Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (59 page)

The connection between emotion and image is familiar: stand in front of a great painting or watch a sentimental movie. So images arise, guided to a certain extent by the therapist, and emotional issues are worked through. Freud maintained that images were more primitive than verbal thought, and therefore reached layers of the mind that words gloss over. Psychotherapy is still biased towards verbal communication, but is increasingly having to recognize the value of imagery.

Visualization also helps physical healing. If you don't think that your imagination can have physical results, just imagine a beautiful
woman (or man, according to preference) doing unmentionably sexy things to you, and see what happens! As with all psychosomatic techniques, visualization works because the CNS affects the ANS. The simplest experiment which has demonstrated this is one conducted by American scientist Edmund Jacobson: he found that when a person imagines himself running, the muscles used for running contract a little. In other words, the same neurological pathways are stimulated by imagining running as actually by running.

Perhaps the most striking use of visualizations for physical healing is the Simonton method of treating cancer. Physicians Carl and Stephanie Simonton noticed that spontaneous remission occurred far more frequently in people whose outlook was positive and life-affirming. They enhanced this attitude with a five-step programme. The patient is first taught to relax, and then to imagine a tranquil scene. She then pictures the cancer and visualizes the radiation treatment as bullets striking all the cells in her body, cancerous and healthy, with the cancer cells significantly weaker, so that they are killed by the radiation. Next she is to imagine her white blood cells carrying the dead cancer cells away through the kidney and liver. Finally, she imagines her body as healthy, with the tumors decreasing in size. The Simontons achieved some notable successes: even apart from downright remission, a good proportion of their patients with terminal cancer lived far longer than medical science could have expected. The same technique can be adapted to any part of the body and any illness.

Recreational drugs such as alcohol, marijuana, ecstasy (methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA for short) and LSD produce almost archetypal ASCs. On the face of it, drug-induced ASCs resemble the hypnotic trance, and certainly a number of writers have assimilated these trances to one another. Also, for over 100 years, various drugs largely considered recreational (especially nitrous
oxide, alcohol, LSD, hashish) have been used to deepen the hypnotic trance. But there are certain differences in the subjective experiences involved, and some drugs involve a wider range of experiences than hypnosis.

Let's deal with the major differences first. I discount physiological details, such as LSD's dilation of your pupils, or the need to snack which is stimulated by marijuana and hashish. Recreational drugs may involve unsolicited hallucinations (as opposed to hypnotic hallucinations, which are the product of the operator's suggestions), synesthesia (so that sound, say, is perceived in visual terms) and strong emotional changes from euphoria to anxiety. None of these are features of the hypnotic trance. While drug trances involve time-distortion, as hypnosis does, the results are different. On drugs, time goes slowly enough for you easily to observe your thoughts, which leads to increased creativity, as new and unusual connections are made in your mind. In the hypnotic trance, however, time just passes quickly, with no increased creativity as a side effect (unless you are involved in a creativity-enhancing hypnotic experiment).

The three chief features of the hypnotic trance are suggestibility, dissociation and a narrow field of attention. Tests have shown that all the usual recreational drugs involve an increase in suggestibility. If losing inhibitions is a sign of suggestibility, this is within everyone's experience. One only has to compare the behaviour of a hypnotized subject in a stage show with the outspokenness of a drunk or the love-making of a couple stoned on grass. Moreover, drugs certainly induce dissociation; the most familiar aspect of this is the ability to observe oneself and one's functions as if they belonged to someone else, and even to do so on several levels at once. But drugs open up, rather than concentrate, the field of attention. It is of course possible when stoned or drunk or high to become absorbed in some task or sensation, but the main subjective experience is one of heightened not dampened sensation. The hypnotic trance, if I can put it this way, is designed so that the only meaningful input is the operator's voice; the drug trance is such that everything has increased significance. You can be very sensitive to others' emotional states, and hallucinations start from heightened perceptions too: you pick out patterns in the carpet or the clouds that would not usually be perceived.

The differences make it clear that a different state is involved. There is little in any of following extracts that would be recognizable to hypnotized person:

Throughout its duration, the intoxication will be nothing but a fantastic dream, thanks to the intensity of colours and the rapidity of the conceptions, but it will always retain the particular quality of the individual … He is, after all, and in spite of the heightened intensity of his sensations, only the same man augmented, the same number elevated to a much higher power.

I thought that I was near death; when, suddenly, my soul became aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so to speak, in an intense personal present reality. I felt him streaming in like light upon me … I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt.

In that time we recognize life's deepest meaning; the opacity, the darkness is made bright. Like the lips of fresh and gentle girls, sound like kisses showers our bodies. In our spine, in our skull, colour and line buzz new, yet ancient and clear. And now, no longer resembling the colour and line to which we are accustomed, they reveal the grand secrets hidden in forms. That primitive and so very flawed knowledge of Life we had gained through sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch is now improved, and made whole. We are given the chance to learn the truth of Life inherent in each of us, all of truth, perfected, beyond the faculties of our senses.

The first extract is the French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) on hashish; the second is from a report by William James in
Varieties of Religious Experience
of the experiences of the English critic John Symonds (1840–93) on chloroform; the third is from a short story called ‘Opium', first published in 1910, by the Hungarian doctor Géza Csáth (1887–1919).

NLP has been described as ‘the art and science of personal excellence'. More precisely, it is a way of understanding people's behaviour patterns, and then influencing their behaviour. As a way of gaining power over your neighbour, it is popular among salespeople; as a way of gaining sensitivity to others, it is useful for, among others, social workers and businessmen (especially for conflict-resolution). It is a way of excellence, then, only if excellence is defined in terms of effectiveness. It owes a lot to the work of Milton Erickson. We saw in
Chapter 10
how Erickson used language and precise observation of his patients to gain rapport with them and then to affect their present and future. Richard Bandler and John Grinder took the essential structures of Erickson's work (and that of Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir) and developed it into NLP. The central ideas are: first, there is no such thing as failure, only feedback. Every response is only information that can be used to tell you whether you are being effective. Second, people already have all the resources they need. All they have to do is access these resources at appropriate times. There are no problems, only results. Third, anything can be accomplished if the task is broken down into small enough pieces. Don't ask ‘Why?', ask ‘How?'. Fourth, the individual in any group with the most flexibility will also control that group. Look at what you can do rather than the limitations of the situation you're in. Remain curious.

Some people will be put off by the pretentious name and the slick packaging in which NLP is presented. Much given to mnemonics, snappy phrases (the ‘blame frame'; ‘what you resist persists', ‘the swish pattern'), simple diagrams and tables (e.g. ‘six-step reframing'), NLP offers a way of unlearning skills you think you have, and then re-learning them to do them better. It also develops in the practitioner a high degree of sensitivity to others' states of minds and body language. This is how it can help hypnotherapists (and other sorts of therapists too), because awareness of what the
subject is experiencing enables a hypnotist to build trust more rapidly and securely, and, in a therapeutic context, to elicit emotions and resources, and tailor strategies for the subject's future. NLP is related to hypnosis historically, since Erickson was a hypnotist, and it can feed back into hypnosis by developing sensitivity to others, communications skills and confidence. But these skills are useful in any domain, so the relation of this aspect of NLP to hypnosis is purely accidental.

However, NLP has another aspect – what they call ‘downtime' as opposed to the ‘uptime' skills of using the senses to develop sensitivity to oneself and others. ‘Downtime' is using all the Ericksonian skills we looked at in
Chapter 10
(mirroring, ambiguities, etc.) to induce a light trance in others. Why would one want to do this? NLP is based on the belief, shared by Erickson and others, that the unconscious knows best. So you take someone down into her unconscious in order to tap into the resources hidden but available there. These unconscious resources can help a person reframe problems as opportunities, open up horizons and so on.

NLP arouses huge enthusiasm in its devotees. I was once standing in a queue and saw someone nearby holding one of Bandler and Grinder's books. With time to kill, I engaged him in conversation – and he would hardly let me go in the end, when we reached the front of the line. Academics are rather more sceptical. Scientific experiments have failed to validate most of the basic tenets of NLP, such as that there are ways, from a person's eye movements and speech patterns, to tell what his ‘primary representational system' is – which of the sense modalities (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory) he is primarily oriented towards. If it works, then, it probably does so simply because it trains people in sensitivity. It's like the central controversy over astrology: is it a science or an intuitive divinatory practice? An astrological chart should trigger the reader's intuitions rather than be taken as a rigid system. NLP can develop interpersonal skills without being a science.

There are so many different kinds of meditation that finding a common core is not easy. Psychologist Deane Shapiro's definition is broad enough to cover almost all techniques: ‘Meditation refers to a family of techniques which have in common a conscious attempt to focus attention in a non-analytical way, and an attempt not to dwell on discursive, ruminating thought.' Hypnotic imperialists often assimilate meditation to hypnosis, and there are certainly enough superficial similarities to make things confusing from the outside. For instance, relaxation suggestions are likely to be given by both hypnotherapists and meditation teachers, and I have even heard a hypnotist tell his subject that if she noticed any extraneous sounds during the session she should just lightly let them go, without allowing them to disturb her state: this is a standard instruction in meditation.

But the practice of meditation involves repeatedly, over a period of twenty minutes or more, bringing one's attention back to the mantra or image or whatever the vehicle may be. You do not drop off into a full trance state; you do not let go into passivity; as in biofeedback, you monitor and regulate your performance. So the difference is one of will: the will remains active in proper meditation, but does not in self-hypnosis. In fact, this enables us to distinguish proper meditation from relaxation techniques, which are often wrongly called ‘meditation', such as listening to tinkly music or Herbert Benson's ‘relaxation response'. In other words, while hypnosis may look like meditation from the outside, it does not feel like it from the inside. Also, in so far as they can be trusted as evidence, the EEG characteristics of meditation and hypnosis are different: the former are far closer to the pattern of a sleeping person than the latter, which are hardly distinguishable from those of someone who is wide awake. In less experienced meditators, alpha waves predominate; the more experienced touch on the deeper theta state.

The differences between the two have been the subject of some
scientific studies, not all of which are conclusive. For instance, some studies have shown that both meditation and hypnosis have similar effects on the autonomic systems: a reduced respiration rate, increased basal skin resistance, increased alpha rhythm activity in the brain, reduced blood lactate levels, reduced blood pressure and pulse rate. But these similarities are no more than one would expect. They are the typical changes brought on by relaxation, and both hypnosis and meditation involve relaxation (though neither of them stop there). However, the fact that two things involve relaxation does not make them the same, any more than the fact that both pancakes and bread contain flour makes them the same.

Going back to Hilgard's demonstration of the hidden observer, it is possible to describe one difference between hypnosis and meditation as follows. Hypnosis affects
output
: pain or other perceptions are perceived but evoke no response. Meditation affects
input
: in deeper meditative states the amount of sensory information received is limited. This is not just a subjective impression of meditators, but has been proved by scientific tests: the sensory parts of the brain are less stimulated.

Different meditation systems have different names for their ultimate goal (nirvana, bliss, enlightenment, etc.), and for the stages on the way, but they all both start and end with higher states than are recognized within a hypnotic context. The closest correlates within Western psychology to meditative experiences are the peak experiences described by psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908–70) in various books, drug-induced ecstasy and what Hungarian-born Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, director of the Quality of Life Research Center at Claremont Graduate University in the States, calls ‘flow'. Maslow insisted – especially against behaviourism – that as well as basic needs such as eating and drinking, people have higher needs, such as the need to be dignified. What he called ‘peak experiences' are essentially the satisfaction of these higher needs, culminating in transcendent and ecstatic experiences which are marked by a detached, focused view of the interconnectedness of all creation. Csikszentmihalyi defines what he calls ‘optimal experiences' in terms of ‘flow'; they are times when we lose ourselves in whatever we are doing or experiencing, so that there is a suspension of the sense of time and a feeling of effortlessness. Sportsmen talk of being ‘in the zone',
others of being ‘in the groove': this is flow, these are peak experiences – but they are not hypnotic experiences.