August 2017
by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.
Couns., PhD
While considering what to write on for
this month’s article, I came across some notes I made on hypnosis and dream
work in depth psychology some years ago and thought this was the beginning of a worthy something or other.
I remember having the beginnings of a thought then about how both hypnosis and
dream work share a very rich interior landscape. Such musings led me then to
adding qualifications in clinical hypnotherapy to my counselling and
psychotherapeutic training and practice.
I first came into contact with depth
psychology when I was 19, and began a ten year study immersion in the field of Jungian
Analytical Psychology in both Australia and Switzerland. Since then I’ve
trained in several other modalities, but I continue to mull about the unconscious
and wonder, as I work, on its flexibility and capacity for fundamentally
changing ordinary lives when properly nurtured and tapped into.
The unconscious mind is a strange place of
figures, and feelings, and sliding doors of perceptions that throw up, in the
cracks of our existence, meanings that eluded us previously. Here is a kind of
trance-scape that is really interesting not only theoretically but also
experientially. This I know from my own inner work, as well as academic study.
Here is the space where a richness of half known things are found to be much greater
than originally thought. It’s sort of like a Tardis, where the interior is
vastly bigger that what appears on the outside.
I remember when I was a child playing a
game that involved only traversing the cracks in the pavement on the street
where I lived. This often required leaping around gazelle-like to avoid the
plain old pavement with no cracks. It required focus, agility, and – at the
same time – something of a relaxed stance. This focused-relaxed attitude is likewise
what is required to be engaged in by both therapist and client alike in dream
work and hypnosis. In order to move beyond the obvious, we have to connect
gently to the subtle in order to know better the landscape of our minds. Hypnosis provides a useful training for
that, as does the work done in a counselling psychotherapy. Both take the
natural aptitude most of us have for entering this focused-relaxed state and
enhances it so that fundamental change can take place.
None of this magical nor out of the
ordinary; indeed most, if not all, of us already know what it feels like. We
watch movies, we read books, we write, we listen and play music, we paint or
gaze at an art work, we run, cycle, swim, or just wander around gardens or
streets and shops in a present, and yet drifting away type of state. We do not
lose control, just we do not lose control with hypnosis nor exploring our inner
life in therapy, and no one can do things to us that we do not want. We can
move in and out of this state at will.
In therapy and hypnosis there is safety in
the meeting of minds, a rapport,
and it is this mutuality that builds not only trust but a deepening of shared
therapeutic experience where change happens.
I particularly like working with
people who, till now, have felt stuck in repetitive habits, negative ways of
thinking, and bogged down with worry, anxiety, and a sense of unfulfillment.
The artist, the writer, the musician facing the perpetual blank canvas, or page or unliberating
musical silence are perfect candidates for hypnosis and/or the depth psychology
of dream work. I know this not only from working with such people, but through
my own experiences facing similar sorts of things. There is a great beauty in the
release of such blockages and the making of art, the release of iterative
habit, and repetitive thought processes. This, by way, is felt as much by me as
my clients. I enjoy my work and I bow my head humbly to
the courage of those who journey with me.
