Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (5 page)

As usual, most of the objections to hypnosis stem from a combination of ignorance and outmoded views. For instance, you hear the argument that you should submit your will only to Christ,
since any other influence might be diabolic. But hypnosis does not involve abandoning your will or self-control. In fact, many people talk about hypnosis giving them back control of their lives, if it has helped cure them of an addiction. Modern hypnotherapy is consensual, not authoritarian, and it is not the hypnotist's purpose to rob her patient of his will power, but to channel his will power towards the therapy. In any case, this is a most unrealistic or idealistic objection. Of course it is true that a Christian has surrendered her will to God or Jesus, but that does not mean that she does not surrender her will on plenty of other occasions to others too. If she refuses to surrender her will to a dentist or a doctor, she is going down the route of Christian Science; she should never watch TV, in case she is influenced by an advertisement, or read anything but the Bible and so on and so forth. Christians do not go through their days in a state of complete submission to God; they go through their days just like everyone else, but with a background awareness, occasionally fanned into stronger life, of God's presence. On a daily basis, then, they are just as liable to external influences as the rest of us. No one's life is as monolithic as this objection presumes.

If some Christians or religious people of any persuasion are worried about hypnotism simply because it may entail the planting of suggestions, they are on very weak ground. All of us, all of the time, are being bombarded by suggestions, and mass meetings such as church services are one of the most potent methods of implanting and reinforcing suggestions. The only element of genuine concern is that (unless the visit to the therapist is prompted by something purely physiological) values are likely to play an implicit part, and a New Age therapist may be assuming a set of values some of which clash with Christian values. In that case, the patient has two alternatives: she can either accept the therapy without taking on board the values (after all, she will be conscious throughout the process), just as she can enjoy a movie without accepting its values; or she can find a Christian hypnotherapist, and there are plenty of them, since far from all Christians are as narrow-minded as those who find hypnotherapy objectionable.

The fear of being in a suggestible state can be combined with the simple human fear of being in a state about which little or nothing will be remembered afterwards. But spontaneous amnesia in hypnosis
is very rare; most commonly a hypnotherapist will give you the choice to remember as much or as little as you want, or can handle, to help the healing process.

I hope that after reading this book Christians will see that there is nothing to fear in hypnotism, and that its healing properties make it a practice it would be unwise to deny to sufferers.

If flamboyance and authoritarianism are no longer in vogue (except in fiction), what are the basic techniques of modern hypnosis? They vary somewhat from therapist to therapist and practitioner to practitioner, but share the common feature of bearing little resemblance to the fictional and stage methods we've been looking at. This is also the place to mention that hypnotism has been accepted as a valid therapeutic technique by both the British Medical Association (in 1955) and the American Medical Association (in 1958).

Look them up in the
Yellow Pages
or on the Web; visit a New Age fair; contact one of the umbrella organizations of hypnotherapists. There are a lot of hypnotists around. He may be your doctor or dentist, who finds hypnosis a useful alternative to drugs, or uses it to extend his ‘bedside manner' to get a patient to relax. He may be a specialist hypnotherapist, with initials after his name signifying that he has been awarded a certificate by (in America) the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, or (in Britain) the London College of Clinical Hypnosis or the British Hypnotherapy Association. There are plenty of other such bodies – perhaps it is time for some unification. But you should certainly look into the hypnotist's credentials, make sure that he or she is affiliated to some such organization, and even check out the organization itself. Hypnotic treatment is likely to be pretty expensive, so you should take these precautions before committing yourself.

The hypnotist is unlikely to have an intense, staring gaze, or to be wearing a star-spangled cloak. Nevertheless, the respect in which
fact and fiction come closest – though not really very close at all – is in the person of the hypnotist. By this I mean that some of the traits of the fictional or stage hypnotist are exaggerations of the real-life person. As explained in the Introduction, there is bound to be inequality of will between the hypnotist and his client, in the sense that you are to a degree putting yourself in his hands. Now, you are going to put yourself in his hands only if you trust that he is going to do you good, and you will feel this trust only if he exudes an aura of confidence. In other words, while he is unlikely to have a domineering personality, he will have enough self-assurance to put you at your ease, just as any expert in any field must. But it will be the self-assurance of someone you can trust to act as your guide, not of someone who will attempt to dominate you.

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.

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 went 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.