Confidence, then, is one essential quality of a successful hypnotist. Another is patience, because it may take some time to put a subject under. He will also have created a comfortable and comforting environment, designed to put his clients at their ease, with muted colours, few sharp edges, no bright lights. He might also, without the client's knowledge, use artificial means to make the client feel at home. One common such technique is mirroring, in which the therapist adopts the same posture, breathing, tone of voice and so on as his client, or in general uses body language, to make him feel that the hypnotist is someone just like him, someone he can trust. Recent studies have shown that body language and tone of voice are far more important than the actual content of speech in establishing a connection between people. One way or another, without making a fuss about it, the hypnotist will throughout the session be intently focused on you, the client, and sensitive to the slightest gesture or twitch which might indicate resistance or the opposite, and give him further clues as to what is going on.
A hypnotist uses suggestions, and this is a word which will recur countless times in this book. The subject responds to the hypnotist's suggestions, but that does not mean that he is suggestible in the sense of ‘gullible’, nor does the fact that psychologists rate our ‘hypnotizability’ (as they call it) on scales of ‘susceptibility’ bear any such implication. There are basically three kinds of suggestion that the hypnotist might make: suggestions designed to induce hypnosis (‘Your eyelids are feeling heavy’), suggestions during hypnosis to be acted on immediately (‘You will hear no sound except the sound of my voice’) and suggestions during hypnosis to be acted on later (‘After you wake up, you will no longer feel any craving for a cigarette’). These last suggestions are called ‘post-hypnotic suggestions’. They are not, as the term might imply, suggestions given after the hypnotic session, but suggestions given during the session which take effect after the session is over.
Techniques of Induction
In his autobiographical Moab is My Washpot comedian Stephen Fry recounts how he visited a hypnotist to get him over his fear of singing in public.
The business of being put in a trance seemed childishly simple and disappointingly banal. No pocket watches were swung before me, no mood music or whale song played in the background, no mesmeric eyes bored into my soul. I was simply told to put my hands on my knees and to feel the palms melt down into the flesh of the knees. After a short time it became impossible to feel what was hand and what was knee, while miles away in the distance rich, sonorous Hungarian tones told me how pleasantly relaxed I was beginning to feel and how leaden and heavy my eyelids had become. It was a little like being lowered down a well, with the hypnotist's voice as the rope that kept me from any feeling of abandonment or panic.
Or here is Whitley Strieber's account:
The process of becoming hypnotized was pleasant. I sat in a comfortable chair. Dr Klein stood before me and asked me to look up at his finger, which was placed so that I had almost to roll my eyes into my head to see it. He moved it from side to side and suggested that I relax. No more than half a minute later, it seemed, I was unable to hold my eyes open. Then he began saying that my eyelids were getting heavy, and they did indeed get heavy. The next thing I knew, my eyes were closed. At that point I felt relaxed and calm, but not asleep. I was aware of my surroundings. I could feel my face growing slack, and soon Dr Klein began to say that my right hand was becoming warm. It got warm, and then he progressed to my arm, and then my whole body. I was now sitting, totally comfortable, encased in warmth. I still felt as if I had a will of my own, a sensation that was never to leave me.
This well highlights the essential difference between real life and fiction. Modern hypnotism is consensual and permissive, gentle rather than authoritarian. All hypnotism must be consensual to a degree: you cannot be hypnotized unless you want to. In fact, it is arguable that the hypnotist's role is not to do anything as such, but just to facilitate your own spontaneous entry into a trance state. All hypnosis may be self-hypnosis. A light trance is perfectly sufficient for most therapeutic purposes, so that you will easily remain aware of what is going on. It is all rather relaxing and comfortable, like falling asleep in a warm bed as a child.
There are phases to the induction. First, the therapist will put the client at his ease and allay his doubts and suspicions, by discussing what he wants and expects to get out of the treatment, by explaining what is involved in hypnosis (especially if the client has expectations based on TV and fiction), and generally by establishing rapport with the client. Then he will ask the subject to be quiet and to focus on his voice. This is an important part of the induction procedure: as the famous Russian psychologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936) found, the exploratory apparatus of animals, including humans, is essential to maintaining a state of general alertness and to orienting oneself within reality. So the hypnotist must close down our exploratory apparatus somehow, in order to reduce our alertness. Since the eye is the basic human exploratory apparatus, eye-closure is generally the first milestone in the induction of hypnosis. At the same time the hypnotist is ensuring that the input received by eye and ear is monotonous, because if we know what is going to happen next – if the input is boring enough to be predictable – that relaxes us, in the sense that we feel no sense of expectation, and our sensory sentinels can doze. The hypnotist may also get the client progressively to relax his whole body, starting with his toes and ending with the head. He may arouse the client out of his light trance and get him to talk about it, inspiring confidence, before repeating the procedure.
At some point the hypnotist will apply one or more tests to check whether the client is hypnotized; the most common tests used are the eye-closure test, hand-clasp test, postural-sway test and hand-levitation test. These are perfectly straightforward: in the hand-levitation test, for instance, the hypnotist suggests to the subject that his hand is so light that it floats up into the air. If the subject's hand does then float up into the air, the hypnotist knows that the subject is hypnotized. For the subject, it is a peculiar feeling, I can assure you. You know what is going on, but somehow can't be bothered to stop your hand rising up off your knee, though you know you could if you tried. The postural-sway test is a little more dramatic. The client is instructed to stand up and make herself rigid, like a board. The hypnotist pushes her gently from behind, making her sway, and then tells her that when his hand is removed she will find herself being drawn backwards. So he pushes her and withdraws his hand – and she finds herself rocking backwards on to the hypnotist's waiting hands. These tests are likely to be employed as much as anything to convince the client that something is going on, but in fact a skilful therapist already knows how susceptible any given client is likely to be, and in any case has enlisted the client's support, which is the single most important factor in susceptibility.
Some hypnotists prefer to use a device, rather than just the relaxing effect of their voice. The subject might be asked to stare fixedly at a bright object, and after a while the therapist will suggest that the patient is feeling sleepy. Whatever the induction technique, the therapist will then use suggestive procedures to deepen the trance. A common method is to get the client to visualize a set of stairs leading downwards … downwards … deeper and deeper. This will be repeated as often as is necessary during the process, if the trance seems to be getting shallower. Techniques seem all to be equally effective, so it depends on which ones the hypnotist and the client feel comfortable with. Further tests might be employed to check that the client is still entranced. For instance, the hypnotist might suggest that there is a mosquito in the room and the client will report (at the time and after the session) that he heard its whine.
There is no difficulty waking someone up from a trance; on the contrary, the usual difficulty is keeping him in a trance. The hypnotist will probably simply suggest that the client ‘Wake up now’, or he may reverse one of the procedures: ‘You are climbing back up the stairs you w
ent down earlier. When you reach the top stair you will wake up.’ One common waking-up instruction has the hypnotist counting backwards from five to one, at which point the subject wakes up, ready to implement whatever suggestions he and the hypnotist have agreed on during the session.
Even if you are left alone, you will still come round from the hypnotic state. You will either fall into natural sleep, or wake up, and whichever of these happens is unlikely to take long. In a classic experiment psychologists Martin Orne and Frederick Evans hypnotized one batch of subjects but had others simulate hypnosis; the hypnotist left the room on some pretext; before long all the hypnotized subjects had come around, but those who were just pretending stuck it out for the whole half hour of the hypnotist's absence, because that is what they thought a hypnotized person would do.
At the end of the session, the hypnotist will talk his client through the procedure, and is likely to give him an exercise in self-hypnosis to do at home to reinforce the beneficial effects of the session. This might be as simple as: ‘Every time you feel a craving for a cigarette, close your eyes, count to ten, and picture yourself jingling the extra money you have in your pocket as a result of not smoking.’
Methods of Treatment
There are treatments without end, and I'll just be scraping the surface here. There's more in Chapter 11. The method of treatment is likely to depend on the school to which the therapist belongs and the problem the client wants to solve. But nowadays most hypnotherapists are empirically trained rather than school trained, and so he is likely to use a range of treatments, culled basically from a Freudian or a behaviourist quiver. Freudian or psychodynamic methods are good for allowing the origin of problems to be brought to the surface, examined and explained, so that the undesirable effect can be made harmless. Behaviour-modification techniques are good for breaking ingrained habit patterns which contribute to problems. Then at the end of the treatment the therapist might suggest some reinforcing method, such as self-hypnosis or visualizations, with or without affirmations and positive thinking. Ideally each case will be judged on its own merits, and treatments tailored to the client's particular nature and needs, rather than the therapist's being so committed to a school that she cannot use techniques outside of that school.
Regression is a common technique, and has featured in films such as the 1946 Oscar-winning The Seventh Veil. In regression the therapist takes you back to your childhood, to uncover the origins of some syndrome or problem that you have. What caused that fear of spiders? Why did you originally start to stammer? In regression you can see the start of the problem, and begin to untie the knot.
I like the Freudian anagram technique: the hypnotized patient is told to imagine a box containing all the letters of the alphabet. She takes a handful of the letters, throws them into the air and watches them land. Those that land face up will form a word (so the therapist instructs) which will be related to the patient's problem. There are similar techniques, such as being taken through a symbolic journey, in which the things you encounter – a gate, an animal – are symbols with mental and emotional values. These are all ways for the therapist and client to see what is going on deep in the unconscious, so that measures can be taken to deal with whatever the problem may be. Sometimes being brought face to face with the roots of a problem can cause what is known as ‘abreaction’ – a cathartic, emotional reaction such as weeping. If such a thing occurs, the therapist will gently guide the patient through it, and show her why it happened.
Behaviourist measures can seem quite drastic. In order to deal with a phobia, the therapist will take advantage of the ability of a hypnotized subject to visualize things vividly. Suppose you have a fear of spiders: you will gradually be brought to the point, over a series of images, to where you can cope with spiders crawling on your stomach, perhaps. Or aversion is a technique whereby you are trained to associate a habit like smoking with something unpleasant, until you are put off smoking. These are techniques for ‘reframing’ – locating something that was perceived as a problem inside a new frame of reference, one in which it is no longer a problem, or at least less of one. As the old saying goes, an optimist perceives as half full a glass which a pessimist perceives as half empty: they have different frames. Since there is a connection between thinking and emotion, and between emotion, breathing and bodily posture, working on any of these can help to bring about the required change. Some therapists literally displace the problem. Milton Erickson once got a woman who was scared of flying to imagine a plane trip on which there was plenty of air turbulence, and to let her fear slide out of her and on to her seat. She had shed it; it was no longer part of her.
Although the patient appears to be will-less, letting the therapist stand in for his will, I would rather say that the patient is distracting his will, akin to the Zen practice of acting through non-action. If you confront a problem head-on, you treat it like an adversary, which gives it power, and makes it harder to get rid of. But if you sideline the problem, or treat it in an avuncular fashion, as the manifestation of the spoiled child within you, so to speak, its hold over you is lessened. This is passivity, but not will-less passivity. Having said that, however, it is likely that direct, authoritarian approaches will work better in cases where the patient has chosen to come to the therapist, for treatment for addiction, perhaps, while indirect, permissive, reframing techniques will work better for more deep-rooted psychological problems. The former approach is for the hypnotist to implant the direct suggestion: ‘You will find that your craving for cigarettes has gone.’ On the latter approach, the hypnotist might seed in the subject's mind ideas and pictures which represent how much healthier and wealthier he will be if he quits smoking.
Once the subject is hypnotized, suggestions will be seeded. Suggestions can be of various kinds, especially either direct or indirect. Let's say that you have gone to the therapist because you want to quit smoking. Then, as an example of direct suggestion, the hypnotist may say: ‘When you wake up you will find that you no longer want to smoke.’ Indirect suggestions are more subtle. The therapist might say something like: ‘I wonder how good you're going to feel about not smoking tomorrow?’ On the face of it, this is an innocuous question, but by lightly emphasizing the words ‘how good you're going to feel’ the suggestion is implanted in you that you will feel good if you quit smoking.
Like all therapists, a hypnotherapist needs to get feedback from his patients. Like all therapists who are dealing to any extent with the mind, they find it hard to get reliable information from their patients. In the very nature of the unconscious, the material is not readily available to the patient, so how can she communicate it to the therapist? In the 1930s the famous hypnotist Leslie LeCron developed a technique called ‘ideomotor signalling’ that has come to be very widely used. The patient rests his hands on his thighs. He is asked to designate specific uses for the four fingers of his dominant hand. The reason he is asked to make the choice is that it is vital to have his agreement. So, one finger is for saying ‘yes’, another for saying ‘no’, a third for saying ‘I don't know’, and a fourth for saying ‘That's none of your business’ – or at any rate: ‘I don't want to answer that right now.’
Now LeCron found – and his findings have been confirmed by countless hypnotists since – that these fingers could act independently of the conscious mind. Consciously, a subject might answer ‘yes’ to a question, while his ‘no’ finger rises of its own accord into the air. And so this is a way for hypnotherapists to tap into the unconscious of their patients. It has even been used to evoke responses from patients in a coma. If this sounds freaky, and reminiscent of automatic writing, that is quite right. Hypnotists – sober academics in prestigious universities – regularly use automatic writing in their experiments. This doesn't mean they claim to contact the dear departed and transcribe spirit messages, but they make use of a kind of extension of ideomotor signalling. They get their subjects to express in writing what's going on below the threshold of conscious
ness.
The Hypnotic Trance and What it Feels Like
Over the last couple of centuries, various theorists have been quite sure that there are seven – or nine, or four, or whatever – phases of trance. In actual fact, things are rather more fluid, and it is hard to discern the border between one phase and another, but there are tests that can be applied to determine depth of trance. The depth to which the client is hypnotized depends partly on his or her susceptibility, and partly on the skill of the hypnotist, but more on the particular therapy involved. For treating nicotine addiction, for instance, no more than a light or medium trance is necessary; for performing surgery, hopefully something deeper will be achieved!
For practical purposes, hypnotists may outline five stages of increasing depth of trance: the hypnoidal state, light trance, medium trance, deep trance, somnambulistic state. The term ‘somnambulism’ is a hangover from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and since it means ‘sleepwalking’ it is inaccurate, but it has been perpetuated in the literature on hypnosis. ‘Sleep-waking’, a term which also has a long history, might be a better alternative. Since a regular hypnotic subject soon develops shortcuts to reach the full hypnotic state, the different stages of deep hypnosis are easiest to observe in a novice subject. If you've been hypnotized yourself, you may have noticed different phases in yourself. A light trance feels like being relaxed, but in a deeper trance, impressions are fresher, imagery is more vivid and so on.
Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis Page 5
