“Hearing” Others by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

February 2021

 

 

     I’m  intrigued by the way in which we  get a sense of unseen other people through the narrative of the people talking directly with us. In literary terms, this is known as narrative empathy and it may because my first degree was a major in English Literature, that the idea fascinates me on several levels.

 

     A while ago, I was listening to a man describing a few ex-girlfriends and I could barely get any real sense of the personhood of these women. It dawned on me that my feelings of disquiet had a lot to do with this man’s own lack of a sense of the “otherness” of the women. If they were characters in a novel, they would be like wraiths, with no substance. We speak, after all, much as we experience.

 

     We fill in, with our imaginations and felt sense, what we think is going on in another person’s mind when we listen to them speak or write or otherwise depict, the object of their interest. If a person’s focus is on outward appearances, as it was with the man described above, we get very little information on what these other people are actually like. It’s sort of like flicking through a Vogue magazine where women are objectified; nothing more, nothing less.

 

     This man, who did not have a real sense of the subjective nature of his ex-girlfriends’ experiences, could not understand the effect his actions had on them and the not knowing caused him and, presumably them, real distress. His lack of empathy seemed to be generated by an unawareness of the subjective presence of others. This, I think, was the result of being thrust into an adult world when he was still a child. We develop much of our capacity for empathy though peer contact in a casual environment where ideas of relationship are tried and tested and tried again, and he didn’t have much of this. He was forced to grow up too quickly.

 

     Getting a sense of how others are feeling is a sign of emotional intelligence and it is the capacity for empathy. Not “hearing” how others are feeling means that they don’t really get a sense of what they themselves are feeling. This is not to say they have no feelings, but rather can’t identify what’s going on within themselves and in the behaviour of others and have difficulty adjusting their behaviour to make space for others’ responses. There is a clinical word for this personality trait: Alexithymia, and being a  trait, it is possible to learn, to heighten, awareness of the feelings of self and others.

 

     When I was studying couples counselling in my Master of Counselling course we did a lot of practice runs working with people who were not “hearing” the perspectives of the other person they were in a relationship with. We had them do a bit of play acting whereby each had to pretend to be the other person, saying the words they’d heard the other say. This simple task quickly gave each person a felt sense of the other person and a bit of an awareness of other lives, other sensibilities, other perspectives.

 

     A study needs to be done to investigate how such a technique changes the quality of “voice” in a person’s narrative accounts of others. The quality of “voice” after all changes the capacity to “hear” another person, other people. When we speak of others, what we know of ourselves and how we perceive the other lives of the people we speak of, is reflected in the quality of our narratives. To speak of others without feeling something of what another is feeling is to speak as if “tone deaf”: there is sound, but not much content.  To “hear” another allows us to speak of them in a deeper, fuller way. The man I mentioned above, could well benefit from psychotherapy, if he ever should wish it. The purpose of therapy here would be to learn how to fill out a life with reciprocated relationships that feel good, by recognizing the felt being of others. That makes for a life among others rich and fulfilling.

 

 

Can Hypnosis Retrieve Memory? by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

January 2021

       Every now and again, I get requests from potential clients to help them remember something they’ve forgotten using hypnosis. I generally say I don’t do this sort of thing. There are three reasons for this, and I say so to these people. One is that memory isn’t a large, permanent and possibly accessible storehouse of information, nor is it a recording device, two, hypnosis isn’t a searchlight into such a storehouse, and three, hypnosis wrongly done can plant false memories, and I’m uninterested in doing that.

     Memory is already a distortion of experience since it is an internal representation of an event and not the event itself. No amount of uncovering bits of information through hypnosis will get to an absolute truth. What hypnosis might do is allow a person to think about a situation or event differently, and this is useful therapeutically, but as a possibly inviolate forensic tool it is generally not admissible in the court of law, with few exceptions. It should be remembered that hypnosis isn’t a powerful tool to recover accurate memories under a variety of conditions including accurate memories as far back as birth or even past lives. You may get glimpses of ideas, but that’s about it.

     Digging into memory using hypnosis, it has been found through years of considerable research, is as susceptible to the problems of distortion and confabulation as any other method of trying to remember something. It would be unethical of me to use hypnosis to fulfil someone’s desire for memory recovery, and I won’t recommend any other practitioner who might claim to do this dubious thing.

     My interest as a clinical hypnotherapist, as opposed to a forensic hypnotist is the loosening up of rigid ideas about oneself. I use hypnotherapy as an adjunct to my psychotherapeutic practice, but only by client choice.  I am a psychotherapeutic first and foremost, and my participation in my clients’ healing is my actual interest in the field.

     I have helped some clients find missing objects, but not by directing them to that object. I know from personal experience that when something is missing I am more likely to find it when I’m not concentrating on looking for it. It’s when my attention is elsewhere that I can find pointers to the lost thing. When preparing for exams, I used to play difficult fugues on the piano and in this way solve the mathematical problems by approaching the issues from other directions. This, to me, is a far more interesting way of approaching difficulties.

     This loosened therapeutic direction, valuable as it is as I use it, actually also points to the inherent danger of trying to hypnotise someone in order to direct them to actual memory. A hypnotised person’s openness to suggestions, as well as an expectation that hypnosis will work, sets the stage for possible confabulation. Memory is easily contaminated by a whole range of things (just like a crime scene), including the very desire for hypnosis to uncover truth. If you believe something will work, you are most likely to believe the veracity of the something. In court cases where hypnosis is used to trigger memories (real or not), the person is likely to say they are more than one hundred percent sure that such and such is true. This is a red flag. Nobody can be so sure of anything. I note that I avoid such directiedness by saying something like, “Maybe you will find it; maybe you won’t, and that’s alright.” I try to avoid direct statements of any kind, as I do not wish to create stories for the other person.

     By avoiding direct statements during a hypnotherapeutic session, I also avoid client resistance, which is just more inflexibility to a much more fluid approach to life. Loosening anxiety around a problem has the capacity for releasing a person from the problem itself, and that matters enormously.

    So, hypnosis is an unreliable means for uncovering things unremembered, but it’s a wonderful tool for learning to think outside the box; it is a doorway to greater creativity and self confidence.