2024-04-24 15:36:05
According to the professor, there is really no need to be afraid of hypnosis. “Hypnosis is a collaborative thing. The psychotherapist tries to help the person enter the state of consciousness in which he will benefit the most from the therapeutic session. Therefore, there is no need to hypnotize a person who does not want it at all,” says the specialist.
– What exactly is hypnosis? How is it different from sleep?
– First of all, hypnosis is not sleep. This is a special state of consciousness called trance. Some authors respond negatively to the theory of trance, claiming that hyposis is just a set of manifestations of a deep suggestive state. However, the essence is still the same: during hypnosis, an innate human quality is used – suggestibility. People sometimes say: “You won’t convince me with hypnosis.” However, hypnosis is not belief, during hypnotherapy there is really no attempt to convince a person.
Hypnosis is the use of an innate ability to suggest that we have throughout our lives. In the earliest phase of human life, it is suggestibility that allows us to learn and learn a great deal of information without criticism. This is what makes suggestion different from understanding or belief, because during either of these two processes, consciousness “filters” the information it receives, critically evaluating it. Meanwhile, suggestion is based on our unconscious “channel” of communication. It is especially important that the specialist performing hypnosis not only has a good command of this technique, but also adheres to strict ethical principles.
There are many different things that can be instilled, which can appear to people, for example, in dreams, which have turned into beliefs about themselves. And then people don’t understand where it came from. You need to be able to control the processes of hypnosis, to be able to work with them. I used the word “technique” for a reason: although there are different opinions, I think that hypnosis is still not an independent type of psychotherapy, but rather a technique that can be productively applied in almost all directions of psychotherapy. Thus, psychotherapists should learn hypnosis, that is, those who have already completed psychotherapy studies and have other necessary education.
– What problems do you usually see a hypnosis specialist with? How can hypnosis help a person?
– People come to hypnotists for the same problems they come to any other psychotherapist, i.e. anxiety, panic attacks, mood disorders, various somatoform (body sensations, but the body itself is completely healthy) disorders, etc. First, hypnosis helps to relax, control anxiety and fears, which could happen during the psychotherapy process. Another thing is that hypnosis helps to focus on the connection between the psychotherapist and the client, which is especially important in any psychotherapy.
Finally, hypnosis helps to “reproduce”, remember a lot of unconscious, “uncomfortable” information. During hypnosis, it is helped to restore it – it becomes easier for a person to accept and recognize that unpleasant information. In addition, human creativity is used during hypnosis: very often in hypnotherapy it is possible to “replay” various psychological situations, recreate, imagine or even fully experience situations that may have been traumatic or are still waiting in the future, and the client experiences them. Such things help a person to change. So, the essence of hypnosis is the same as any other psychotherapy technique: hypnosis is designed to help a person change. No one can do this work for him.
There is a misconception that during hypnosis, a person is passive, and only the one who performs hypnosis is active, so it seems that he can do everything, change for the person himself. But nothing of the sort is happening. You can’t force a person to do something he doesn’t want to do. If you want to have a result, then efforts are made to achieve it, whether with the help of hypnosis or other techniques. Hypnosis is only an auxiliary instrument.
– Are there cases when it is better not to apply hypnosis, it would do more harm than good?
– Dangerous is what is dangerous in any other medical situation: when there is an acute illness or other health disorder that requires a very specific procedure or intervention – appendicitis, broken bones, etc. But even in such cases, hypnosis can be used as an analgesic for those patients who, for some health reason, cannot or cannot administer pain medication. By the way, 25 years ago, there was an approved hypnotherapy course in Lithuania for all doctors and dentists. The latter were happy to learn hypnosis – its application helped a lot in working with children.
– What does a hypnosis session look like, what happens during it?
– The hypnosis session consists of three stages. During the induction, the person is brought into this specific state of consciousness so that other stimuli no longer disturb him and the attention is focused on a strict, stable relationship with the psychotherapist. Then follows the healing suggestion: images, scenes, phenomena, etc. imagining things, approaching them. In this sense, hypnosis becomes an art: in order to create images, you first need a discussion with the patient, to know what is pleasant for him, what is unpleasant, etc. The last stage is the exit from hypnosis. Both entry and exit times are approximately the same. Very often clients ask: “What if I don’t wake up?” The answer is very simple: a person does not wake up from sleep. If this happens during hypnosis, it means that hypnosis has simply turned into sleep. Everything here is very simple, so there is really no need to be afraid that you will not get out of hypnosis.
– After a hypnosis session, does a person remember everything he said or shared?
– Some things he remembers, some things he doesn’t. It really happens in many different ways. For example, in the case of spontaneous amnesia (memory loss), a person can forget a certain part of what happened during a hypnosis session without any great effort. There is also induced amnesia, in which the client is suggested to forget some things so that they are not disturbing, even though they had important therapeutic value. Research shows that even after specifically inducing amnesia, memories can be “brought back”, but this requires persistent efforts, that is, not another hypnosis session, but helping the person in a fully conscious state to reveal little by little what he has forgotten.
This was one of the phenomena that Sigmund Freud studied while traveling in France. At the University of Nancy, he observed how hypnosis was applied in a demonstration session: Professor Hieronym Bernheim performed hypnosis, induced amnesia, and then, in front of the entire audience, with persistent questioning, finally reconstructed the sequence of all the events of the hypnosis session down to the last detail. This gave Freud the idea that a person does not need hypnosis at all to remember something, it is enough just to give him time and freedom to remember. This idea was later used to create the main working instrument of psychoanalysis – the “free association” method.
– And yet: why is hypnosis so surrounded by various myths and rumors?
– Hypnosis is surrounded by all kinds of myths precisely because during it the person’s attention is very concentrated: he sees (or even does not see) only the one who performs hypnosis, hears only his voice, intonation, rhythm, volume, etc., and does not react to all the rest of the environment. There is a clear redistribution of attention. However, this is not unique to the phenomenon of hypnosis. For example, a mother with a newborn baby can sleep while cannons are firing outside the window, but she will wake up in an instant if, say, the baby’s breathing rhythm is disrupted. Such a phenomenon is a reaction of the “awake” areas of the human brain.
– I heard about the use of hypnosis in criminal proceedings, for example, in US court practice. Are human memories recovered during hypnosis really more accurate, more reliable than “ordinary” memories?
– Yes, there are US states that use hypnosis. However, we also have one very interesting case of the use of hypnosis in court in Europe: a hypnotist participated in the investigation of the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, who said that the wife of the murdered man could really remember the killer, because at the time of the incident (the Prime Minister at the time with his wife, Lisbeta Palme, was leaving the cinema) was facing him. However, the hypnotist’s testimony was dismissed as unreliable, and the killer was never imprisoned. Here it remains to emphasize once again: the main task of hypnosis is precisely neutrality, not instilling anything about the event itself, but only inducing hypnosis itself and asking questions.
– What new, interesting scientific research has been carried out in the field of hypnotherapy today?
– There are quite a few hypnosis associations in Europe that conduct various scientific researches. One of the more interesting discoveries is that the heart and breathing rhythms of the hypnotist and the client are of great importance to the hypnosis session itself: if those rhythms harmonize, coincide, the depth of the session is greatest.
2024-04-24 15:36:05