Clinical Hypnotherapy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD, Dip. Clinical Hypnotherapy.

 

May 2025

 

Clinical Hypnotherapy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD, Dip. Clinical Hypnotherapy.

 

In 2013 I got into a conversation with my dentist about the use of hypnosis in dentistry. He loaned me a book on the subject written by a dentist working in  Australia who started using hypnosis with anxious patients and for ameliorating oral pain.  Until then, I’d had only a passing interest in the field, although I knew about the old experiments in psychology (Clark L. Hull etc) and also the mystique surrounding it (Mesmer, and all that). The dentist author, though, was hinting at more than suggestibility and magic; he was exploring the revelry of the trance state where anything can be attended to. This was the revelation for me and ignited a more profound interest.

 

I researched training bodies around Australia teaching hypnosis and decided upon the Australian Institute of Clinical Hypnotherapy in order to learn how to do hypnosis properly, and to gain qualifications in it. And so for four days out of every month for four months I travelled down to Sydney to attend classes held in one of the  University of Sydney’s colleges: in theory and practice and essays, building up my expertise. I had to do 400 hours of practice in order to get my diploma. It was a thorough education that added beautifully to my existing training as a counsellor/psychotherapist; an education that continues.

 

My main interest in the hypnotic state is, as I hint above, that it opens our minds to other possible paths hitherto not considered. Anything can be attended to in equal measure to the otherwise iterative one track mindedness of a problem story. Recurring thoughts are the things that bog us down and get in the way of more creative solutions.  For example, a client I’ve been working with recently had two main things going on: recurring negative thoughts and feeling her life and career was going nowhere. I worked with her issues in two ways: shifting her awareness from the negative thoughts to the process of breathing in new cool air and breathing out and letting go of old stuff. The second arm was getting her to explore ways she can reactivate her intellectual and activist life through writing scholarly papers in the field of her expertise. Iterative thought processes are inward looking and depressing, while awareness of breath and focus on creating new work are outward looking, and break the mindset that behaves more like a mouse wheel than anything healthy.

 

Hypnosis throws up other ways of being in forms that excite and interest and appeal to the bigger picture of what a person sees in themselves.

 

Another patient has been bogged down with the problems of giving up smoking. He now wears nicotine patches which help with the chemical addiction. The physical pleasure of rolling the paper and stuffing the tobacco inside also has an addictive component. What to do? My suggestion was to practice making origami birds and little beasties out of paper, thus transferring the cigarette paper making skills to something fun and intricate and little animals that can be given to his grandchild – this bringing delight to her. From the insular process of rolling a fag to making a gift is compelling.

 

The thing about the hypnotic state is that it is a trance state and thus no different to the trance states we enter when we watch a movie, read a compelling book, enter into a dance, playing music, riding a bicycle, swim, walk. We are entranced by our involvement and we are very aware of what is going on at the same time. Minds are not taken over, but rather we allow our participation in a shared space that we choose. We can choose not to be there at any point along the way: that is up to us. The hypnotic space, in capable hands, is a secure and safe place and nothing is suggested that goes against a person’s wishes. In this safe place, new and creative ideas can be born and begin to flourish. Hypnosis nurtures this.

 

Doing hypnosis is beautiful and its good results confirm my ongoing interest in it. Both practitioner and patient benefit.

 

Charcot and Me

February 2018

     When I have any dental treatment I have nitrous oxide. I have had so much extensive dental work over my life time that now I cannot bear to have fingers and instruments in my mouth at all while in ordinary consciousness. And thus I receive nitrous oxide, otherwise known as laughing gas. I am not amused, by the way, more really interested in the kind of consciousness I experience. In fact I use the experience to examine the levels of awareness: of having a sense of being in a particular place, of body sensations, of what is going on between my dentist and his assistant, of his accounts of travels through India or scuba diving trips and the way in which he speaks of these things, of my own feelings and thoughts,  as well as my  discursive processes, and my detachment from all of these. I am intrigued that I am able to follow everything that is said and remember it, even though much of the time I am in an altered state of consciousness.

     It is these layers of awareness that interests me and is a primary reason I am motivated to work in my profession. I like exploring the edges of consciousness and noticing how each level and kind of awareness has the capacity to effect change in myself and others.

     Naturally I do not use nitrous oxide in my work, I am a mere psychotherapist with no access to the stuff, but the space of therapy itself is anyway a thick and rich one where focus and comfort  (cum forte, Latin for  “with strength”) are both employed to create a healing place. I am reminded here of Erv Polster’s comment that therapy occurs in the spaces between a light hypnotic trance and a deep one (From the Radical Centre, 1999).  Some have spoken of it as a crucible and the work an alchemy, some see it as a play with reverie, but I am keen to view it as a really valuable place where consciousness is not only explored but used to bring very particular awareness of lives as lived. There is in here an acute feistiness that may be effectively nurtured. And I’m speaking here of a normal counselling session that may, or may not, also employ hypnosis.

     I do do hypnosis when specifically requested to by my clients (it costs a bit more than a psychotherapeutic/counselling session mainly because it is intentionally more focused, much like a psychic lathe). Hypnosis is a state that deliberately explores the levels of consciousness as a particular tool. It should be noted here that not all personal health and relational issues are particularly helped by hypnosis but when it is useful both the client and the therapist have a unique access to both our personal and collective unconscious so that problem behaviours, iterative thoughts, sleeplessness, and so on may disappear, or be reduced.

       So why the title, “Charcot and Me”? I came to be thinking about such things while re-reading Charcot, the Clinician: The Tuesday Lessons: Excerpts from Nine Case Presentations on General Neurology Delivered at the Salpetriere Hospital in 1887-88 (translated and published in 1987) which explored levels of awareness in relation to psychopathology and being intrigued yet again that present at these lectures were the luminaries of Babinski, Gilles de la Tourette, Pierre Janet, Freud and William James, among others: all thinkers and clinicians that literally shaped neurology, psychology and body-mind philosophy into what we know today. 

     Reading this material is kind of like attending a gathering of family and friends. Old ideas are chewed over and the good bits relished, while the bad spat out (politely, under a neatly placed napkin).

     The business of consciousness and the exploration of levels of awareness is as much part of my life as it was theirs. Last year, when I bought this book on Charcot’s Tuesday lectures, I took a photograph of myself holding it up, calling my photo: “Charcot and me”, for it is as much a source of useful knowledge as connection with my intellectual genealogy and I have a certain fondness for the man.