunity that the hypnotic trance provides to work separately and independently, or in collaboration with different aspects of the personality. In the hypnotic trance, the subject can be guided to access and re-associate important aspects of their past experiential life before integrating them into his everyday conscious life. The integration process can be accomplished in steps and stages, and at a pace that the subject can best handle.
Participation of the subject in the therapy is the main requirement for effective results. In the trance state, the subject can recognize and re-associate their internal psychological complexities and experiential life. They can learn a great deal about themselves and how to express themselves more effectively and appropriately. It is the subject's own experience of re-association and reorganization of their own experiential life that leads to a good therapeutic outcome and not merely the subject's response to the therapist's ideas and suggestions.
The job of the hypnotherapist is to guide and the job of the subject is to learn through their own efforts to understand their own experiential life in a way that allows them to make more effective use of their personality and thus make more effective adjustments to their life circumstances.
Erickson emphasized that hypnosis should not be viewed as a general phenomenon but as a
phenomenon that governs specific types of physiological behavior, physical behavior, and psychological behavior. Understanding hypnosis in this way allows the therapist to direct his subject's attention towards special processes within himself; be it physiological processes or psychological processes -from altering capillary hemorrhage, to creating numbness, or looking at one’s self at various stages of development.
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It is important to understand that hypnosis is not a form of sleep. The subject is aware of their world, but in a very special way. Understanding the subject's special type of awareness enables the hypnotherapist to better direct his subject's attention to achieve the therapy he needs.
The subject's entry into the trance begins with a withdrawal from his external reality to an internal reality where he is reoriented exclusively to the reality of his own body.
To better understand this, consider how we automatically orient ourselves to our external reality. For
example, each time we enter a new environment, we do an assessment of that environment and
continually update that assessment. This is an automatic process that we learned from childhood and it is part of the biological survival process: an evolutionary learning.
Then, as the subject withdraws from his external reality, he maintains awareness of the "map" that he made when he was last in his every day consciousness. He respects his assessment and does nothing more about it until his external reality changes significantly. The hypnotic subject, in trance, doesn’t feel the need to keep updating his map of the surrounding reality and doesn’t feel the need to get back in control of his environment, unless some major change occurs in his environment that affects him. The hypnotized subject can sit in a chair and give no particular response to the surrounding reality because there is nothing in the surrounding reality to alter his behavior.
When the subject has withdrawn from attending to his external reality, towards the reality of his body (internal reality), the subject becomes more and more attentive and receptive and particularly open to the ideas and suggestions provided by the therapist.
In a trance state, the subject tends to examine and evaluate the ideas and suggestions the hypnotist provides in terms of his own memories, learnings, conditioning, and in terms of all the experiential learnings that he has acquired while living his life. In particular, he listens carefully to ideas being presented by the hypnotist and carefully examines those ideas in terms of their intrinsic value to him. He then responds to those ideas and suggestions in accordance with, and in terms of, his own memories, learnings (including bodily learnings), and conditioning, as well as all his various experiential learnings. He takes the ideas and suggestions the therapist offers and then translates them into his own unique learnings and body behaviors.
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In other words, the therapist offers the subject various stimuli (in the form of ideas and suggestions) and then the subject translates these stimuli into his own personalized, effective and adaptive behavior through the use of his own experiential learnings.
This fairly rapid conversion of ideas and suggestions into therapeutic results occurs in a way that would otherwise be impossible, except for prolonged practice and therapy.
INTRODUCTION
AL TRANCE
Not all people have the same ability to enter hypnotic trances. The ability to be hypnotized can be inherited, according to some studies (Morgan, 1973; Duke, 1969). Others, like Milton Erickson suggest that there is no difference in hypnotic ability (Erickson, 1967 and Barber, 1956) and emphasize training and experience to achieve different levels of trance. Research by Dr. Murray-Jobsis (1991) suggests that both performance on the hypnotizability scales and the manifestation of hypnotic phenomena are "in a dependent relationship." In other words, she suggests that the better the relationship between the hypnotic subject and the hypnotic operator, the better results will be obtained. Drs. Herbert and David Spiegel (Spiegel and Spiegel, 1978) suggest that less than 15% of the population is highly hypnotizable. According to them, this group of individuals has the ability to easily and deeply abstract themselves in activities such as reading a novel or watching a movie. They developed a hypnotic induction profile (HIP) that can be administered in the clinical setting in a short period of time to measure a subject's hypnotizability on a scale of 1 to 5.
In order for an individual to "enter" a trance, the hypnotist initiates a transition process called "induction." For a person to enter a hypnotic trance, one or more hypnotic phenomena must be elicited from within the subject. The basic material of hypnotic phenomena consists of unconsciously acquired response patterns (latent learning) and excessively learned behavior patterns that, over time, have become automatic and more or less autonomous in their functioning: they have become part of the ordinary psychological experience of the subject. It is also made up of a lifetime of bodily learnings, underdeveloped resources, past experiences, feelings, and forgotten skills. In general, hypnotic phenomena arise from a repertoire of experiential learning collected and stored throughout the life of the subject.
Hypnotic phenomena can be understood as normal aspects of human behavior that occur autonomously and spontaneously when detached from their usual associative (conscious) context. In the trance state, these phenomena can be extended, redirected, and then used to facilitate therapeutic change. In the words of Milton Erickson MD: "... the hypnotist's suggestions are the impetus for behavior, the course and development must be within the subject."
It is important to note that most hypnotic subjects do not learn to enter suitable trances for therapeutic work the first, second, or even third time they attempt it. Most subjects require a period of training to learn to remain in trances and to experience various hypnotic phenomena used in their therapy. At first, most subjects try to learn hypnosis with their conscious minds. With training and experience, they can learn to stay in trances with less and less conscious participation and, with proper practice, learn to respond only with their unconscious thoughts and understandings. In other words, the deeply hypnotized subject is thinking and understanding with his unconscious learnings, learning that he is free from the neurotic patterns that constitute his waking conscious life. Thus, you can think and feel more openly, clearly, and consequently more easily accept and practice new ways of thinking and behaving, which may eventually correct your problem (s).
The main advantage of using hypnosis in psychotherapy is related to the ability of the hypnotic subject to be psychologically oriented in quite significant different ways. As mentioned above, the hypnotic subject can listen more objectively to the ideas presented and easily respond to those ideas. They can also be reoriented to a different time (either past or future) and place (past or future), as well as experiencing themselves in different degrees of "self" (I). For example, they may reorient themselves to a much earlier time and place, while, at the same time, still thinking and understanding as an adult, that is, being in two states of mind simultaneously. Therefore, the deeply hypnotized subject can be directed to be only an "intellect" without a body, an identity or a history; just a pure intellect separated from your habitual, often neurotic and highly biased conscious thinking and behavior. For example, the individual who is highly phobic, for example to bridges, elevators or airplanes, can be oriented in a trance state to see someone "over there" fighting a phobia who is not them. They can be emotionally withdrawn but intellectually active and supportive. They can observe that other individual and speculate on the origins of the other phobic person's problem and on the correction of their problem, often with an excellent understanding of it. All of this can be accomplished without the emotional burden that phobia constitutes and that avoids objective thinking. In general, the hypnotic subject is related much more from the healthy core of his personality and can think, respond and behave in a psychologically healthy way.
Hypnosis is made up of a set of phenomena that can be individualized and used in various therapeutic ways. The phenomena included are: dissociation; time distortion (elongated or condensed perception of it); amnesia; post-hypnotic suggestions; automatic writing; anesthesia and analgesia; hypermnesia; positive and negative hallucinations; age regression and progression; and ideodynamic behavior such as ideomotor indications and catalepsy. Although subjects vary in their ability to manifest these different phenomena, hypnotic interventions can be designed using those phenomena for which the subject shows the ability to develop them. (Edgette and Edgette, 1995). After sufficient training to experience and use various hypnotic phenomena, they can be introduced into therapeutic interventions, using, for example, the hypnotic phenomenon of time warp in which a subject can review a set or series of forgotten events in ten seconds . The memory of these events can be systematically made available to consciousness in a newly organized and more tolerable way for the subject.
Barber, TX (1956) "A note on 'hypnotizability' and personality traits." Int. J. Clin.Exp. Hypno. 4: 109-114.
Duke, JD (1969). "Relatedness and waking suggestibility". Int. J. Clin. Exp. Hypnosis. 17: 242-250.
Erickson, MH 1967 Advanced Techniques of Hypnosis and Therapy, ed. J. Haley. New York: Grune and Stratton.
Edgette, John H. & Edgette, Janet Sasson Edgette. (nineteen ninety five) The Handbook of Hypnotic Phenomena in Psychotherapy. Brunner / Mazel, Inc. New York.
Morgan, AH (1973) "The heritability of hypnotic susceptibility in twins." J. of Abnormal. Soc. Psychol. 82: 55-61.
Murray-Jobsis, J. (1991). "An exploratory study of hypnotic capacity of schizophrenic and borderline patients in a clinical setting." American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 33 (3) 150-160.
Spiegel, Herbert MD & Spiegel, David MD (1978) Trance and Treatment Clinical Uses of Hypnosis. Basic Books, Inc. New York.