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Senior Living

2009-10-01 15:50:00

Definition of hypnotic regression

Question: What is hypnotic regression really? Isn’t it just someone who wants to pretend they were Cleopatra or something?

Answer: Sigmund Freud, at the peak of his career, said that the answer to all psychosis would be found by going back to the initial cause of it, with a technique as yet undiscovered ( at that time). Dr. Freud, didn’t know it, but he was very close to that technique at the time, having been experimenting with hypnosis. However, the eye fixation i.e. pendulum, technique, used to induce hypnosis at the time was extremely slow to use, and for many people didn’t work at all. Freund also said that hypnosis held great promise due to the immediacy of the results, if a way could be found to make it useful in more cases. The “Undiscovered Technique” that Dr. Freud was hypothesizing about is now termed “regression” A very effective technique for finding the initial sensitizing event that is causing one discomfort. Once the ISE “Initial Sensitizing Event” is discovered, various ways of defusing its’ effect on ones’ life can be used. As for “people who want to imagine they were Cleopatra” I’m certain there are some out there. This particular statement however deals with a certain type of regression which is known as “Past Life Regression” which has proven also to be an effective way of dealing with difficulties. So let’s define a little more clearly what we are talking about here. All of us know that progress is to go forward. To regress is to go backward. A hypnotic regression takes us back in time to when an event occurred that is now affecting our life. If it was helping us, we wouldn’t want to get rid of it, so we’ll assume for the present that all regressions are going to be done to help us deal with something negative in our present life. In this case, present means today, not 10 years ago. We will deal with the subject of past lives, whether they exist or not, a little later. Hypnosis, of course, as we’ve discussed before, is not a matter of the hypnotist controlling the client, but instead a team effort between them to achieve a stated goal, whether it is to stop smoking, relieve pain, improve test taking ability, eliminate fear, have easy, painless childbirth or any of the thousand other things it can help with.. Once the client enters into the highly focused state of hypnosis, working with their powerful subconscious mind the trained hypnotist then determines the direction to go, as any good coach does, to reach the goal. In many cases, the hypnotist uses positive suggestions and/or imagination to help the client make the changes desired in the super powerful subconscious mind. Often this is all that is required to make the desired changes. However, sometimes it becomes obvious to the trained hypnotist that some experience is causing the unwanted behavior. For instance, a disabling fear which is constantly getting worse almost always has its cause in something that was experienced prior to the experience of the conscious fear. To shield personal identities, I am going to give you an example which combines several cases. A client came in who couldn’t drive over a bridge without extreme fear, not only of the bridge, but he also feared it would cause him to faint and wreck his car, possibly driving off the bridge. He believed it stemmed from a time when he and a brother were swimming in the creek near a bridge and he had difficulties and almost drowned. Since his work required him to drive, and cross many bridges, it was creating extreme difficulties for him and his family. In his case, knowing that he had to start functioning, his first hypnosis session dealt with direct positive suggestions, that he would be able to control his fear and breathing, so he could drive across bridges. However, that was not taking care of the problem. It was at best a band-aid on the wound. He was scheduled for a second appointment, when he had more time for his session.. During that appointment, using a technique known as an “Affect Bridge” for regression, we went back to the initial event which started the fear to building within him. During his boyhood, he had been climbing on a slate roof and his mother had yelled at him to get off that roof before he fell and killed himself. The boy agreed to do so and his mother went back inside. While working his way back to the tree he had used to climb onto the roof, he slipped and only avoided a deadly fall, when his belt caught on a roof projection as he went over the edge. As young boys are able to do, he twisted around and got back on the roof, making his way safely down. However, he had been scared and that fear lay in his subconscious for years. A ride in a glass-walled elevator in a hotel, also built on the fear, as did several other experiences until suddenly, he began to fear going over high bridges and each time he did so, the fear grew until he was almost totally disabled by it. After using time-tested techniques during the session., he was able to drive over bridges and deal with heights with no difficulties. The fear was gone. Incidentally, one of the reasons regression is so powerful, is because during a regression, the person actually relives the occurrence as if they were back there again. Regression is not remembering, instead it is re-living. The experience is thus so much more powerful than it would be if it was just a conscious mind memory. Sometimes regression leads us back to adult years, or to childhood years. Sometimes, we find it was only a word or sentence, which began a waterfall of growing experiences which cropped up negatively at a later time, and maybe was only distantly related to the issue. Regression is not something that you decide that you need. Just like the young man thought his fear of bridges stemmed from almost drowning, the conscious mind usually leads us astray on what the cause, or treatment is. Only a trained hypnotist, in the session, can make the decision on what technique to use. Often clients are referred in from mental health professionals who feel their client needs to discover causes of current discomfort. In most cases of such referrals, the referring mental health professional is invited to sit in on the session with their client. We have had such referrals in which the client had “missing years” or could not remember a portion of their life. Regression is almost always the way those times are accessed. Usually, the person cannot remember, because something traumatic occurred which would be too painful to remember, or which they could not deal with by themselves. In a hypnosis session, with trained professionals, those occurrences can be accessed and the client helped to deal with the trauma in a healthy way. Now, the issue of past lives. Most people want to know if it’s real or if past lives really exist. I really can’t answer that. We don’t have scientific evidence proving the existence of past lives. We do have a preponderance of evidence that something is there, but whether it is a past life, a scenario dreamed up by the subconscious for healing, a memory from the superconscious, or a glimpse of a parallel universe, or one of the hundreds of theories advanced, we just don’t know. What we do know, unequivocally, is that regressions which lead to the experience of “past lives” are healing. For me, that is all I need to know. My job is to help people live better lives. Whatever helps them is fine with me. However, let’s talk about an experience I had while touring the U.S. putting on hypnosis seminars. While I worked coast-to-coast, I also had a circuit where I re-visited certain venues in the southeast every 6 to 8 weeks. One of those was a hotel on International Drive in Orlando, FL. Since I lived in hotels I had the accumulated many “points” and received priority treatment there, always getting the same suite,(at singe room rates) on the 12th floor. This particular hotel was built around a large patio area, and we walked along an open balcony from the elevator to our suite. On one trip, I noticed a marked uneasiness while walking along the balcony, which i ascribed to fatigue. However, the next trip, the fear was so great I hugged the inside wall, almost unable to walk. I was sweating and nauseous. Realizing, that I had an increasing fear, and that it had to come from somewhere, I called a fellow hypnotist, described what I was experiencing and said, “Let’s go get it” About 45 minutes into the session the hypnotist asked me, “ Where are you now?” I replied, “In the crow’s nest … on the ship” While I was hypnotized, and talking to him, I was also experiencing being in the crow’s nest, feeling the wind, the rails and seeing the ocean. “What happened there” he asked. “I died”, I replied as tears began flooding down both sides of my face. There was no sobbing, only the tears for about 20 seconds, and then it was over. At that point I was aware the fear had gone. A few weeks later, as I again visited my hotel in Orlando, I was leaning over the twelfth floor balcony railing looking down at the people crossing the patio, and feeling no fear at all. Was I experiencing a past Life? Well, it felt like it, but I’ve been to movies where I thought the bad guys were about to get me too. I just don’t know. What I do know, is that unexpected fear of heights, which barged into my life is totally gone. And when you come right down to it, that’s all that really matters. Yes regression is real. As for the reality of past lives, the scientific jury is still out. Oh, and by the way, in all the regressions I have done that ended up in past lives, I’ve never met a person who appeared to be anything more than ordinary. I really would like to meet Cleo though!