Is hypnosis real? Show
Hypnosis is a genuine psychological therapy process. It’s often misunderstood and not widely used. However, medical research continues to clarify how and when hypnosis can be used as a therapy tool. Hypnosis is a treatment option that may help you cope with and treat different conditions. To do this, a certified hypnotist or hypnotherapist guides you into a deep state of relaxation (sometimes described as a trance-like state). While you’re in this state, they can make suggestions designed to help you become more open to change or therapeutic improvement. Trance-like experiences aren’t all that uncommon. If you’ve ever zoned out while watching a movie or daydreaming, you’ve been in a similar trance-like state. True hypnosis or hypnotherapy doesn’t involve swaying pocket watches, and it isn’t practiced on stage as part of an entertainment act. Yes and no. Hypnosis is a tool that can be used for therapeutic treatment. Hypnotherapy is the use of that tool. To put it another way, hypnosis is to hypnotherapy what dogs are to animal therapy. During hypnosis, a trained hypnotist or hypnotherapist induces a state of intense concentration or focused attention. This is a guided process with verbal cues and repetition. The trance-like state you enter may appear similar to sleep in many ways, but you’re fully aware of what’s going on. While you’re in this trance-like state, your therapist will make guided suggestions designed to help you achieve your therapeutic goals. Because you’re in a heightened state of focus, you may be more open to proposals or advice that, in your normal mental state, you might ignore or brush off. When the session is complete, your therapist will wake you from the trance-like state, or you will exit it on your own. It’s unclear how this intense level of inner concentration and focused attention has the impact it does.
Researchers at Harvard studied the brains of 57 people during guided hypnosis. They found that:
Takeaway It’s possible, but hypnosis shows marked differences in brain activity. This suggests the brain reacts to hypnosis in a unique way, one that’s stronger than a placebo effect. Like hypnosis, the placebo effect is driven by suggestion. Guided conversations or behavioral therapy of any type can have a powerful impact on behavior and feelings. Hypnosis is just one of those therapy tools. Hypnosis rarely causes any side effects or has risks. As long as the therapy is conducted by a trained hypnotist or hypnotherapist, it can be a safe alternative therapy option. Some people may experience mild-to-moderate side effects including:
However, hypnosis used for memory retrieval is a controversial practice. People who use hypnosis in this way are more likely to experience anxiety, distress, and other side effects. You may also be more likely to create false memories. Some doctors aren’t convinced that hypnosis can be used in mental health or for physical pain treatment. Research to support the use of hypnosis is getting stronger, but not all doctors embrace it. Many medical schools don’t train doctors on the use of hypnosis, and not all mental health practitioners receive training during their years of school. That leaves a great deal of misunderstanding about this possible therapy among healthcare professionals. You may not undergo hypnosis during your first visit with a hypnotist or hypnotherapist. Instead, the two of you may talk about the goals you have and the process they can use to help you. In a hypnosis session, your therapist will help you relax in a comfortable setting. They’ll explain the process and review your goals for the session. Then, they’ll use repetitive verbal cues to guide you into the trance-like state. Once you’re in a receptive trance-like state, your therapist will suggest you work to achieve certain goals, help you visualize your future, and guide you toward making healthier decisions. Afterward, your therapist will end your trance-like state by bringing you back to full consciousness. Although one session can be helpful for some people, most therapists will tell you to begin hypnosis therapy with four to five sessions. After that phase, you can discuss how many more sessions are needed. You can also talk about whether any maintenance sessions are needed as well. Although hypnosis is slowly becoming more accepted in traditional medical practices, many myths about hypnosis persist. Here, we separate reality from falsehoods. Myth: Everyone can be hypnotizedNot everyone can be hypnotized. One study suggests that about 10 percent of the population is highly hypnotizable. Although it’s possible that the rest of the population could be hypnotized, they’re less likely to be receptive to the practice. Myth: People aren’t in control of their body when they’re hypnotizedYou’re absolutely in control of your body during hypnosis. Despite what you see with stage hypnosis, you’ll remain aware of what you’re doing and what’s being asked of you. If you don’t want to do something you’re asked to do under hypnosis, you won’t do it. Myth: Hypnosis is the same thing as sleepYou may look like you’re sleeping, but you’re awake during hypnosis. You’re just in a deeply relaxed state. Your muscles will become limp, your breathing rate will slow, and you may become drowsy. Myth: People can’t lie when they’re hypnotizedHypnotism isn’t a truth serum. Although you’re more open to suggestion during hypnotism, you still have free will and moral judgment. No one can make you say anything — lie or not — that you don’t want to say. Myth: You can be hypnotized over the internetMany smartphone apps and Internet videos promote self-hypnosis, but they’re likely ineffective. Researchers in one 2013 review found that these tools typically aren’t created by a certified hypnotist or hypnosis organization. For that reason, doctors and hypnotists advise against using these. Probably a myth: Hypnosis can help you “uncover” lost memoriesAlthough it may be possible to retrieve memories during hypnosis, you may be more likely to create false memories while in a trance-like state. Because of this, many hypnotists remain skeptical about using hypnosis for memory retrieval. Hypnosis carries the stereotypes of stage performances, complete with clucking chickens and daring dancers. However, hypnosis is a genuine therapeutic tool, and it can be used as an alternative medical treatment for several conditions. This includes insomnia, depression, and pain management. It’s important that you use a certified hypnotist or hypnotherapist so that you can trust the guided-hypnosis process. They will create a structured plan to help you reach your individual goals.
HUMAN givens therapists, with good intentions, are no doubt accustomed to viewing hypnosis, however we might term it, as a force for good. Using this procedure can, indeed, lead to powerful therapeutic results but it can also be powerfully harmful, depending upon the ideas absorbed by the person in trance. Therefore, it is important that it is always used judiciously. I should like, in this article, to review human givens understandings about hypnosis, its uses and abuses. Unfortunately, something mysterious often attaches itself to talk about hypnosis, especially amongst those who style themselves hypnotherapists, as if practitioners who use it have highly specialised, even esoteric, skills – indeed, some seem to encourage that belief. This is added to by the fact that, although hypnosis has been known about for centuries, and been the subject of scientific research for over 200 years, there is still widespread misunderstanding about what it actually is. A quick look on the internet brings up a whole range of notions, broadly divided into ‘altered state of mind theories’ (it is a half-conscious state, seemingly between sleeping and waking; an unconscious, cataleptic condition; a form of dissociation; a dazed or bewildered condition; “regression in the service of the ego”; or a state of focused attention) and ‘non-state’ theories (it’s just play acting). Clearly, we need a bigger organising idea and the human givens provides one: hypnosis is not a state of consciousness at all; it is any artificial means of accessing the REM state. Thus hypnosis is a process, separate from the trance state that it induces, and its effects are no longer mysterious because this can account for all phenomena associated with it. It is self-evident that hypnosis is an artificial process, rather than a state, when we take into account that we usually go into a trance without anyone putting us into it. Indeed, hypnotherapists will often tell clients whom they are trying to reassure about its safety that we go in and out of trance quite naturally all the time – which is true. We are in a trance whenever our attention is focused and locked. But this means our viewpoint is limited by whatever trance we are in. And in that lies the danger. Anyone who can focus their attention, who has a good imagination or who can become emotionally aroused, will, at many points in time, enter trance. We are in a self-induced trance whenever we are highly emotionally aroused in what is usually thought of as a negative way: anger, fury, hatred, fear, anxiety, worrying, depression, envy, greed, selfishness – all such emotions cut us off from our thinking brains and give us a locked-in, limited view of reality. The same is true when we are in thrall to conditioned belief systems that we cannot see beyond, whether those of religions, cults or politics. Exciting events which we experience as positive are no less limiting in terms of our seeing the bigger picture – however thrilling it may be to support one’s team to victory, to feel swept away by music, moved by poetry, art or drama, to fall in love or make passionate love or to experience an awesome wonder that takes our breath away. We can be in a trance when using skills too. When driving, for instance, we can be totally unaware of passing landmarks or particular roads or even towns, because we have been doing so, in effect, on automatic. Becoming absorbed in creative activities such as cooking, gardening, writing, making art, music, poetry or pottery, singing and dancing put us in a trance, as can reading and studying. Activities like singing and dancing are highly trance inducing, particularly when done in a group. Performing a sport or using professional skills well is also totally absorbing. We can even enter a trance state known as ‘flow’ when we know how to do something really well and, in doing that activity, our sense of having a separate self temporarily disappears and we effortlessly become one with what we are doing. This type of blissful trance, when we enter it, seems to function autonomously within us: we become the experience that we are creating. This wonderful capacity to go into flow, which some psychologists call a ‘peak experience’ and others describe as ‘being in the zone’, contributes a great deal to the sense of life being meaningful. Trance can also be induced, intentionally or otherwise, by drugs, shock, slow rituals, hypnotic language, unexpected touch, prayer, sexual activity, reflection, staring, being asked to recall particular memories, greed, changing breathing patterns – indeed, any stimulus that arouses strong emotion and, paradoxically, any form of deep relaxation that lowers emotional arousal. The three most basic forms, which animals experience too, are dreaming, becoming highly emotional and learning – and none require hypnotic induction. The way a focused state of attention is generated can have a direct bearing on the quality, depth and length of trance. For example, one reason for building exquisitely beautiful cathedrals, mosques, temples and palaces was that people entering them were automatically put in a trance state of awe, which made them highly suggestible and more accepting of whatever teachings or instructions were imparted to them in those environments. And when people wear masks, they themselves go into trance because they are suddenly aware that, when people can’t see their facial expressions, they feel disinhibited; they can behave in ways in which they would not normally behave, focusing attention on this sense of transformation. The deepest trance of allHuman givens knowledge about the true nature of trance and hypnosis derives from Joe Griffin’s expectation fulfilment theory of dreams.1 For, of course, the deepest trance of all is dreaming. It is the most basic form of trance that develops in the womb when the foetus first starts manifesting REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. (The eye movements are the visible sign of the activation of a specific brain circuit, known as ponto-genicula-occipital (PGO) waves.) It was sleep research pioneer Michel Jouvet, now emeritus professor of experimental medicine at the University of Lyon, who had the extraordinary insight that it is during REM sleep that instincts are programmed into us from our genes. We return to it every time we dream and, as the expectation fulfilment theory shows, this is what maintains the integrity of our instincts. For dreams are metaphorical translations of emotionally arousing expectations not acted upon in the previous waking period. Dreams deactivate the emotional arousal, freeing the brain to respond afresh to each new day – thus maintaining the integrity of our instincts. In the human givens approach, we refer to trance as the REM state because of the clear physiological similarities with the state of REM sleep. Deep trance, when induced by hypnosis, mirrors many aspects of REM sleep, such as imperviousness to outside sensory information, less sensitivity to pain, muscle paralysis, etc. In addition, aspects of how the REM state functions when we dream parallel methods used for inducing trance. Many hypnotherapists may use rhythmic movement to help generate trance (for instance, making repetitive hand movements or getting people to stare at spinning optical illusions), which links back to the primitive fish brain that we evolved from. (Fish, of course, respond extremely powerfully to rhythm because of their constant need to propel, steer and balance themselves in water, which they do by ‘spinning’ their fins.) Focusing attention mirrors absorption in a dream. Another similarity is in the orientation of attention: making a loud noise or sudden movement can put a person into trance, as that instantly captures their attention and involves electrical brain activity known as the orientation response – the same PGO waves as seen in REM sleep. When we first start to dream, the orientation response fires furiously. The expectation fulfilment theory of dreams explains that this is the mechanism for alerting the brain to the presence of unexpressed emotional arousals that need discharging in a dream.1 There are yet more similarities. The deep relaxation, which psychotherapists use as an induction into trance, parallels what happens as we start to fall asleep. And, once clients are relaxed, the guided imagery we use to enable them to see their difficulties from a different perspective and overcome them, parallels dream material arising – the difference being that, in an artificially induced trance, the therapist is guiding the process, whereas unacted-out emotional arousals from the previous day provide the ‘dream script imagery’ in our sleep. As we know, metaphor is extremely powerful in therapy, when given to a person in trance; and dreams are metaphors. Vivid trance experiences may involve hallucinations – clients may report ‘feeling’ on their face the warmth of the sun that they were imagining, for instance – and dreams are hallucinatory. Research has shown that the same brain pathways are active in both circumstances. In addition to this, phenomena that can be induced in trance are also spontaneously experienced in dreaming, such as amnesia (for the dream), anaesthesia and analgesia, body illusions, catalepsy, dissociation and time distortion. Just as hypnosis is not the trance, however, so the REM state is not the dream. It is, in effect, the theatre where the dream takes place. As Joe Griffin showed, the dream script is separate from the REM theatre, our internal ‘reality generator’ and is acted out, or made real, within it. The REM state, then, is active in all types of trance. It isn’t just a ‘relaxed’ or ‘passive’ state. It is active. It is involved in programming innate and learned knowledge – all kinds of learning, academic or otherwise (including therapy, conditioning and indoctrination) – and also when we daydream and solve problems. When we are being traumatised, the REM state is the medium through which the traumatic event is captured by the brain and becomes a learned part of the survival templates. So the REM state is critically important to understand, especially if we are involved in delivering therapy. The promotion of confusing half-truthsA half-truth is just as dangerous as a lie, even if offered with the best of intentions. Unfortunately a great many half-truths are spouted about hypnosis, and practitioners need to be careful not to promulgate them. They include the following. • “Hypnosis is a natural state of relaxation and concentration, with a heightened awareness induced by suggestion” • “Hypnosis is safe with no unpleasant side effects” • “You will be aware of everything that is said to you” • “Hypnosis has nothing to do with sleep – it is just an extremely relaxed state” • “A hypnotist cannot influence anyone to do anything against their will” • “A person’s own ‘moral code’ will protect them from doing anything against their own best interests” • “The ‘unconscious’ is very wise” The dark side of hypnosisIt is clear, then, that hypnosis – accessing the brain’s programming pathway – can be used to do harm as well as good, both intentionally and unintentionally. The following are risks which all ethically minded practitioners of hypnosis need to acknowledge and protect against. • Taking away someone’s sense of volition • Muddied intention • Creating false (illusory) memories • Inducing hallucinations, • Conditioning Anyone who thinks hypnosis is harmless might do well to remember that Hitler studied it after being cured by a hypnotist of the hysterical blindness that he suffered at the end of the First World War. His personality changed at that point as the result of a strong suggestion given in trance by a psychologist who told him that he was special and that he had great personal powers and that, with these great powers, he could cure himself of the blindness. This acted as a post hypnotic suggestion and Hitler went on to induce receptive trance states in vast crowds at rallies, bombarding them with emotionally arousing nominalisations. He even adopted a stylised form of arm levitation as the Nazi salute. Of course, in therapy, abstract language is used with benign intentions, to send clients on their own internal search to find meanings for ‘inner resources’, ‘creativity’ and ‘strengths’ etc, but it is important to remain mindful both of how power can easily be abused and of how unintended consequences can occur when language is used loosely. At the very least, over-use of trance-inducing positive abstractions can prevent a client from moving forward, if certain abstractions are not made concrete. For instance, suppose a client scales herself at a 2 for depression on a scale where 1 is the deepest of depressions and 10 is living life fully again. The therapist then asks what number of the scale the client will need to reach to feel satisfied. The client says 7 or 8. All we have here is a set of abstracts, including the descriptors for 1 and 10 and a couple of meaningless numbers above mid-scale. Unless the therapist ascertains the behaviour the client associates with 1 and 10, and with 7 or 8, the client has nothing concrete to work with, in terms of making positive changes – and the therapist has nothing for the client to rehearse achieving in guided imagery. Although we teach trainee therapists to ask, in effect, “What does that look like?” when clients talk in abstract terms, sometimes therapists themselves become entranced by the abstractions, go on their own internal searches, and fail to see past them. I have seen this sort of thing happen often over the years that I have examined trainee therapists. The point I am making is that it can be surprisingly easy to be seduced into trance, even when you think you know better. • Unwanted telepathy • Damaging a person’s very essence The aim of therapy is to help people detach and cope alone, not become dependent. Extreme cases of repeated hypnosis can even eventually derange the brain, as when ordinary people start behaving in grotesque ways and think of others not as humans but as ‘things’. When the self-righteous behead people who don’t share their religion or think it is acceptable to rape, torture and kill people – it is certain that they have been hypnotised by the use of emotional arousal through fear, chanting, repetition, or other means, to make them become highly suggestible. All dangerous mass movements involve hypnosis and the programming of people, once they are emotionally aroused. This danger has long been known. As the renowned Indian Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda said, “Think of the mind like a team of wild horses, and rather than controlling them through muscular strength and taking hold of the reins, you ask another to hit them on the head to stun them into a submissive state for a short period of time. Each time another stuns the horses into submission the person loses an amount of their own mental energy. From continued regular sessions of hypnosis from another person, entering into this docile state, instead of gaining power and better control, the mind can become a shapeless powerless mass eventually leading to the mental asylum.” A version of this is what may happen if therapists repeatedly try to bolster a psychologically damaged person by telling them that they are talented or desirable or have a great future ahead, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, and doing nothing concrete to help make this a reality. Careless use of hypnosis can interfere with people’s psychological and spiritual development and it is not melodramatic to call that psychic murder. Using the REM state in therapyOf course there is a bright side to hypnosis, otherwise we would not have been teaching how to use it in therapy all these years. To recap, hypnosis is the accessing of the REM state artificially by focusing attention until it can be guided. Once a person is in that trance state, therapists can make powerful, positive psychological interventions, such as offering metaphors, embedding empowering suggestions, giving direct instructions and by guiding rehearsal of desired new behaviours in imagination, such as successful public speaking or driving confidently. Trance also provides the best platform for unhooking strong emotions from traumatic memories that the brain has interpreted as life threatening, which is why, using specific techniques, it offers the quickest means to help people overcome phobias and PTSD. Trance plus therapeutic interventions is what constitutes hypnotherapy. We can clearly see, too, how hypnosis fits with the APET™ model of activating agent, pattern matching, emotion and thought. The activating agent is whatever means the therapists chooses for inducing the REM state in the client (we recommend gentle ways, not harsh ways, like shock). The client’s brain pattern matches to the empowering ideas suggested by the therapist, and gives them personal meaning. Every pattern match fires an emotional response (an expectation), however subtle. The client may then think about the new ideas and rehearse new possibilities. The stages of effective hypnotherapyThese are: • Induction: artificially access the REM state by focusing attention • Trance: relax the client to prepare him or her for learning • Educate: guide the client’s attention and add new information that gives their life a richer context. All learning happens in trance. Whenever we recognise something familiar in the world, it is always because we are making a pattern match between what is out there in the environment and an internally stored pattern, which we normally call a memory. Our brains are constantly pattern matching to the outside world and we only become aware of that if something different from the norm occurs – the orientation response fires and our attention is drawn to it. All learning, by its nature, involves novelty and we have to focus, however briefly, on what is new and different in order to absorb it. That requires us to go into the REM state. When the new knowledge to be absorbed is profound, we need to introspect about this new pattern match and adjust our model of reality to it. Thus all learning is post-hypnotic. • Heal – help bring about psychological healing by guiding a person to access positive life resources and harness the mental processes needed to rehearse healthy new behaviours; and physical healing, by helping or motivating the body to heal itself. • Ensure volition: give complete control back to client. First, do no harmWhether trance work does harm or not depends on many factors including: • the integrity of the person doing the therapy • the therapist’s sincerity and intelligence (emotional and otherwise) • their level of skill and how well they use language skills; especially metaphor • the therapist’s level of psychological knowledge and self-knowledge • their understanding of innate emotional needs about what a patient really requires • the therapist’s ability to put their own ego aside • the nature of the ideas absorbed by the patient. Confucius is reported to have said: “The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools.” When we use hypnosis to induce trance in psychotherapy, our brain is our prize tool. So we must keep it sharp by improving our understanding of what we are doing, developing our skills and staying alert and focused when activating the REM state in our clients, otherwise we can harm the very people we want to help. Ivan Tyrrell is co-founder of the human givens approach. He is a director of Human Givens College and editorial director of Human Givens. This article first appeared in the Human Givens Journal, Volume 22, No. 1, 2015. © Ivan Tyrrell. We need your help – this article originally appeared in the Human Givens Journal which takes no advertising at all, in order to maintain its editorial independence. To survive it needs new readers and subscribers – if you have found the articles, case histories and interviews on this website helpful, and would like to support the human givens approach – please take out a subscription or buy a back issue today. References
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We have noticed that several articles (including this Daily Mail one: Breathe easy to combat anxiety: The mind tricks that can alleviate symptoms) fail to explain how such breathing can lower emotional arousal. The answer is very simple, and once grasped, provides an extra layer of understanding which might encourage more of us to try this simple and effective tool to control our anxiety levels. Breathing techniques are not just 'mind tricks', they produce a bodily response that lowers your anxiety in a very physical way. Deep breathing techniques all have one thing in common, they work by stimulating what is known as the Parasympathetic Nervous System. You may have heard of the 'fight or flight' response, the Parasympathetic Nervous System is simply the opposite of that ('fight or flight' is the term for the activation of the Sympathetic Nervous System) - instead of getting you ready for action, deep breathing activates a natural bodily response that can be described as 'rest and digest'. Out-breaths decrease your blood pressure, dilate your pupils and slow your heart rate – lowering emotional arousal in the process. Practising a breathing technique a few times a day will lower your overall stress levels in the long term. It's important to realise that it's the out-breaths that stimulate the response, so it stands to reason that a breathing technique with longer out-breaths than in-breaths will be more effective at lowering emotional arousal. Breathing techniques in which the out-breath is the same length as the in-breath, or during which you focus on your anxious thoughts (as advocated in the above Daily Mail article) are generally less effective at quickly lowering the physical symptoms of anxiety, despite being a good way of being mindful or entering into a relaxed state. Which breathing technique should I use?On our Human Givens College training courses, we teach a technique which Joe Griffin named '7-11' breathing, because it's the most powerful technique we know. Here is how you do it, and it is as easy as it sounds: 1 - breathe in for a count of 7. 2 - then breathe out for a count of 11. Make sure that when you are breathing in, you are doing deep ‘diaphragmatic breathing’ (your diaphragm moves down and pushes your stomach out as you take in a breath) rather than shallower higher lung breathing. If you find that it’s difficult to lengthen your breaths to a count of 11 or 7, then reduce the count to breathing in for 3 and out to 5, or whatever suits you best, as long as the out-breath is longer than the in-breath. Continue in this way for 5-10 minutes or longer if you have time – and enjoy the calming effect it will have on your mind and body. An added bonus of 7-11 breathing is that the very act of counting to 7 or 11 is a distraction technique, taking your mind off your immediate concerns. This 7/11 breathing technique for relaxing quickly is the most powerful we know and has been used for thousands of years throughout the world. This article originally appeared on the Human Givens Blog on the 26 October 2012. |