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Hypnosis and archaic practices

Once a woman who was suffering from a fear of planes came to an appointment with the famous hypnosis specialist Milton H. Erickson. The doctor sensitized her for an imaginary flight and made her believe that if she landed safely, her fear would slide off the seat and be gone. When the patient realized that, she jumped up from the seat screaming “It’s contagious!” and wouldn’t let the doctor’s wife, Mrs. Erickson, sit on this seat, trying to protect her from the danger. This is another way of working with phobias. One more example is the practice of “ebbing the fear” which comes from traditional practitioners. They part from the idea that fear goes into the body. Then the healers create a special condition to remove fear from the body. The healer pronounces the spell and pours melted wax into a bowl filled with water that is held above the patient’s head. Both the healer and the patient expect the fear to move to the wax. When the wax solidifies in the water, the form it takes should reveal the real former fear of the patient. For example, if the patient was afraid of dogs, the wax might take the shape of a dog’s face. This also serves as proof for the patient that the fear is gone. When I went to Bashkiria, I learnt how fear was understood in the local shaman practice. During the seminar, there was one participant who was really interested in the customs and traditions of her people. According to her, the moment the person is frightened, he or she loses a part of their good soul, and a dark spirit settles inside.The task of the shaman is to find the lost part of the soul and send away what wrongfully entered the body. I would say it partly looks like what we witness during the psychotherapy sessions. What is the difference then?

Expecting a miracle

In the above-mentioned examples a patient is looking forward to the fear moving away, be it sliding on the seat, pouring into the wax or going to the centre of the Earth (which is what shamans in Siberia do). Expectation should trigger some sort of work in the body which will eventually lead to the healing. However, neither hypnotist, nor healers nor shamans tell you how exactly this result is achieved. It is impossible to trace what is hidden in the core of the process. There’s only the expectation of the miracle.

Both parties, the healer and the patients, hope that liberation will take place. This is an option of “righteous expectation therapy’: if you hope for something positive, it will definitely happen. Nevertheless, the result is not at all guaranteed because the whole process is delegated to the subconscious, and it just cannot do all the work by itself. The patient cannot just play a passive role in this process.

Trance is not enough

Neither auto-training (autosuggestion), nor meditation of the general character really work in case of phobias and other traumas. “Formulae of auto-training” set the idea of striving for an ideal condition but they do not offer any step-by-step instructions on how turn a halted psychological process around. In serious cases these methods are futile. Trance as such, without any active participation of consciousness, can be healing but it might be considered more like luck rather than an efficient method. The same applies to other methods which are aimed at non-directive activation of nervous and psychological processes (holotropic breathing, etc.)

To understand is not enough

There are completely opposite approaches which presuppose addressing the intelligence of the patient: “Don’t you see that your fears are ridiculous, and that you can easily overcome them?“Of course, such kind of understanding is important but it is not enough for healing oneself from fear. Increasing one’s level of competence doesn’t have that much influence at the autonomic level. The head can understand that there is nothing to be afraid of, but once the object of fear is mentioned, a sinking feeling will appear in the stomach.

There’s a curious story about a patient in therapy who imagined that he was a seed and was afraid of being pecked by a rooster. After various therapeutic sessions his doctor asked him: “Well, do you understand that you are not a seed?” – “Of course, I do! I am a person!” – “Will you go home without worries?” – “No, doctor.” – “Why?” – “Because I know I’m not a seed, but does the rooster know?”

Understanding creates some background which can make further work with the autonomic nervous system more efficient but unfortunately it cannot automatically unblock the initial reactions of the body.

Synthetic practices

One should pay special attention to the following synthetic practices based on Pavlov’s neurophysiological research.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849—1936) and his supporters while studying the physiology of nervous processes came to the conclusion that in cases of impulsive obsessions, nervous processes lose their typical agility, there is certain inertia of nervous processes, and it manifests in congestive centres. (Pavlov, 1950).

Joseph Wolpe (1915 – 1997) was a South African psychiatrist who parted from Pavlov’s research of conditioned reflexes and developed a concept of neurotic fears from the point of view of learning theory. At a certain moment “a body learnt” to treat some factor with fear. Now it has to learn how to stop doing this. “If your fears are automatic emotional habits, then you will have to use different emotions to destroy these habits. If some of your fears appeared due to disinformation then we will provide correct information (Wolpe, 1982, p.87). He introduced “systematic desensitization’: a patient is brought to a very relaxed state and then he or she is subjected to a light stimulus that causes fear. Once the patient has acquired tolerance to such a level of anxiety, the dose of the stimulus is gradually increased until the patient gets accustomed to the bigger dosage and considers it low, which would then lead to a decrease of anxiety. (Wolpe, 1958, 1961). This approach was named, behavioural therapy.

It is essential that the process of adaptation is gradual, and it is based on the fact that the patient is relaxed and well informed. However, there is one issue that is left out when this approach is taken. The signal that has gone deep into the body and that has activated the autonomic system is ignored. Thus the new reaction is imposed “over” the old one. This slows down the treatment and doesn’t actually set the patient completely free from his or her internal fear fighting.

There is another method based on Pavlov’s neurophysiological approach. This is a method of working through traumas which relies on eye movement activation (Shapiro, Francine, 1996). The foundation of the method is a highly interesting observation. When a person stops looking for solutions, the frustration settles in, and his or her eyes seem to stop, and it looks as if this person is gazing into space. In contrast, when a person is trying to find a solution, his or her eyes are moving actively. In order to help a person overcome the inertia of nervous processes, he or she is motivated to move his or her eyes. The therapist moves his or her hands in front of the patient’s face and thus sets the direction of the patient’s vision. The directions can be the following: left-right, diagonally, in a circle or figure eight. The movements must be quite quick. Just as the eyes begin to move, “impulse movement” is triggered in the brain. When the stagnant focus begins to “blur”, the chance comes to work through the traumatic experience.

This approach can provide quite useful results in some cases, though it is still artificial. I have never applied it in my practice. If I reconnect the attention of the patient with the aspects that are holding his or her mind and nervous processes, then the release happens automatically, with great precision, a full-scale feedback, with the total participation of the patient and understanding of the significance of the process. Further on I will try to demonstrate it with examples.

Having paid my respects to my colleagues, who have been working on the idea of counteracting fears and other conscious fixations, I would like now to describe my own approach.

Conscious self-regulation: Psychocatalysis

Self-regulation based on the primary sensations is a mild directed alternative to other kinds of therapy which appeals to the subconscious (meditative techniques); it may also serve as a supplement to the kinds of therapy that work with the conscious mind (analytical techniques).

A patient can observe the processes that take place in his or her mind, and the result depends on the patient, on his or her decisions and not on favourable circumstances or the authority of the healer. This is a method of internal work: it’s reliable, simple, natural, and fast.

Let’s have a closer look at the details.