As I blanched, chopped and stir-fried, I stuck my iPod in our speaker-gadget thingie (technical term) and whacked up the volume. It wasn’t long before I was dancing around the kitchen to tunes I hadn’t heard in a very long time: Morcheeba, Moloko, Goldfrapp and one of my all-time favourites, ‘Instant Pleasure,’ by Rufus Wainwright.

I had my music on the shuffle setting and tracks popped up that I hadn’t listened to in a couple of years. It was very interesting to me that, as each song came on, images from the past would pop into my mind.

Some of the songs were powerfully associated for me with the last long hot summer I spent living in London; others revivified for me the experience of driving around in Tom’s car through the Yorkshire countryside in the first months after we met.

It reminded me of just how powerful music is for me in inducing these trance phenomena. To be more specific about it, you might say that music has the ability to trigger a series of age regressions in which I revisit specific scenes and feel in my body some of what I felt back then combined, in a particularly potent way, with my emotions about remembering those scenes from my past.

Fragrances and scents do that for me too:  the smell of old books with a certain kind of paper can regress me right back to particular moments from my childhood; the smell of a cocoa butter body lotion I like to use still carries with it a memory of my first holiday in France. I am leaning out of the window of an old house on the coast, looking at the sun making long shadows between the olive trees, stretching my arms above my head.

Of course, I have cultivated that particular association, perhaps deepened it over the years, because I enjoy experiencing it so much. I can still connect with the sense of excitement, of my life opening for me, that I felt as a thirteen-year-old in France and I want to reconnect with that feeling, from time to time.

The iPod-induced trance phenomena I experienced last night was a powerful reminder of the ability of our minds to create these associations. Sometimes it is extremely pleasurable to revivify and reconstruct the happy, life-enhancing memories and experiences that nurture deep parts of our selves.

You know, I think that sometimes, as hypnotherapists, we can easily forget that spontaneous regression as a phenomenon doesn’t have to be difficult or unhelpful. We might spend a lot of time working with people who need help in stopping the unhelpful regression to and endless reconstruction of incidents and events in their past that are troubling them in some way.

And yet there are all kinds of powerful positive memories and associations that we can draw upon as resources to help us to strengthen aspects of our selves.

I don’t think that’s what Rufus Wainwright actually means when he sings about, (ahem!) ‘Instant Pleasure,’ but it works for me.

One of the participants in my afternoon workshop asked me a very interesting question. We were talking about using writing to ‘dialogue’ with feelings, emotions or physical sensations when he observed, ‘But to do that, wouldn’t I have to be a creative person?’

So what is a ‘Creative Person’?

Who is this person, so different from most of us, who is Creative with a capital ‘C’?

When we begin to become more consciously aware of the stories we tell ourselves about creativity and creative people, we can begin to question and challenge some of the myths around creativity and what makes people creative.

In his book,  Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Mihalyi Csikszentmhalyi interviews creative people from many different fields: the arts, mathematics and science, inventors, educators, thinkers, therapists. He concludes that creative people are not people who simply happen to connect with and express their own innate abilities but people who combine their abilities with disciplined practice. They actually invest time in finding and developing their flow experience – through activities which actively nurture this.

Many of our ideas about the messy, crazy, slightly chaotic or even brilliantly tortured creative soul are simply not true – and probably extremely limiting to us.

To create, we need not only to be able to allow our ideas to emerge, but we also need to work at our particular skill, through consistent disciplined practice.We need to combine playfulness with emotional intelligence, nurturing creative freedom and discipline.

When we talk about ‘creative people,’ we often leave ourselves out. I loved helping people to rediscover yesterday that, using self-hypnosis and writing as self-hypnosis to find our flow or optimal state, we can create something out of an apparent nothing; that, by connecting with the feelings and emotions that are always going on for us, beneath all our ‘busy-ness,’  we can remember and reconnect with our innate creativity.

And when we practice a few simple self-hypnosis and free-writing techniques, regularly and with consistency, we can enjoy experiencing ourselves as Creative People every day.

Next time you catch yourself wistfully wishing that you were ‘more creative’ or that you could be more creative ‘if you only had the time/ the right space/ could leave your current job, etc, etc,’ it might be helpful to ask yourself if that story is holding you back in some way.

Take a few deep breaths. Learn and practice a self-hypnosis or free-writing technique. Invest a little time each day in finding your own flow.

Yes, this is still what many, many people think about when they think about hypnosis: that the hypnotist induces the state of hypnosis in them or for them and their bodies respond in a particular way, perhaps like being in a walking dream or even totally anaesthetised or unconscious.

In fact, as we have discussed before on this blog, a hypnotherapist does not and cannot put you into hypnosis. Perhaps the only thing we can say with any accuracy is that, when you are willing, a hypnotherapist can facilitate the process with you, helping you to create a certain quality of attention or awareness in which you are more receptive to suggestion and change.

In order for this to happen, you do not even have to close your eyes. You can be in trance with your eyes open, moving around, going about various aspects of your day.

As many hypnotherapists will tell you on their websites, hypnosis is a very natural state (or non-state) that we move in and out of quite naturally. One of the common examples of a natural trance state is the ‘driving trance,’ that state of relaxed and focused awareness, often a heightened kind of awareness, in which your conscious mind drifts off with all kinds of thoughts and suddenly, to your surprise, you realise that you are reaching the end of your road, approaching your own house and you think to yourself, ‘How did I get here? Who has been driving all this time?’

If you are a child of the 80’s, like me, you might remember the famous shower scene from that 80’s soap, Dallas, where Bobby Ewing drifts off in the shower, thus imagining or day-dreaming an entire series, with plot twists and side stories, that had audiences on the edge of their seats trying to figure out who shot JR. That is, until Bobby realised that he had been standing in the shower for far too long and really should get out now because he was becoming a wrinkled prune. The entire series had been imagined and experienced inside his mind. And Bobby Ewing certainly didn’t have his eyes closed. (Maybe there was a little soap involved.)

Or you may be most familiar with the particular trance state, often described as ‘hypnagogia,’ in which we drift somewhere between waking and sleeping, either at the beginning or end of the day.

Or, like me, you may enjoy being fully immersed in a certain creative activity  such as writing or painting or gardening, where you lose all track of time. This kind of temporal distortion is a strong sign of trance. I would even argue – and I regularly do – that writing, when approached in a particular way, is a kind of self-hypnosis and can be used to induce a state of trance.

And so this idea that hypnosis is something we do with our eyes closed is clearly unhelpful and misleading.

One of my favourite books on hypnosis and therapeutic trance is called ‘Trances People Live By,’ by Stephen Wolinsky, a book that, as the title suggests, describes our problems as states of negative or unhelpful trance. Wolinsky writes:

‘Reactions are trance states when they happen to us – which is more often than not. We blow up, raise our voices, slam our fists down on tables, get red-faced,  get passionate. We don’t usually experience ourselves as consciously, intentionally creating our reactions, especially when any degree of emotional valence is involved.’ (Wolinsky. 1991. p. 15).

You may have noticed, only after the event, this kind of unhelpful trance state.  For example, you might be experiencing a certain relationship trance: he says that, you say that, then he says that and, before you even know it, you’ve both had that argument again, that one, the one that goes like that. You’re firing off all kinds of post-hypnotic suggestions to each other: ‘You always do that… You’re always late… You never do that…’

According to this model, our reactions are very useful tools, giving us valuable information, once we’ve blurted them out for the hundredth time and can see them clearly and become less identified with them.

An enjoyable in-the-present-moment experience can turn into a particular kind of trance state when we start spinning fantasies or stories – either positive and pleasurable or anxiety-invoking – into the future.

I love the way Wolinsky describes the trance phenomena (age regression, pseudo-orientation in time, positive or negative hallucination and so on) that we can create in this way: ‘Trance phenomena “shrink-wrap” our focus of attention, leaving a very consricted perspective with which we usually strongly identify’ (p.15).

One of the most wonderful and fascinating hypnotherapy sessions I ever experienced was when I was working with a very young client, aged seven, who had been refusing to go to bed at night, refusing to go to school in the mornings, getting very distressed, crying and screaming and shouting and generally creating all kinds of problems for herself and her parents. Her parents were worried that she was very anxious about something and asked me if I could help.

Sure enough, the girl arrived in a temper. She was really very angry with her mum and she proceeded to kick her legs and stamp her feet and sat on the floor in the corner of my consultancy room, with her back to us and her hands over her ears.

She shouted repeatedly, ‘I don’t need your help. I can do it myself.’

As her mum told the story of the problem, I noticed that the little girl’s body language became more marked whenever her baby brother was mentioned and so I continued to question her mum about the little brother until we were talking about him almost exclusively.

Sure enough, my client soon stopped shouting, turned around, tried to climb on her mum’s lap and started interjecting herself into the story. After some time, I asked her if she would like to talk about the feelings that she was having in the morning before school and she repeated, more quietly, that she didn’t need my help. She could ‘do it herself.’

I replied that I could see how grown-up and clever she was and that I was absolutely certain that she could do it herself extremely well.  I then went through an elaborate rigmarole of taking out my notebook, asking her questions -  her name, age, the school she attended, her favourite activities – and I made a great show of writing them all down in my book. Right at the end of this I said ‘So could you tell me exactly, just so that I can write it in my book here, when you will have this problem sorted; exactly when you will be able to do it all yourself?’

Quick as a flash, she answered, ‘By tomorrow.’

I wrote that down too, gave her mum a self-hypnosis audio programme to help the client to enjoy deep, refreshing sleep – when, and only when, she would like to use it – we finished the session and arranged that I would call her mum to check in with her the following day. And how wonderful it was to discover that my client had got up, got dressed, had her breakfast and gone happily off to school as if without a care in the world. And this new behavior continued for the next few days, weeks, months. She certainly did do it all her self.

Only the most indirect and conversational hypnosis was used in the session. There was certainly no formal kind of eyes-closed trance.

I often think about that session and just how well it illustrates that a problem itself can be a kind of negative trance-state in which we unconsciously do the things we do, creating all kinds of bad feelings for ourselves. As a therapist, I believe that, when I can meet my client in his or her particular trance, I can then help him or her to shift it and transform it.

If we think about hypnotic trance as a quality of non-conscious attention – sometimes helpful and sometimes not so helpful – that we can naturally find ourselves in at all kinds of times, then this subtly changes our understanding of our role as practitioners and clients of hypnotherapy.

By becoming more consciously aware of that trance thing you’re doing – with your eyes wide open – you can begin to make changes to it, to manipulate it and move it forward.

“Memory is continually created, a story told and retold, using jigsaw pieces of experience. It’s utterly unreliable in some ways, because who can say whether the feeling or emotion that seems to belong to the recollection actually belongs to it rather than being available from the general store of likely emotions we have learned? Memory is not false in the sense that it is willfully bad, but it is excitingly corrupt in its inclination to make a proper story of the past.”

Jenny Diski

I feel I need to warn you. This myth is a Big Myth. In fact, this myth is so pervasive in the world of therapy, hypnotherapy and hypnosis that perhaps it should carry a health warning.

I mean that seriously.

The problem, as I have come to understand it, is that there are many therapists out there – working in many different disciplines – who will tell you that it is necessary to understand why you feel the way you do in order to feel better. Let’s call this myth the Big Myth of Why.

But first, let me ask you something. Are there things going on for you right now that you understand perfectly well – and perhaps you may even have had a couple of years of soul-searching and/or therapy to understand where those feelings come from and you have a very good intellectual understanding of these problems – and yet you still seem to be experiencing them, all the same?

I meet people every day who have an incredibly finely honed and articulate understanding of the history of their problems. They have spent years thinking about it and analysing it. They can understand why that something is happening and yet the why doesn’t necessarily help them to change the behaviours, habits, emotions and responses that they want to let go of. The why doesn’t necessarily change anything.

My feeling is that ‘why ‘doesn’t serve us particularly well when we want to make changes in our lives.

And, indeed, I have met people who are on a search for why. They are on a big mission of why. They are making why their life’s work. Their internal script goes, ‘If I can just understand why this is happening, I will feel better…’ and they have been trying to understand why for the last two or twelve or twenty years. And this trying to understand why has become a painful and tortuous journey in which they find themselves feeling worse than when they started. Maybe they are now obsessed with the idea of wanting to know why or caught up in endless rumination and questioning that is creating a lot of anxiety and feelings of somehow not being good enough.

And this search for why brings them to the consulting room of a hypnotherapist. Because the Big Myth of Why says that a hypnotherapist can go inside your mind and discover why. A hypnotherapist can regress you to the exact time and place in your life where the problem started – and then you will know and then you will feel better. Right?

Well, erm, actually, not necessarily. In fact, probably not.

It’s a seductive notion, this concept of ‘deep underlying causes’ for our problems and issues. If we could neatly pin it down to one formative event – for example, the day our primary teacher told us off in front of the class for getting a word wrong and then we suddenly became unable to read aloud in front of others -  that might certainly be very convenient. But is this a little over-reductive?

Problem One: Now, I am not saying that some issues that people experience do not carry with them the resonances and echoes of prevous experiences. Of course, they can do. Over the years, we can form beliefs about ourselves as the result of our experiences, the things we hear around us,  our interactions with significant others, for example.

However, fears, problems, phobias and habits tend to fade away over time unless we are actively keeping them fuelled with our own thoughts and worries and beliefs and the way that we talk to ourselves inside our minds.

So our primary school teacher may have introduced us to the notion of fear – but that is only part of the story.We have somehow kept the fear going. In order to let go of the fear, we need to understand how we are still doing it to ourselves twenty-five years later, so that we can start to change things.

Problem Two: Even if a hypnotherapist can help us to indentify the so-called ‘root cause’ of a particular issue, this doesn’t mean that it actually happened  or happened in the way that we experience it now in hypnosis.

We still do not sufficiently understand the way that memory works, for example, but it is thought that, in order to experience a memory, our brains need to go back and reimagine or recreate that memory in order for us to experience it again. And we may not recreate it in exactly the way that it actually happened.

Have you ever experienced a situation that really didn’t bother you until you began to go over and over it in your head and it gradually assumed all the proportions and details and colours of a horror story? That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

In a similar way, dreams and fantasies can be re-imaginings and re-workings of what we have experienced in the day. And although our dreams can feel very ‘real’ to us when they are happening, we wouldn’t dream of supposing that they are representations of truth.

We can’t be sure that how people experience things in hypnosis is how things actually happened either. There may be a feeling-tone, a sensory theme of the hypnotic experience that carries emotions and  memories and associations from way back. But things can get a little blurry and what actully happened and how we re-experience it can get a little mixed-up.

But what really concerns me about the Big Myth that goes, ‘there must be an underlying cause somewhere in a person’s past for the problems and challenges that s/he might be facing in the present,’ is that this assumption can result in long (and often expensive) periods of fruitless searching, over-thinking, rumination and anxiety.

If you’re asking yourself why something is happening for you, a well-trained hypnotherapist can help you to understand how you are doing that thing in the present and what you can do differently to change it as well as any possible emotions, associations and habits you’ve been carrying from the past.

So, I think this is good news. Because if it’s possible that there is no why,  no single pin-downable ’cause’ for what you are feeling, then you may simply have been looking in the wrong direction. The search for why may have been holding you back from becoming more consciously aware of how you can do the problem differently.

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up’

Lucille Clifton

This week, let’s look at the one that goes: ‘Hypnosis is weird/ scary/ mystical/ mind-control/ utter hippy nonsense/ what that bloke off the telly does/ brain-washing/ something you do to me to fix my head  *

* or a combination of the above.

Firstly, I want to let you into a secret. Noone knows exactly what hypnosis is. Nope. Hypnotherapists don’t know what hypnosis actually is, and neither do researchers looking at people’s brains whilst in this apparent state of hypnosis with MRI scans and other neuroimaging techniques.

In MRI scans, we can see parts of the brain either ‘light up’ or get ‘turned off’ when people are apparently in hypnosis. Here is an example of the kind of research into hypnosis that neuroimaging is making possible, carried out by Amir Raz, who wanted to look at how hypnotic suggestions might affect the regulation of pain in the brain. This particular research gives us fascinating data about how hypnotic suggestions ‘turn off’ the area of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which would normally get activated when performing certain tasks. It has many interesting possibilities for further research and application.

But it still doesn’t really tell us what hypnosis actually is.

The question of whether hypnosis is an actual state of attention (state theory) or a set of beliefs, attitudes and expectations (non-state theory) is hotly contested in the field of hypnotherapy and hypnosis. In fact, you will find people arguing about it all over the internet.

The state theory maintains that hypnosis is an actual change in the quality of our attention and awareness, a kind of experiential shift or hypnotic ‘trance’ state that is often described by people in terms of changes in temporal and spatial awareness (‘My body feels so heavy,’ ‘My hands feel so huge’ or ‘Has that really been half an hour? It felt like ten minutes’).

The non-state theory of hypnosis claims that there is no such thing as this altered state of awareness or hypnotic ‘trance’ and that the effects of hypnosis can be explained by the motivation, cognitive set and expectation of the person being hypnotised and the way that he or she is prepared to work towards a therapeutic goal.

You will notice that, so far, there has been no mention in either of these theories of a sleep-like or unconscious state, nor of vaudevillian stunts. Contrary to popular misconception – and I do still meet people who think of hypnosis in this way – hypnosis is not like being asleep or unconscious. It is not something that a hypnotist or therapist does to you.

In hypnotherapy, the therapist does not go inside your mind and flick levers and switches or make things disappear or convince you that something you previously thought true is now suddenly untrue. (I don’t know about you but I would personally find that rather unnerving. I wouldn’t go anywhere near a hypnotherapist if I believed that s/he could do that to me!)

We know that hypnosis is something that you actively need to co-create with the therapist you choose to work with. The therapist guides you through the process of going into hypnosis (state theory) or you yourself create the mindset and beliefs within which the changes can happen (non-state theory) because you want to make the changes you want to make. Or a combination of these two.

To illustrate this more clearly, we know that if a person sits in the chair with their arms crossed and says, ‘Humph. Well you’re not going to put me under. You’re not going to hypnotise me, matey,’ well, then they are right. They will not be experiencing anything very soon except their own desire not to go into hypnosis. And maybe their own fear, which may be what is preventing them from making the changes in the first place.

So if we assume that most people seeking the help of a hypnotherapist actually want to make some changes in their lives, is hypnosis a state that therapists guide them into or a description of their set of beliefs and expectations that will make it possible for the therapist to work with them?

Personally, I think it is a combination of these two.

Many people who come to work with me are worried that they won’t be able to ‘do it right’ or relax sufficiently (see last Monday’ Myth-Busting) or go into hypnosis but, despite these fears and apprehensions, they learn exactly how to use the power of their minds and the power of self-hypnosis in helpful ways.

Whether you think that hypnosis is a weird (or mystical or in some way spiritual) state or non-state really depends upon your own set of beliefs around turning your attention inside yourself in a focused way. Some people think this is a very ordinary thing to do. For others, it is actually something quite special.

What I do know and continue to notice all the time in my own practice – both as a hypnotherapist and as someone who regularly uses self-hypnosis – is that it’s so easy to be carried away by the busy-ness of our everyday lives so that making time to direct our attention inwards in a focused way and really notice what we are feeling and thinking and how, in a sense, we are doing or creating or imagining our lives can feel strange, weird, pleasant, a relief or even slightly scary at first. It may be something we haven’t done for a long time.

When we begin to learn and understand how to do our lives and thoughts and internal experience in more helpful and progressive ways, I do personally think that is a very powerful experience. Learning to relax deeply or notice our thoughts or the way that our body feels in the midst of our busy-ness can be a kind of special or transformative experience.

There are some who would say that all our experiences are kinds of ‘trance state,’ either positive, neutral or negative, until we become consciously aware that we are doing them. So we find ourselves going into the trance of a particular relationship (he says that, she says that, you say that) or the trance of work (everything is so hard and it will never get any better) or the one about money (I need more and never seem to have enough and if only I had more my life would be so much better), for example.

Hypnosis, then, in this regard, is a kind of waking up from the trance of our everyday lives.

I think it’s an interesting and important question to ask.

Evidence can mean – and is often thought to mean, solely and entirely – the data gathered through third-person research and quantitative studies such as random controlled trials and systematic reviews. These are reviews that are largely designed to produce ‘objective,’ ‘third-person’ evidence.

However, can we really say this is true? RCTs are often, as Ben Goldcare often points out on his ‘Bad Science’ blog, trials designed to support our prejudices and biases. And when we hold a view about something, we can very often find a piece of ‘evidence’ to back it up.

Indeed, just yesterday I found ‘a small and very preliminary study’ that would support my personal view that dark chocolate is very good for me. Now I am not saying that this particular piece of research is not a good, solid piece of research. I really wouldn’t know unless I did a systematic review of all the studies that have ever been done on the health benefits of eating dark chocolate so that I could evaluate whether all the existing data contradicted or supported this study.

I merely point to this study as an interesting example of they way that I can find ‘evidence’ for pretty much anything I want to find evidence for.

Another kind of ‘evidence,’ which is perhaps less obvious to many people is what researchers refer to as qualitative evidence. This is often ‘first-person’ evidence: what people using the intervention – patients, clients, clinicians, health care professionals, hypnotherapists – feel or know or find out empirically through  first-person, qualitative and/or phenomenological evidence.

When I was researching a model for the use of writing in therapy, I had to create a methodology that gathered qualitative data – what the process of writing feels like for me and for other people engaged in similar processes – and then look for correlates of that data in the qualitative and quantitative studies in cognitive science, developmental psychology, neuroscience and various therapy traditions.

Because I was working in such a new area, I had to examine what we really mean by ‘evidence.’ So much research in therapeutic and expressive arts had not been, in the opinion of my supervisor and myself, very rigorous. (This is probably why arts-based research can so easily be dismissed by many hard scientists.) Doing my research really made me scrutunise the meaning and nature of evidence in therapy.

One of the problems is that, when we talk about the brain – and I wanted to do that because I wanted to identify possible neurophysiological correlates for the processes of change and transformation that I was seeing in my research – we often have to talk about in terms of metaphor. The term ‘mind’ is itself a metaphor. We can’t see the mind or touch it or isolate it to one particular area of the brain. Similarly, the self is a kind of metaphor. According to neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens, 2000)  even our earliest pre-verbal sense of self is a kind of ongoing mapping or ’story without words’ created by our brains encounters with objects, internal and external. Bu that’s for another blog post.

Our field of hypnotherapy is changing. I love, embrace and applaud the fact that leading hypnotherapists  are demanding more rigorous training and evidence-based practice for our field. We need that rigour and that framework for our practice.

However, I also think that we need to remain mindful of what ‘evidence’ in therapy actually means.

Take any one therapist, a client, a problem or challenge, and an agreed outcome. My friends, colleagues and mentors in the field may work with that person in many different ways. We might draw on the ‘evidence’ from various quantitative studies where a particular model of therapy was used with one group and compared with a control group who did not receive therapy. So we would be engaged in evidence-based practice.

However, and this is crucial, each of us might apply this knowledge in different ways. Each one of the therapists that I respect or whom I have learned from or have been mentored by, works in a different way. Our way of being in the world, our more or less directive approaches, everything we can use and draw upon as therapists; and what the particular client presents to us at the time – their way of being, their verbal and non-verbal communication, metaphors, stories and experiences, abilities and qualities – will all inform how we work in a particular session. I am not at all sure that this kind of process can be turned into replicable ’steps’ to be used in exactly the same way with all clients, all the time. That seems to be the very opposite, to me, of what effective hypnotherapy can be.

So, whilst we need evidence and evidence-based practice and more reigorous research in the field, I personally feel that we should not be wary of becoming complacent about what the evidence tells us. Perhaps what is most replicable and measurable about hypnotherapy is a model of flexibility, of listening to and responding to and being with the client in ways that give that client sufficient safety and sufficient freedom to make the changes s/he wants to make.

Hypnotherapy should be subject to the smae rigorous standards as any medical intervention or procedure. (Actually, when we dig deeper, many drug therapies and medical procedures are subject to surprising few trials and tests; so maybe we should say that hypnotherapy should be subject to even greater standards of rigour?)

But surely, in the end, what ‘works’ is what works for that client on that particular day – informed and guided by our knowledge and research, yes – but, above all, informed by the person we are working with.

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds

e.e. cummings (508)