Trancework

An Introduction to the Practice of Clinical Hypnosis

Michael D Yapko, Michael D Yapko, Michael D. Yapko

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351246286
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

For nearly four decades, Trancework has been the definitive textbook for thousands of professionals undergoing training in the art and science of clinical hypnosis. Now in its 5th edition, this classic text continues its legacy of encouraging sound clinical practice based in established scientific research. This latest edition incorporates new studies and emerging topics within the field of hypnosis, including new chapters on depression and the construction of process-oriented interventions. Readers can expect to receive a comprehensive overview of current developments in the domain of hypnosis, an in-depth consideration of the practical and ethical issues associated with its use, and a greater appreciation for its many therapeutic applications. This thorough, engaging text equips professionals with the essential skills to change clients' lives by using hypnosis to enhance treatment of both medical and psychological issues.

Section 1
Thought Before Action

Developing a Deeper Understanding of Hypnosis

The 10 chapters in this first section can provide you with a solid conceptual and practical foundation for the effective use of hypnosis. “Just tell me what to do” is a hazardous position to take. After all, how you think about hypnosis naturally determines how you will use it. So, I strongly encourage becoming familiar with hypnosis in a substantive way.

Chapter1
A Kaleidoscope of First Glimpses of Hypnosis

Sharing a Moment with You That Has Lasted a Lifetime

When I was a 19-year-old undergraduate student studying psychology, I had an exciting opportunity to attend my first workshop on the topic of clinical hypnosis. I grabbed that opportunity with both hands! It was open to both students and professionals, and I was more than a little curious about the topic. Up to that point, the only times I’d ever seen hypnosis performed was in movies and television shows where it was consistently portrayed negatively as a scary form of mind control. In virtually every example of hypnosis I’d ever seen, people were apparently subjugated to the will of the invariably evil hypnotist. Under the hypnotist’s malevolent control, it seemed, they were either compelled to commit crimes or act silly, depending on the whims of the hypnotist. From exposures such as these, I skeptically wondered what possible therapeutic value hypnosis could have. Intuitively, though, it made sense to me that if you could influence people for worse, it should be equally possible to influence them for the better. I went to that workshop carrying the weight of a thousand questions.

The workshop instructor was a psychotherapist who utilized hypnosis in his clinical practice. He was bright, articulate, experienced, and quite knowledgeable about hypnosis. It was great to hear someone knowledgeable with benevolent intentions talking about the positive possibilities hypnosis could offer to health care providers. The first day of the workshop focused primarily on giving people an intellectual understanding of hypnosis. He discussed common misconceptions, differing viewpoints about the nature of hypnosis and hypnotic phenomena, different clinical applications, and so forth. It was truly fascinating!

On the second day, though, was the event that grabbed me and, in all the many years since, never let me go. It was a clinical demonstration of hypnosis that was so compelling in its dramatic and successful outcome that I can still feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I recall it. When the instructor announced that he was going to conduct a live demonstration, I made sure I was sitting right up front so I could see and hear everything that transpired. I didn’t want to miss one tiny bit of what went on, and I especially wanted to see whether applied hypnosis was mind control, a fraud, or something else. Despite the previous day’s assurances that hypnosis wasn’t mind control, I wasn’t convinced yet. I was still skeptical and wanted to see how it actually happened.

A woman I guessed to be in her mid-40s from the group of attendees volunteered to be the demonstration subject. The interview revealed that she was a psychotherapist in private practice, but ever since a serious car accident she’d been in about three years earlier, she wasn’t able to work as much or as consistently as she used to. She had suffered multiple injuries, all of which had resolved fairly well except for a continuing severe pain in her leg that made it hard to walk, sit, or even sleep. She’d consulted a number of different doctors, tried many different treatments both physical and pharmacological, but still the severe pain persisted. More than one doctor told her the pain was from nerve damage and would likely never go away. She felt tired, hopeless, afraid, unwilling to give up, and desperate. I’m sure everyone in the room listening to her describe all that she had to endure was moved by her story and her struggle. I was so hopeful the hypnosis session she was about to undergo would provide some relief but also fearful that it wouldn’t. I just couldn’t imagine that there was anything the instructor/therapist could say that would make a difference in such dire circumstances.

The interview came to an end and a clear transition in the interaction took place when the instructor/therapist invited her to arrange herself comfortably, close her eyes, and focus her attention on his words. Again, I wondered, what could he possibly say that might ease the suffering in this woman’s life? He began with some general suggestions about breathing comfortably and relaxing. He reminded her of special times in her life when she felt happy doing things she enjoyed doing. He described times when she’d been pleasantly surprised by something going much better than she’d expected. I waited patiently for the mind-control commands I “knew” were coming… but, they never came. He was gentle, respectful, positive, and reassuring in his approach. It inspired confidence.

After about 20 minutes or so of his suggestions aimed at helping her focus and relax, he introduced some suggestions for imagery that I found nothing short of bizarre. He encouraged her to see the pain in her leg turning into a dark liquid, a liquid that could gradually flow down her leg, then exit her toes and spill into her shoe, then overflow her shoe and create a puddle on the floor. He described this “puddle of pain” that left her leg and accumulated on the floor in graphic detail, and as he did so I wondered what kind of mildly psychotic thinking goes into generating imagery like that. I wondered to myself, not at all seriously, though, whether anyone else observing this interaction was concerned about his state of mind. But, I sensed there was something important going on here even though I didn’t really have a clue as to what it might be. My lack of knowledge was a barrier to grasping the intelligence and creativity of what he was demonstrating.

As he continued providing the “puddle of pain” imagery, the woman’s face literally changed before our eyes. It was astonishing to see the dark shadows beneath her eyes lightening, to see the worry lines in her face diminish and gradually disappear, and to see a look of serenity develop in their place. I wondered what exactly was going on inside her because clearly something of great significance was taking place within her. I simply didn’t know enough to even guess at what it might be.

Eventually, the session was brought to an end with suggestions for her having discovered some new previously hidden abilities that she could use in helpful ways that could provide ongoing relief and comfort. When she finally opened her eyes, the look on her face already said it all, but then came a flood of tears as she reported, “This is the first time in three years that I have no pain!” The room was absolutely silent as everyone processed what had just happened. I was so steeped in a combination of awe and excitement at what I’d just witnessed, all the while knowing I didn’t even understand a fraction of what had actually gone on in this unusual but powerful hypnotic interaction. My only thought in that moment was an earnest promise I made to myself: “I MUST learn how to do that!”

I literally decided in that magic moment that I was going to spend my life learning about and practicing hypnosis, developing that special skill set while exploring the boundaries of ways the mind could influence the brain as well as the body. And, that magic moment has indeed lasted all my life…

The Curiosity of a Clinician

Socrates said, “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” The sense of wonder and the curiosity it inevitably fosters was and remains a driving force in the study of hypnosis. Curiosity leads to closer observation, objective research, and innovations in applications. Curiosity motivates the drive to deepen understandings of a complex phenomenon that both puzzles and delights. That’s true for me, and it’s equally true for all those clinicians around the world who have studied hypnosis, discovered its many clinical merits, and enthusiastically integrated it into their health care practices.

This book is a direct product of my curiosity about what happened that day so long ago, a curiosity that the passage of time has only intensified. Now, more than 45 years later, I have observed many hundreds of remarkable demonstrations of hypnosis by a wide array of experts, personally conducted thousands of hypnosis sessions with people all over the world and been an avid reader of the research in hypnosis and related areas. The questions I raise here that have motivated me are questions that I hope will motivate you to learn about hypnosis as well:

• How does paying attention—focusing—translate into non-volitional yet meaningful responses, the therapeutic ones that people say they didn’t work at producing but “just happened?”
• Why do some people respond so dramatically to experiential processes such as hypnosis, finding them “transformative” and “life changing”?
• Can hypnosis increase the value of a therapeutic intervention? If so, how? And for what kinds of problems?
• What general and specific factors determine one’s capacity to respond to hypnosis? Can anybody and everybody be effectively hypnotized?
• Can we objectively define and measure hypnotic capacities in people?
• Can an individual’s quality of responsiveness be increased to maximize therapeutic benefit?

Consider these questions, and perhaps many more of your own, when you reflect on the dramatic success of the suggestions given during hypnosis to transform a distressed woman’s pain into a harmless puddle on the floor. How does a suggestion that isn’t even rational exert such a profound therapeutic effect?

With your curiosity now at the fore, I hope, I welcome you to the extraordinary possibilities to be found in the world of hypnosis!

Power… Magic… Mystery… Danger

The power of hypnosis. The “magic” of hypnosis. The mystery of hypnosis. The danger of hypnosis. The very word has an aura of intrigue associated with it, commonly conjuring up images in peoples’ minds of both the extraordinary and the malevolent. Yet, the questionable nature of hypnosis that has its roots in mysticism and quackery tells us something about the fundamentally human need to believe and the strengths and vulnerabilities of our being made this way. The strength of a belief can allow one to endure the grueling hardship of a Mt. Everest climb or six months of chemotherapy or allow one to respond to a child’s mistake with love and education instead of a barrage of criticisms.

The connections to be found between personal beliefs and hypnosis are obvious in some ways, and not at all obvious in other ways. At its simplest level of consideration, your beliefs can inspire and motivate you to do and be your best self or, conversely, can lead you to live a painfully restricted or even self-destructive existence. Our beliefs go a long way in defining us, so a study of how hypnosis can shape one’s beliefs is foundational to any clinical practice. There are many variables to consider when striving to better understand the special interaction that takes place between people when hypnosis is introduced into their relationship. The questions posed above are merely a starting place for beginning to understand how the belief that meaningful change may be possible can become a defined pathway for actually producing that change.

What is hypnosis? How is hypnosis relevant to clinical interventions? And, how can you begin to acquire the necessary skills for incorporating hypnosis into your clinical practice? These three questions provide the foundation for this text, and multifaceted answers derived from clinical and experimental research will be forthcoming as each chapter unfolds. This book will provide clinicians wanting to learn hypnosis with both perspectives and methods that are based on current scientific understandings of hypnosis as well as the realities of modern clinical practice. This is, indeed, a “how to do hypnosis” text that aims to guide you in your desire to learn about how and when hypnosis can be effectively used in treatment.

In this first chapter, I explore in a general way some of the issues that can help you begin to establish a foundation for learning the art and science of hypnosis. These include: (1) the difficulties in trying to define something as complex as hypnosis; (2) the mixed reactions hypnosis gets from people; (3) the effectiveness of hypnosis in treatment; (4) the importance of the relationship between the therapist and client in the treatment process; (5) the hazards of overselling hypnosis; (6) the limitations of labeling multidimensional experiences such as hypnosis; (7) the roles of communication and influence as foundational to therapeutic experiences in general and hypnotic experiences in particular; and (8) the merits of developing a strength-based approach to integrating hypnosis into treatment. These topics can provide a good introduction to the field and will be further developed in subsequent chapters.

A First Attempt to Define Hypnosis (Sort of)

It makes good sense here at the outset of this first chapter to want to have a definition of the phenomenon this thick book hopes to illuminate. This is easier said than done, however. Scholars have grappled with the challenge of trying to define hypnosis for at least two centuries and in all that time no consensus has been reached about a precise definition. It may be easy to understand why: The experience of hypnosis is a highly subjective one, opening the door to the expression of many different “expert” viewpoints about what experiences actually deserve the label “hypnosis.” Thus, clinicians show a great deal of diversity in the populations they treat with hypnosis, and they may differ quite substantially in the way they apply methods of hypnosis.

Even long-time practitioners have an easier time describing rather than defining hypnosis. For example, John (Jack) Watkins was a psychologist and one of the earliest pioneers of modern clinical hypnosis. In fact, he was a founding member of the first professional hypnosis society, the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (SCEH) in 1949. Not long before he passed away, he acknowledged the enigma of hypnosis in an article he wrote entitled, “Hypnosis: Seventy Years of Amazement, and Still Don’t Know What it Is!” (2009). His inability to define hypnosis after all his years of practice is certainly not for a lack of thoughtful consideration on his part. Rather, the lack of a precise definition for all of us in this field speaks to the complexity of trying to untangle the intricacies of hypnosis when it encompasses scores of variables from domains as diverse as neurobiology, cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, individual psychology, genetics, and epigenetics. You will be introduced to many of these variables throughout the book.

Hypnosis has no single agreed-upon definition. In an attempt to create one that most experts might be willing to accept, Division 30 of the American Psychological Association, called the Society of Psychological Hypnosis, formed a “Hypnosis Definition Committee” (HDC) of well-known hypnosis experts to develop a definition, asserting that such a definition “is fundamental to scientific inquiry” (Elkins, Barabasz, Council, & Spiegel, 2015, p. 2). Realistically acknowledging that not everyone would agree with this definition, the executive committee of Division 30 accepted the following as the formal definition of hypnosis:

A state of consciousness involving focused attention and reduced peripheral awareness characterized by an enhanced capacity for response to suggestion.

This minimalistic Division 30 hypnosis definition inspired a great deal of thoughtful dialogue. Stephen Lankton, the perceptive editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis (AJCH), invited a number of experts, including me, to offer their views regarding the new definition in a special issue of the AJCH. (See the April, 2015, issue for these interesting and insightful commentaries.) The HDC considers their definition to be a “concise and heuristic description” (Elkins et al., 2015, p. 6). It is somewhat perplexing to refer to a definition as a description. Is a descriptio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About Michael D. Yapko, Ph.D.
• List of Tables
• Frames of Reference
• Foreword
• Introduction to the 5th Edition
• SECTION 1 Thought Before Action: Developing a Deeper Understanding of Hypnosis
• SECTION 2 Hypnosis in Action: Developing Skill and Artistry in Clinical Practice
• Name Index
• Subject Index