By: Jacqueline Gaye Terry
Jacqueline Terry
Our culture has us in a trance. We are enthralled by ideas and images that it generates. We are incapable of putting them aside and seeing things from some neutral point of view. The thoughts we cherish, the values we espouse are created for us. Our fashions, fads, and manners are orchestrated. Even our rebellions are expressions of conformity. Although we are capable of free choice, the alternatives placed before us are so limited that we act very much like automations. And all the time we think we are living as free, independent creators of our lives. (Crabtree p.xvii)
In all magical healing there are two different approaches. Some are carried out through the confidence of the healer in his or her own special power. In the process of spiritual healing, on the other hand, the healer acts as an intermediary in a spiritual process initiated by a deity. The spiritual healer believes that he is a “divine instrument” of God and therefore is capable of healing only through a religious approach.
Suggestion can be defined as the uncritical acceptance of an idea. For the most part all subjects believe that the hypnotist produces the responses they feel. But for those of us who have experience with hypnosis clients, it is apparent that it is the subject who initiates the response with their belief and expectant attitude. When rapport has been established between the practitioner and the client criticalness is reduced. As the client allows the hypnotic state to set in, a suggested act usually is automatically carried out without the individual’s logical processes participating in the response.
Practitioners of hypnosis realize that it is the favorable mind-set of the patient that produces the results. Since almost every organic condition has a psychological component, magic, faith healing and hypnosis can be successful in most psychosomatic conditions. Kroger doubts if organic ailments can be cured by faith healers but… he later says, “It has long been recognized that wart tumors, even though benign, are due to a viral involvement and often respond to suggestion and/or hypnosis. This is a noteworthy example of alteration in tissue pathology…” (Kroger p. 284)
It would appear that all healing is not miraculous healing, but rather a method involving known psychological forces. It is well documented that faith is the best-known antidote for despair. Since despair is often at the root of psychogenic illness, faith plays a major role in recovery.
William James, the psychologist, who was cured of melancholia, believed that strengthening the will or educating it is the very object of our existence.
Kroger offers the notion that “no healers have a monopoly on the use of faith and spiritual forces, that faith is another valuable arrow in the therapist’s quiver, and that susceptibility to hypnosis is based on faith, and is largely a panacea, it is especially effective in the case of emotionally disturbed individuals — those who wish to have faith.”
Paracelsus observed, “Whether the object of your faith is real or false, you will nevertheless obtain the same effects.” (Kroger p.135)
It is the faith of the patient in either the shaman, the doctor or the hypnotherapist that work equally as well depending on the patient’s beliefs. The effectiveness of any of these approaches obviously relates to previous conditioning of the subject. Kroger suggests that all of these approaches make use of suggestion “by effecting a temporary dissociation produced by selective cortical inhibition—the attention is diverted through misdirection—and the favorable attitude or the mind-set resulting from previously invoked beliefs allows the acceptance of faith-laden ideas. The misdirection is obtained by the ritualism that accompanies all … healing.” (p. 135) This would indicate that hypnosis is merely a catalyst in the process of using belief, conviction and imagination to produce a particular branch of faith phenomena. Through hypnosis it is possible to stimulate the recovery processes that are inherently present in each of us. Therefore, I accept Kroger’s assertion that the power of hypnosis is the power of belief!
Our ability to move from the state we are now in to deep trance depends on the rapport we have with our unconscious mind. The unconscious mind can and does communicate with every cell in the body. There is now scientific evidence that our mental processes, mental states, and mental behaviors affect all the cells in our body all the time. We know that neuro-transmitters bathe every cell in the human body. It is this knowledge that is key to the Mind/Body connection.
Until Candice Pert discovered the opiate receptor in 1972 there was a very brain-centered view of emotions in Western science. Pert demonstrated that emotion is not generated by the brain but by the cells themselves. She found that the receptors, while densely concentrated in the limbic brain, also occur in every other part of the body. Since these receptor-bearing cells are found all over our bodies, the emotion is experienced in the blood, organs, muscles, tissue and bones at the same time as it is registered in the brain. The limbic brain transfers the information to the frontal cortex, where we become conscious of it. It is only at this point that we begin to form ideas about what we are feeling. The experience itself occurs at a preconscious, physiological level. These bio-chemicals are the molecular underpinnings of what we experience as feelings, sensations, thoughts, drives, perhaps even spirit or soul.
Darwin speculated that the emotions must be key to the survival of the fittest. The term emotion, in the broadest of terms, includes not only the familiar human experiences of anger, fear, and sadness, as well as joy, contentment, and courage, but also basic sensations such as pleasure and pain, as well as the “drive states” studied by the experimental psychologists, such as hunger and thirst. Pert also includes an assortment of other intangible, subjective experiences that are probably unique to humans, such as spiritual inspiration, awe, bliss, and other states of consciousness that we all have experienced but that have been up until now, physiologically unexplained.
Zen Buddhists meditate on paradoxical koans for many years to arrive at the realization that all reality begins with the perception and intention of the mind. An understanding of the ‘unreality of reality’ will assist in working with hypnosis, because the body is just as ‘unreal’ as anything else. It can be changed very quickly, if not instantly, therefore, the mind and body can be healed at any time.
Milton Erickson once said, “Patients are patients because they are out of rapport with their own Unconscious.” Hypnotherapy patients are people who have had too much programming – so much outside programming that they have lost touch with their inner selves.
Belief consists of a collection of perceptions of reality. They take on the level of convictions as beliefs are correlated with one another establishing a firm sense of reality. Unless new reality situations are introduced, the older sensory impressions cannot be changed. The conscious mind is guided by reality, but this is limited by past and present realities.
Studies in perception indicate that awareness of reality comes from within us, not from our environment. This means that reality is subjective. Each individual constructs his or her own reality from a varied collection of past experiences combined with cultural and social programming. This further makes hypnosis a subjective phenomenon. It, too, is constructed out of beliefs of the past that can create a readiness to believe in the hypnotic process. Successful hypnosis is based on altering perceptual awareness by compounding existing beliefs that lead to a conviction independent of reality.
It is becoming clearer that the placebo effect plays a key role in drug therapy as well as to all forms of psychotherapy. Hypnosis is no exception. Placebo action has been the one constant in the practice of medicine no matter what it has been called. An interesting point that Kroger makes is that the present cure rate for many conditions with a psychogenic base would not differ appreciably today from that of any other period in history. This observation suggests that most drugs have no more value than a placebo. It has been the dynamic placebo force that has perpetuated the medical profession for centuries, even when drugs were physiologically harmful. It is the placebo effect or the faith and imagination of the patient that produces the majority of cures. Kroger concludes that all human beings need motivation, self-esteem, and something to believe in so that they can face their daily stresses.
Although suggestion and hypnosis are related to the placebo effect they differ from each other in some ways. The difference is similar to the comparison made between religious and hypnotic healing. Healing by hypnosis requires belief in the validity of the induction of hypnosis, that is, in the “power” of the hypnotist. Cortical inhibition produced by misdirection of attention is common in hypnosis but not in placebo administration. Kroger indicates that in a clinical setting, where motivation is high, hypnosis may prove to be the peak of scientifically applied placebo effect.
The hypnotic induction acts to narrow the focus of awareness on a particular aspect of reality to the exclusion of much of the rest. If sufficient rapport has been established between subject and therapist the verbal suggestions will be taken and become effective because they are not subjected to ordinary reality testing. The degree of effectiveness of a post-hypnotic suggestion is based on the degree the subject is able to suspension habitual perception. If a suggestion seems to be a certainty because of belief and conviction, it has the power to affect an appropriate response in the subject.
The degree of success in establishing a new response in the subject depends on the manner and the number of beliefs necessary to establish conviction. If we hear something long enough and strongly enough, we can build up conviction, as in religious faith, or a faith in brand names built up by advertisers. Suggestion, presented in the hypnotic state using both conviction and imagination bypasses the critical conscious state and has this power to make change.
Until Candice Pert discovered the opiate receptor in 1972 there was a very brain-centered view of emotions in Western science. Pert demonstrated that emotion is not generated by the brain but by the cells themselves. She found that the receptors, while densely concentrated in the limbic brain, also occur in every other part of the body. Since these receptor-bearing cells are found all over our bodies, the emotion is experienced in the blood, organs, muscles, tissue and bones at the same time as it is registered in the brain. The limbic brain transfers the information to the frontal cortex, where we become conscious of it. It is only at this point that we begin to form ideas about what we are feeling. The experience itself occurs at a preconscious, physiological level. These bio-chemicals are the molecular underpinnings of what we experience as feelings, sensations, thoughts, drives, perhaps even spirit or soul.
Darwin speculated that the emotions must be key to the survival of the fittest. The term emotion, in the broadest of terms, includes not only the familiar human experiences of anger, fear, and sadness, as well as joy, contentment, and courage, but also basic sensations such as pleasure and pain, as well as the “drive states” studied by the experimental psychologists, such as hunger and thirst. Pert also includes an assortment of other intangible, subjective experiences that are probably unique to humans, such as spiritual inspiration, awe, bliss, and other states of consciousness that we all have experienced but that have been up until now, physiologically unexplained.
In his book, The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley referred to the brain as a “reducing valve.” This concept has been the focus of a great deal of research and speculation over time. There is considerable neuro-physiological evidence to indicate that the nervous system is not capable of taking in everything, “but can only scan the outer world for material that it is prepared to find by virtue of its wiring hookups, its own internal patterns, and its past experience.” In other words, we see what we believe. As Pert suggests in her ideas on the nature of emotions, “Emotions are constantly regulating what we experience as ‘reality’. The decision about what sensory information travels to your brain and what gets filtered out depends on what signals the receptors are receiving from the peptides.”
Dr. David Spiegel of Stanford University School of Medicine wrote, “You have to pay attention to pain for it to hurt, and it is entirely possible to substantially alter pain perception during surgical procedures by inducing hypnotic relaxation.”
Errol Korn and Karen Johnson write that they “believe that the most powerful imagery is end-result imagery; that is, developing as clear a picture as is possible of the goal or desired outcome.” (Korn & Johnson p. 85) The therapist may suggest that the end-result image be experienced directly. The practitioner may suggest to the client that they experience what it is like to become relaxed in that stressful situation, by seeing with relaxed eyes, by standing with relaxed muscles, or indirectly by viewing the end-result image on a television or movie screen. The end-result image is then worked with every day to reinforce its strength and to realize the unconscious fulfillment of that image by setting into daily practice all the individual steps that comprise the entire desired behavior or feeling state.
It is important to remember that imagery exists in all five modes of perception; therefore a person who is not able to visualize vividly may be able to hear or feel vividly. Maltz asserts that an image is more effective if the person “feels” as well as “sees.” Korn and Johnson state that an image is more successful if the client uses all five modalities of perception. The more conscious an image is and the more consciously directed it happens to be, the more concrete it will appear. The closer the image is to the source of thought and the deeper levels of oneself, the more abstract it tends to be.
References—
Crabtree, Adam. From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing. New Haven: Yale University Press.1993.
Crabtree, Adam. Trance Zero: The Psychology of Maximum Experience. St. Martin’s Press. New York. 1997.
Pert, Candace B, Molecules of Emotion. New York, NY: Scribner. 1997.
Zeig, Jeffery K (editor). A Teaching Seminar with Milton H. Erickson. Brunner/Mazel Publishers. New York. 1980.
Ansari PhD, Masud. Modern Hypnosis: Theory and Practice. Mas-Press, Washingto DC. 1982.
Jacqueline Gaye Terry is a Washington State Registered Hypnotherapist and a student of Antioch University and Roger Moore’s Institute of Hypnotherapy.
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