IS HYPNOSIS DANGEROUS?
This is the most common belief of all—and the greatest fallacy.
You cannot be hypnotized against your will! You have to agree to it. But you can be caught off-guard. If any unacceptable suggestions were then made, you would nevertheless have the choice of either terminating the voluntary trance state or continuing with it. You can be persuaded or told to do something but you still are able to reason and you can still say ‘No.’ You are, after all, still awake, as mentioned earlier.
Unfortunately many books on the subject, and even some courses, may lead us to believe that hypnosis is not only complicated but dangerous. If this were true there would surely have been some legislation by now to weed out the unsavoury charactors who were abusing this most natural healing gift. The fact is, the only danger is that, if done incorrectly, hypnosis just will not work.
Many people have been mislead into thinking of hypnosis as ‘brainwashing’. The simple fact is that people who are being hypnotized just will not accept a suggestion in hypnosis that is damaging to them. In order to be brainwashed you need three vital ingredients: pain, drugs and hypnosis. Those who say they were made to do something by a hypnotist or hypnotherapist against their will, then they should eliminate the word ‘made’ and replace it with ‘conned’—and you do not need to be hypnotized to be conned. You always have a choice as to whether you are going to do what the hypnotist says or not.
Do not be persuaded into thinking hypnosis is dangerous, because it is not. A lot of the misapprehensions about hypnosis stem from ignorance, while some of them, it must be said, are spread by practitioners of hypnotism themselves. They fear that too many people will realize how natural a healing process hypnosis is, thereby taking away their importance as ‘miracle workers’—whether on stage or in healing. Although the hypnotist is well aware that it is the person in hypnosis who is accomplishing any act or change, unfortunately the hypnotist’s ego sometimes intervenes and halts the otherwise natural progress by shrouding in mystery the most natural self-healing gift known to humanity.
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In order to have a good, working understanding of hypnosis it is helpful to have an insight into how the mind works in general. This can be explained very simply. You do not need to know about the elaborate, sophisticated workings of the mind; a basic explanation will be sufficient.
The mind is made up of two parts: the subconscious and the conscious. The subconscious part of the mind functions automatically. It is not the thinking part, it is the doer. Before the age of approximately five years old, our ability to learn is at its peak. All the information passed on to us from our parents, teachers, etc. goes directly to the subconscious, which files it away immediately. This is why if you tell a toddler that a wall is black when it is white the child will just accept this, where an older child would challenge you. As the child progresses another facility comes into operation: the conscious.
The conscious part of the mind acts like an editor of a newspaper, who chooses which stories will be carried in each edition, which will be filed away to use another day, and which can be discarded. There is only a certain amount of knowledge that can be held at any one time in the forefront of the mind to which the conscious has immediate access. When this forefront is fully occupied, any additional information coming through is stored away in the mind’s ‘filing system’. Just like the busy editor who has an assistant in charge of the filing, the conscious passes over control of the sophisticated filing system to the subconscious. And just as when the editor’s assistant is absent the editor may have problems finding a file, the conscious has no idea how to work the unfamiliar, complicated controls of the subconscious filing system.
Everything we have ever done, said, heard, smelled or seen is stored away, in fact. In hypnosis the subconscious can be easily accessed and the memories of an incident retrieved and looked at in detail. The police find this particularly useful in uncovering information—such as the record of a numberplate or the description of the face of an attacker—when victims’ or witnesses’ immediate, conscious memory has been erased by shock.
In my practice in Harley Street I often take clients back in regression (a term used to describe taking someone back in hypnosis to an earlier memory) to the time when they first walked as a child. They can see what they wore (sometimes just a nappy), what their parents were like and how they looked, even to describing their hairstyles and what they were saying. This shows how fantastic a system the brain is and how easy it is to retrieve information.
There are many obstacles preventing certain information being directly available to the conscious mind. Accessing the subconscious overcomes these obstacles immediately. Remember, the subconscious is the automatic part of the mind and will take orders. If you ask for a certain memory to be brought forward, it retrieves the required information as instructed. If the memory is attached to a trauma, the whole package comes forward.
By accessing data straight from the subconscious the information is not edited and, consequently, you may touch on a particularly distressing incident. This unhappy memory may cause the person in hypnosis to undergo what is called an abreaction. This means that he or she is in the middle of the emotion and may burst into tears. This outburst can sometimes be very exaggerated, due to the trance and the lifting of inhibitions. To the untrained it can be quite frightening and is another reason why hypnosis has for so long been rumoured to cause people actual mental or psychological harm.
This concentrated raw emotion will usually only come to the surface while a person is being treated with advanced hypnosis, but there are occasions, though very rare, when it can surface during suggestion hypnosis—just as you can strike a raw nerve, by accident, in the middle of an innocent conversation.
I became aware that abreactions are in fact not that serious and that anyone can have one without warning. Just watching a film, listening to the radio or hearing someone speak can trigger off an emotional memory. When I had my memory loss I was told that someone whom I knew had died. I took it in but did not react. Six weeks later I was walking through the busy passageways at a London tube station when I suddenly burst into tears. Something had triggered off the memory of my friend’s death.
The conscious is the thinking, logical part of the mind. If there is no reasonable explanation for a behaviour pattern the conscious will invent one that seems to it to be logical. You can see an example of this thought process in the typical smoker. Asked why he smokes his reply could be simply: ‘I enjoy it.’ Yet this same person will probably have a list of objections to smoking as well, such as ‘I hate the smell,’ etc. He may even claim that he wants desperately to quit. There is definitely a conflict here, but not one so great or complex that the smoker cannot easily be treated by hypnosis. Because smoking is rarely trauma related, quitting with the help of hypnosis is a straightforward matter.
The person who overeats may say he does so because he enjoys it. This may be partly true but there are most likely other, deeper motivations. He may crave comfort, protection or even punishment, and overeating satisfies this craving. We all have to eat to live and therefore we are all programmed to be tempted by food. Our senses are tuned to pick up on the smell, taste, texture and look of food. Our bodies are also programmed to provide a feeling of fullness or satisfaction when we have eaten enough. When there is some trauma-based condition, however, a new behaviour pattern is created causing a person to overeat not just because he enjoys it, but for other reasons as well.
The answer from the conscious of ‘Because I enjoy it’ for the two entirely different problems of smoking