Hypnosis Provides Mind Control for Many Health Problems

NOTES FOR A LECTURE ON HYPNOSIS

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1. INTRODUCTION

Background

Objectives:

Hypnosis provides mind control for many health problems.

Self-hypnosis depends upon attitude and belief.

Many alternatives are effective for depression, obesity, pain etc.

Meditation, Yoga, Tai-chi, Vaswani, prayer etc. have hypnotic features.

Preventive health care is more important than curative health care.

Our thoughts provide our character, so we must reject negatives.

Practice can achieve self=hypnosis for a healthy lifestyle

1. DOSTOYEVESKY

Four levels of consciousness

Man can believe anything.

Man v Woman

Belief

DEMO

1. SPIEGEL

Stanford and Harvard

Hypnosis & self-hypnosis

Reinforcement of health care

DEMO

1. VASWANI

Change attitudes and change life.

Seven steps-Self-hypnosis. Belief

DEMO

1. CONCLUSIONS

Objectives can be achieved.

Practice self=hypnosis for a healthy lifestyle.

INSPIRATIONS OF DADA VASWANI TO CHANGE YOUR ATTITUDE AND CHANGE YOUR LIFE

Brief summary by and

Dada Vaswani publishes a great Youtube video (see and many books on how to achieve a happy life. In 2018 he is 99 years old and still working hard. See it for just one hour today?

He believes that you are your thoughts. Thus you make your own character. But, you can change! You can change your attitude and achieve a happy life.

So do not waste emotional energy on a negative imaginations. Be positive. Live not in the past or the future. Live for today!

How to do to do it? Just practice daily the seven Vaswani steps:

1. Fill the mind only with positive thoughts. Don’t admit negatives. Do a daily mind spring clean.Case: bucket half empty or half full.
2. Do not criticize others. Concentrate on their virtues.
3. Keep life simple. Never say something cannot happen. Be open to impossibilities- Case: only birds can fly.
4. Laugh with others, mainly at yourself.
5. Sing to refresh your heart with melody.
6. Be generous to others without need for a reward.
7. Believe in a God (so many available) who really cares for you.

Result? You have done the impossible!!! You have changed your attitudes and changed your life. Thank you so much Vaswani.

A METHOD OF SELF-HYPNOSIS FOR MIND-BODY CONTROL IN A

FEW MOMENTS

BY PROFESSOR DAVID SPIEGEL OF STANFORD

UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

Source: Medical Hypnosis Primer – Clinical and Research Evidence

(Routledge 2009)

After you have completed a hypnosis profile, you are in a position to teach the patient how he or she can utilize this capacity to shift into a state of attentive concentration in a disciplined way. This is how it is done.

I am going to count to three. Follow this sequence. One, look up toward your eyebrows, all the way up; two, close your eyelids, take a deep breath; three, exhale, let your eyes relax, and let your body float.

As you feel yourself floating, you concentrate on the sensation of floating and at the same time you permit one hand or the other to feel like a buoyant balloon and allow it to float upward. As it does, your elbow bends and your forearm floats into an upright position. Sometimes you may get a feeling of magnetic pull on the back of your hand as it goes up.

When your hand reaches this upright position, it becomes asignal for you to enter a state of meditation. As you concentrate, you will make it more vivid by imagining you are an astronaut in space or a ballet dancer.

In this atmosphere of floating, you focus on whatever strategy is relevant for the patient’s goal, in a manner consistent with the trance level the patient is able to experience. -

Then gently resolve your problems

When you are ready … come back …

Reflect upon the implications of this and what it means to you in a private sense. Then bring yourself out of this state of concentration called “self-hypnosis” by counting backward this way: Three, get ready. Two, with your eyelids closed, roll up your eyes (and do it now). And, one let your eyelids open slowly.

Then, when your eyes are back in focus, slowly make a fist with the hand that is up and, as you open your fist slowly, your usual sensation and control returns. Let your hand float downward. That is the end of the exercise. But you will retain a general feeling of floating.

NOTE: If necessary, demonstrate to others by doing it yourselff. Then repeat the sequence of entering the trance state so that the patient can watch it. Then, while you supervise with direction, the patient repeats it again.

NOTE: It is best to formulate the approach in a self-renewing manner that the patient is able to weave into his everyday lifestyle. The patient must sense that he can achieve mastery over the problem he is struggling with by "reprogramming himself" often identified as an "exercise" by means of a self-affirming, uncomplicated “reframing” of the problem.\

NOTE: By doing the exercise every one to two hours, you can float into the state of buoyant repose. You have given yourself this island of time, 20 seconds every 1 to 2 hours, in which you use this extra receptivity to re-imprint these critical points. Reflect upon them, then float back to your state of awareness, and get on with what you ordinarily do.

NOTE: You can assess your basic “hypnotizability” with this simple test: sit and relax with both hands in front with the palms facing, about 20cm apart. Close the eyes and imagine the hands are being pulled together by an overwhelming magnetic force. Don’t resist or move them. Just let your imagination bring your hands together in less than two minutes.

Further information from:

• Hypnosis provides mind control for many health problems.
• Self-hypnosis depends upon attitude and belief.
• Many alternatives are effective for depression, obesity, pain etc.
• Meditation, Yoga, Tai-chi, Vaswani, prayer etc. have hypnotic features.
• Preventive health care is more important than curative health care.
• Our thoughts provide our character, so we must reject negatives.

Practice can achieve self=hypnosis for a healthy lifestylekkk

Hypnosis in the Treatment of Acute and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

David Spiegel, M.D.

StanfordUniversitySchool of Medicine

Introduction

The use of hypnosis in the psychotherapy of trauma was initially thought to be limited to abreaction, based on Freud’s cathartic method. The idea was that some intense affect associated with the traumatic event needed to be released and that simply repeating the event with its associated emotion in the trance state would suffice to resolve the symptoms. However, it became clear to Freud (Freud 1914) that conscious, cognitive work must be done on the material for it to be successfully worked through.

Mere abreaction is not sufficient for therapeutic benefit. For therapy to be effective, cognitive restructuring, emotional expression, and relationship management must accompany the patient’s re-experiencing of the traumatic events. The therapy should provide an enhanced sense of control over the memories of the experience. This may take the form of a symbolic restructuring of the traumatic experiences in hypnosis (H. Spiegel and Spiegel 1987), with the use of a grief work model (D.Spiegel 1981). Hypnosis can be used to provide controlled access to the dissociated or repressed memories of the traumatic experience and then to help patients restructure their memories of the events.

Trauma and Dissociation

Given the growing evidence that many people enter a dissociated state during physical trauma (Butler, Duran et al. 1996)(Cardena and Spiegel 1993)(Spiegel and Cardena 1991)(van der Kolk and Fisler 1994), it makes sense that enabling them to enter a structured dissociative state in therapy would facilitate their access to memories of the traumatic experience, memories that can be worked through to resolve the posttraumatic symptomatology. Hypnosis can be helpful in allowing the victim to review aspects of the trauma in a controlled manner. The memories can be experienced for a time with the assurance that they can be put aside afterward. In a trance, patients can be quickly taught how to produce a state of physical relaxation despite whatever psychological stress they experience, thereby dissociating the somatic reaction from the psychological preoccupation, allowing for modulation of the traumatic memory and an enhanced sense of control over the experience. Patient and therapist can then find a condensation image that symbolizes some aspect of the trauma.

Hypnotic Screen Technique

It is often helpful to have patients do this on an imaginary screen, which gives them some sense of distance from the event. It is also useful to divide the screen in half, having the patient picture on one side some aspect of the event (e.g., a rape victim’s image of the assailant) and on the other side of the screen something he or she did to protect himself or herself (e.g., struggling with the assailant, talking with him, running away). This enables the patient to restructure his or her view of the assault, facing it, but not simply in the familiar terms of the humiliation, pain, and fear with which it was initially associated. Victims can better bear their helplessness when they also acknowledge their efforts to protect themselves. Bereaved individuals can picture themselves at the graveside on one side of the screen and at an earlier moment of joy with the deceased on the other side of the screen. They can then be taught a self-hypnosis exercise in which they grieve and work through traumatic memories while enhancing their sense of control over the process (Spiegel 1981).

Traumatic Transference

The most distressing thing about a traumatic event is the sense of absolute helplessness that it engenders. This helplessness is reenacted in a PTSD through loss of control over state of mind, with spontaneous dissociative states, startle reactions, or intrusive recollections of the event. Furthermore, such patients may tend to identify the therapist with the assailant and feel that the therapy amounts to a re-inflicting of the trauma. It is crucial that the therapy, especially when a technique such as hypnosis is used, be structured so that the process enhances patients’ sense of control. This approach can allow patients to integrate the image of themselves as victims with the ongoing, more global image of themselves as persons coping effectively with severe stress, making the repressed material conscious and therefore less powerful and enabling them to establish a new, more congruent self-image and absorb the loss into the ongoing flow of their lives.

The principles of this kind of psychotherapy *FS ID=RH32T4*can be summarized with the following eight Cs: (Spiegel and Spiegel 2004)

1. Confrontation. It is important to confront the traumatic events directly rather than attribute the symptoms to some long-standing personality problem.

2. Confession. It is often necessary to allow such patients to confess deeds or emotions that are embarrassing to them and at times repugnant to the therapist. It is important to help these patients distinguish between misplaced guilt and real remorse. There is always a retrospective wish to change traumatic circumstances through a fantasy that such circumstances could have been controlled. The price is irrational guilt: “I should have known.”

3. Consolation. The intensity of these experiences requires an actively consoling approach from the therapist, lest he or she be perceived as being judgmental or as collaborating in the pain inflicted on the patient. A kind of traumatic transference can develop in which, for example, rape victims may believe that their therapists are re-inflicting the trauma during the “working through” phase. Appropriate expressions of sympathy and concern can be helpful in acknowledging and diffusing this common reaction.

4. Condensation. It is important to find an image that condenses a crucial aspect of the traumatic experience. This representation can make the overwhelming aspects of the trauma more manageable by giving them concrete, symbolic form. Furthermore, this approach can be used to facilitate a restructuring of the experience by joining previously disparate images—for example, linking the pain associated with the death of a buddy in combat with the happiness experienced during some earlier shared time. This allows patients to alter the pain of the loss by attending to positive aspects of the lost relationship that remain in memory.

5. Consciousness.In a gradual manner, so that the patient is not overwhelmed, the therapist must make conscious previously dissociated traumatic memories.

6. Concentration. Use of the intense concentration characteristic of the hypnotic state is helpful in reinforcing the boundaries of the traumatic experience and of the painful affect associated with it. Through sharply focusing attention on the loss, the inference is made that when the hypnotic state is ended, attention can be shifted away from the traumatic experience.

7. Control. Because the most painful aspect of severe trauma is the sense of absolute helplessness, the loss of control over one’s body and the course of events, it is especially important that the process of the therapeutic intervention enhance the patient’s sense of control over the memories. The experience should be structured so that patients are given the opportunity to terminate the working through when they feel they have had enough, can remember as much from the hypnosis as they care to, and feel they are in charge of the self-hypnosis experience. They should learn to use it on their own as a self-hypnosis exercise as well as with the therapist. Such procedures help patients to deal with traumatic memories with a greater sense of control and mastery.

8. Congruence. The goal of the therapy is to help patients integrate dissociated or repressed traumatic material into conscious awareness in such a way that they can tolerate experiencing the memories as part of themselves, so that the traumatic past is not disjunctive and incompatible with the present. Patients should emerge from therapy having reviewed not only what was done to them but what they did to protect themselves, not only what they lost but what they had had that made the loss so painful.

References

Butler, L. D., E. F. D. Duran, et al. (1996). "Hypnotizability and traumatic experience: a diathesis-stress model of dissociative symptomatology." American Journal of Psychiatry153(7): 42-63.

Cardena, E. and D. Spiegel (1993). "Dissociative reactions to the San Francisco Bay Area earthquake of 1989." Am J Psychiatry150(3): 474-8.

Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. J. Strachey, and Freud, A. London, Hogarth Press. XII: 145-156.

Spiegel, D. (1981). "Vietnam grief work using hypnosis." Am J Clin Hypn24(1): 33-40.

Spiegel, D. and E. Cardena (1991). "Disintegrated experience: the dissociative disorders revisited." J Abnorm Psychol100(3): 366-78.

Spiegel, H. and D. Spiegel (2004). Trance and Treatment: Clinical Uses of Hypnosis. Washington, D.C., American Psychiatric Press, Inc.

van der Kolk, B. A. and R. E. Fisler (1994). "Childhood abuse and neglect and loss of self-regulation." Bull Menninger Clin58(2): 145-68.