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Hypnosis: Forget About Amnesia!

After a hypnosis session, I often have trouble remembering what it was that we just did. This is more true when I'm the subject, but it also happens when I'm the hypnotist! And that means that it's not some kind of mysterious force, but just an example of "state-dependent memory," which everyone has to one degree or another. It's the same phenomenon that makes it easy to remember what you should have bought at the grocery store as soon as you enter the kitchen, but hard to remember in the store. 

Since in many ways hypnosis is "coaching for the unconscious mind," one school of thought is that it's probably good thing if you don't consciously remember what happened in trance, because the conscious mind is neither here nor there: it's not the problem, it's not the solution, and it's best if it stands aside. I'm not sure I agree with this.

When I go all forgetful after a trance, it only takes a few hints to get the memories back. Of course, the unconscious mind never forgets anything, so the issue is only about what your conscious mind remembers. For some reason there can be a lot of disconnect here, such as when your wife glares at you when you come home from work and you suddenly realize, "It's my anniversary today." At which point it's legitimate to ask, "Why didn't that come to mind yesterday -- or, better yet, last week?" Some people's unconscious minds do that, and some haven't yet figured out that they should.

Getting past these hiccups is what hypnosis is all about, and the importance of the problem doesn't seem to make much difference in how you go about dealing with them. One of the most successful practice sessions I've been involved in used my unwillingness to floss daily (or, sometimes, weekly) as the target, and I've flossed my teeth every day for months, which is a big change for me! While this was not a mind-boggling accomplishment, it should save me a lot of inconvenience and discomfort at the dentist's over the next few decades.

"Organ Language" and Pain

If you refer to someone as "a pain in the neck," enough times, you might develop neck pain when you have to deal with him, due to the sometimes excessive literalism of our subconscious minds. This is called "organ language," by Leslie LeCron, and this example of how our use of metaphor can stab us in the back is enough to make your head spin!

The apparently generates plenty of psychosomatic illness, mostly because we're at our most suggestible at times of powerful emotion, and if we claim that someone makes us sick every time they do something that upsets us, this can become literally true.

If you do this to yourself, it's a successful piece of self-hypnosis (congratulations!). If someone else utters the fateful words, it's still hypnosis, however unintended. The solution is to get yourself dehypnotized, which can be done through hyptoanalysis, which traditionally looks for organ language as one of the keys to psychosomatic disorders, or through other hypnotic techniques that don't look for organ language specifically, but still ask the unconscious mind to go back to the problem and find better alternatives.

So now all I have to do is train myself to say "Live long and prosper" instead of swearing. So if you hear someone saying weird stuff like that around Corvallis, it's probably me.

What is the unconscious mind, anyway?

If you pay attention to what people say when they talk about your unconscious mind, you'll notice that they're not particularly consistent. For instance, they'll say your unconscious mind is childishly literal and that it's the source of your creativity. And they'll say that your unconscious is always looking out for you, but isn't it also the little voice in your head that, when you come home in the evening and face an angry spouse, points out, "It's your anniversary today," which begs the question, "Why the heck didn't you tell me this yesterday?"

The fact is that "unconscious mind" is an umbrella term for many different functions, most of which, though cool, are poorly understood. For that matter, the division between consciousness and the unconscious also varies from moment to moment. For example, you probably weren't conscious of the sensations in your left big toe until I mentioned it, and yet, when your toe requires your attention, such as when you stub it against something, you focus on it automatically. The rest of the time, it's in the background, allowing your conscious mind to focus on something else.

And that means that the term "unconscious mind" refers to everything your brain is doing that you're not conscious of at the moment, including some things that you've never had consciousness of yet, that seem inaccessible, and others that you are conscious of from time to time.

Part of this is presumably purely a matter of brain training, while others revolve around the mind-body connection. Most of us don't know how to dilate our pupils at will, and make the pupil of the right and left eyes different from one another. This is usually considered to be an unconscious reflex, but some people can control their pupils at will; it's a skill you can learn. And if this "involuntary reflex" can be controlled, what can't be?

So when you're not dilating them consciously, your pupils are being controlled by the unconscious mind, which also controls your dreams at night, manages your heart and your digestion, comes up with weird and wonderful ideas, and reacts to things you're only imagining as if they are happening right now. These are very different functions, but they're all tied together somehow.

So far, the immense complexity of the nervous system has kept us from figuring these things out with the kind of precision that we expect from a science. Discovering the laws of planetary motion and gravity are child's play by comparison! But it's always been true that the way things start is that theory lags far behind practice, and we know about things that work and things that don't, even though we don't exactly know why. Not only can we enjoy music without understanding the neural pathways behind this, we can compose music without knowing this. Perhaps someday we'll know enough about neural theory that music theory becomes a subset of it, but in the meantime we have a patchwork of different disciplines based on what works and what doesn't.

Hypnosis is like this, too. Hypnosis is a set of techniques that enhance communication with the unconscious mind and, through it, allow access to the mind-body connection. There are a lot of excellent hypnotic techniques for a variety of uses, and a patchwork of theory that allows you to predict likely results and extend the boundaries of practice, though as far as getting back to  first causes, it ain't gonna happen for a long time yet, any more than we can answer, "Why do humans like music, exactly?"

I could say a lot about left-brain vs. right-brain, cerebral cortex vs. cerebellum, brain stem, and peripheral nerves, but I'm not going to today. The main take-away is that our minds are compartmentalized, but communication between every part exists. The pathways can be long and indirect -- people who've had their brain hemispheres separated can no longer take the short path, the corpus callosium, for left-brain/right-brain communication, but signals can still go down to the brain stem and back up into the other hemisphere, or take the long way and use one hand to let the other know what it's doing. Everything we know about the mind is an over-simplification, and it's good to assume that "there's always another way."

And with all the thousands or millions of combinations of "other ways" that we use every day, and others that we can learn to use, you can see how the "unconscious mind" is a very loose concept indeed.

How I Got Interested in Hypnosis

I used to stay awake nights worrying about my insomnia, which has got to be about the dumbest thing you can do! I tried the usual methods of avoiding caffeine, resolving not to worry after bedtime, and so on, but they had little effect.

Then I got a copy of Glenn Harrold's self-hypnosis CD, Deep Sleep Every Night,
and played it on auto-repeat all night long, every night. Almost immediately I started going to sleep within a few minutes, and if I woke up in the middle of the night, it would zonk me right out again.

The first time I listened to it, I wondered how much of a trance effect I'd get, and I got several effects, including a tingling in my fingers and toes and a disinclination to open my eyes. It turns out that getting into a light trance from a self-hypnosis recording is easy.

After a couple of weeks of excellent sleep with this method, I got a little weary of the program and started playing audiobooks all night, ones that I liked and had listened to several times already, so I wouldn't be kept awake wondering what happened next.

As time went by, I got to sleep faster and faster, and woke up less and less. When I started using audible.com's iPhone app, I discovered that I always fall asleep in five minutes or less, since the app's "sleep" feature stops playing after 15 minutes, but I always have to rewind at least 10 minutes to find my place. Not bad!

Later, I used self-hypnosis to lose weight, which worked for about six months until it faded away. In general, I've found that self-hypnosis can do great things, but seeing a good hypnotherapist gets faster and much more consistent results, so if I had found a hypnotist I really liked in the Corvallis area, I'd be further along than I am now.

Book Review: Ideomotor Signals for Rapid Hyptoanalysis

I'm currently reading Ewin and Eimer's Ideomotor Signals for Rapid Hypnoanalysis: A How-to Manual, which expands on LeCron and Cheek's 1968 classic Clinical Hypnotherapy.

I'm only partway through, but it's already the most lucid and directly useful hypnosis book I've ever read. Because people in a hypnotic trance are reluctant to speak, the techniques concentrate on the use of yes/no finger signals to allow the client to respond to questions, turning the hypnotic session from one where the hypnotist aims suggestions in a more or less hit-or-miss fashion into one with feedback at each important step. Highly recommended!