The Pain of Being Shunned by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     Being rejected by your group is literally painful. Studies have shown that the same part of the brain that indicates physical pain, lights up when a person is shunned. It hurts.

     Being ostracized, which is an extreme form of bullying, discrimination, stigmatization, betrayal, and interpersonal rejection, means your connection and communication with the group of people you were formerly a member of  has been broken. You are actually excommunicated.

     We are social animals, like other primates, wolves, and lions, and belonging to a group really matters. In the group, we receive affirmation and support and feelings of being trusted, and through these, come to know who we are. The surge of  interest in social media and the taking of “selfies” highlights this most clearly. 

     Just as we are acutely responsive to how other people perceive, evaluate, and feel about us, so we respond accordingly. If we feel others are disinterested, disapproving, or rejecting, we feel acute pain (physical and emotional), vulnerable, wanting to be cared for, angry and dejected. Long term ostracism can result in feelings of total alienation, depression, and helplessness, and sometimes the person seeks refuge in drugs, alcohol, and occasionally sexual promiscuity.

     I’ve had clients who have known the pain of exclusion so intensely that they have never been able to “enter” society at all: forever standing on the outside looking in. Some have been at the point of giving up. 

     These feelings attracted negative reactions from other people in various forms: disinterest, criticism, prejudice, avoidance, rejection, betrayal, stigmatization, ostracism, neglect, abandonment, abuse, bullying, and a variety of minor slights and snubs, which perpetuates the cycle of separation and alienation.

     People react differently to being ostracized.  Some will try harder to be included, by mimicking, complying, obeying orders, and cooperating with prevailing groups. I have a friend who was badly bullied throughout his school years and to cope with this, he became an avid football groupie in a way few of his contemporaries did.

     Some people who were ostracized as children, now engage in hero worship and imitation of sportsman, film stars, and pop singers; some even having radical plastic surgery to look like them.

Some respond with extreme aggression and so extremist groups begin to look very attractive. I fully expect, by the way, that some of the asylum-seeking children interred in detention centres who are feeling cut-off from society, alienated, and ostracized, will, on their release, join extremist groups and release their rage against us  (and I can’t blame them).

     Some who are rejected by groups, feel the pain, for sure, but they are much less affected. Being excluded and reacting depends on pre-existing levels of self esteem and perceived self worth and this is contributed to by the level of support a person has received from infancy onwards. Low self esteem is associated with inconsistent or absent support from primary caregivers (mothers, fathers, and others), as attachment theory suggests. How this manifests is complex and embraces the cognitive, emotional, motivational and behavioral. 

     If we believe in ourselves, then being ejected from a group isn’t going to have enduring effects.

Group membership, and this is a membership of any kind of group (official and non-official) is something we social animals need.  Having a sense of belonging means, to a degree, conformity to a group’s ethic; an ethic that few in the group will break, or even question. Questioning and awareness about how the group operates is valuable. It is surely better to understand how something works than be a mere cog in its working. Such knowledge can bring greater flexibility to the group and allow a greater diversity among its members.

     Groups need to communicate. The greater the level of communication within the group, the more responsibility, caring and camaraderie group members feel for one another. When there is little actual communication between members, and where the members are largely anonymous, the so-called group becomes a hotbed of rudeness, crudeness, and cruelty (as many internet message boards illustrate).

      So, what can a person who feels rejected by a group/society do? How can they re-enter community? Support groups of the ostracized really help. Such groups build group identity and provide wonderful individual and interpersonal support. They can be initiated by anyone. 

     Support from friends, counsellors and other people, can also help build a person’s damaged self esteem and self worth. I’m finding that using clinical hypnotherapy is a powerful tool in re-establishing a patient as a person that matters. When someone feels worthy they can more easily form relationships and gather friends around them, sharing, laughing, caring, and this is what a group has the capacity to be.

Creating by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

Creating 

The page is blank and I’m wondering how to begin. I’ve been walking around for days thinking about what to write, and then it dawned on me this is the very thing that needed to be said: that the page is blank and I know that the doing of the thing is literally the doing of it. Staring at the page and hoping that something gets written is useless. And so I write this.

Wondering what and how to say it is a common as muck problem for all people who engage in creative acts. There is always a blank page, or canvas, or raw materials.  The tools of the artist-writer, of brush, palette knife, pencil, pen,  pastels, paint, chisel, keyboard can be in tip-top shape (and they are intrinsically lovely, I think), but they’re useless until a mark is made.

We had a game as children where one of us made a mark on a piece of paper and then another of us had to draw something that the mark evoked, and then the next person had to draw something that the mark and the other person’s drawing evoked in them, and so, very soon the whole paper was a mass of drawings. The complete effect was beautiful. It is in the doing that a thing is made.

The creative act depends a lot on being alive and open to possibilities, which is the meaning of receptivity. To hold oneself alive to whatever comes along is not waiting for something random to grab one’s attention; it’s  surrounding oneself with various materials, people, ideas and contexts that nurture and stimulate interaction and a desire to participate in a seed of an idea. Receptivity doesn’t depend on a time frame, but permits access to a creation at any and all points of our engagement. 

This last statement is a crucial one, as it implies that any beginning is a useful one. Any mark on the page is the start of a creation. 

Of course, this is not to say that there are not other factors that get in the way of creating something. The stories we’ve been told about ourselves, the difficulties that we’ve had growing up, the traumas we’ve experienced, and so on have a huge bearing on the making of something new (all of which may be successfully addressed in counselling and hypnotherapy).  I’ve known this rather well in my own life, but over the last month have experienced these apparent barriers more keenly. 

Nearly a month ago I began a 30-day challenge to write for 10 minutes a day and post it on an internet site designed just for this: to get writers writing.  Just doing the thing has thrown up a barrage of resistances. Many days have passed when I’ve left the writing till nearly midnight, but then when actually  writing it hasn’t been hard. So, what is all that about? Why the dragging of feet?

Writing has quite a history for me. I started out a terrible writer in all ways.  My handwriting was practically unreadable and because even I couldn’t read it, my written expression was garbled.  I had been taught to write with my right hand, but I was (am) left-handed, so I actually couldn’t control my pen for a very long time.  It was embarrassing and I didn’t want to do anything with a pen. That changed when I was sixteen and starting to prepare for my matriculation exams in order to get into university. Until then I really was un-grabbed (if that’s a word) by the essay questions given to us.  Here,  suddenly was a question that set me on fire. It was an English Literature question on the poetic uses of language in everyday life. I wrote and wrote and wrote all night and submitted it the next day. My teacher was surprised, for until that point, I was a mediocre student. She gave me a distinction, but said she wanted to tutor me and teach me to handwrite again. So began intensive training both in handwriting and essay construction, a learning process that continues today.

The greater control of my right hand paralleled the greater control of composition and a greater ease of expression. I’m extremely grateful for this help I received. It changed everything. I was finally free to pursue the learning I wanted. That’s my story.  I realize there are many other accounts of difficulties that get in the way of present day creativity.

Resistance to creativity can be broken through  simply by making a mark on the paper and elaborating on it.  Combining this with such tools as journaling and counseling eases up the creator’s block. It’s powerful stuff, just this doing business.

Transformative Power of Rage by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns, PhD

Transformative Power of Rage  

That someone is very attractive – too attractive. We want to get close to him or her, but….  they are kind of dangerous: really handsome, beautiful even, but too hot to handle. They are the life of the party, popping pills, drinking straight from bottles. Spirits of the party. We want to get close, really close, but… it’s like moving in with a handsome sleek lion. Are we nuts?

Somehow or other, we wake up the next day in bed with this gorgeous stranger,  and then the next morning, and next thing you know, we are a couple. It is outrageous, this connection we have. He, or she (this is not a gender specific story), is too wild; his devil-may-care attitude flings us this way and that. It’s like being taunted by a tornado. Thrilling, for sure, and addictive. Yes, he uses too many drugs, some legal (he doctor shops), some illegal (he shops with the guy across the street), and smokes and drinks. He’ll settle down, we think, once the relationship becomes more stable.  We clean up the vomit on the bedroom floor, silently throw out the bottles with the empty packets of pills, we wash his clothes and the sheets and spray room fresheners around; we are good partners, never complaining, and to all intents and purposes, we are no different from everybody else. The fact that we are angry, so incredibly angry doesn’t come into it.

Time goes by and we’ve heard the story before, quite a few times now.  (S)He’ll change; it’ll never happen again; he’s on the straight and narrow and he loves us. Life seems good, maybe. His sleek gorgeous looks are fading. There’s a bit of a paunch and a stray blood vessel appearing on his nose. He is quite attractive, still, in a sort of moth-eaten old leonine way. We say so, he goes out to celebrate and we don’t see him all day. We use this time to angrily clean the house, attend to the business of finding him a job and we secure an interview for him, because he lost the last one through turning up to work drunk. We wait, and wait, feeling like we are about to implode.  He turns up the day after tomorrow, though it is a Tuesday and he has an interview at 10am. He is incoherent, dirty and still very very drunk. There is no way he can attend, so we ring the workplace and say he has come down with the flu.

Some label our place in this relational pattern as codependent. This is a term that doesn’t quite sit well for me, and some others. Essentially codependency is enabling the other person to maintain an addictive life-style.  I don’t like the term because it ignores too much, and it pathologizes what is actually a complicated process.

One of the early theorists on this subject, Robert Subby said in the 1980s, that codependency is “an emotional, psychological and behavioural condition that develops as a result of an individual’s prolonged exposure to, and practice of, a set of oppressive rules – rules which prevent the open expression of feeling as well as the direct discussion of personal and interpersonal problems.”  This “set of oppressive rules” are cultural and family scripts, such as “you are a wife now, your role is to look after your man without complaint”. Other factors may be at work as well, such as, guilt, a desire to be loved and supported (and supporting the partner is a way to achieve that, so the thinking goes), a desire to have the relationship our parents didn’t have, a hope for comfort that somehow never eventuates.

The term codependency has many descriptions. Some have seen it as the denial or repression of the real self, forgetting that the self is not  a thing, but a process, and is always relational to the social and economic realities of our lives.  Some have described codependency as a self esteem issue. It may well be this at one level, but more critically, it is a sense of being locked into a relationship that seemed to have so much promise, but has become endlessly unfulfilling. The primary issue in this relationship is that is less an individual problem than something that is occurring between two (or more) people.

There is nothing wrong, nor pathological, with wanting a loving relationship. It is a basic and necessary human need.  The problem, as I see it, lies with the belief that it is good to forgive another person’s appalling behaviour, always. But it isn’t, particularly when it impacts on one’s own emotional stability, and that of other family members, especially children. It isn’t good to subsume our own needs endlessly for those of an abusive other. It may be nice to visit the lion in his den, but it isn’t a safe place to bring up children, nor a place for ordinary everyday happiness.

Be angry. Rage. Be the rage. This is the point, the fulcrum, that seems to be overlooked in codependency literature. Here, in the rage, is where transformation can take place. Here, in the trembling of anger, is where therapy is most effective and life takes a new course. Here in the rage is a relationship with the self and thus it is the point where the relationship with the other person can be broken, or healed, which ever we choose. There is nothing calm about rage, but it is a gift of incredible energy that can shift everything stuck and voiceless. Finding its direction, though, is the skill to be learned and it is a skill to shape the rest of our lives.

Being in a Sea of Ambiguityby Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

Being in a Sea of Ambiguity

I, and a tour boat of travellers, was snorkelling off Julian Rocks, Byron Bay, the day before Christmas. Around us were literally hundreds of fish, many kinds, many colours, many sizes. I saw a couple of green turtles, several practically translucent jelly fish, and two rays. Some of the other snorkelers saw a leopard shark; I didn’t. I did see, in one fleeting moment, the fish grow frightened, but they resumed their relaxed manner quickly. It was like a ripple effect: from full faced gentle swimming to a rapid streak and then full faced gentle swimming again. Whatever it was, it was a momentary threat.

I was gathered up into the schools and could observe the behaviour of each type of fish. There were the small orange bottom feeders, the sleek mid-swimmers, and the sociable upper dwellers. These social ones swam around me closely. I watched one of them apparently feed from a jelly fish: mouth inside the jelly cup, but neither seemingly getting hurt.

It was choppy that day, but the sea was glass-like and visibility went down at least eight meters with no loss of vision. It was fantastic.

In the sea, a place I love most of all, almost anything can happen. We humans, after all, are merely visitors here. It is an ambiguous  massive space.

Ambiguity is the quality of being open to more than one interpretation, an inexactness. Snorkelling in the sea is quintessentially being present in the mysterium tremendum, that is, in an overwhelming mystery, where some things are identifiable and understood, but mostly just ever felt. I find this space extraordinarily calming and sometimes offers an incredible sense of one-ness with everything, but I am aware that there are many for whom the sea is utterly terrifying. Sharks, millions of them, fill the space of their imaginations. The terror of a shark-populated mind gets in the way of ordinary life and sometimes manifests as anxiety and depression.

Anxiety and depression may be described as disorders of focus, as Michael Yapko puts it.  The focus is put on what’s wrong rather than what’s right; what has caused them pain rather than what has helped them. Sufferers  get locked into a sort of mouse-wheel of hideous thoughts: round and round and round, and it’s torture for them.  This is where psychotherapy and clinical hypnotherapy really helps. Both reintroduce, through focussed attention, ambiguity in a safe environment, and thus a greater flexibility and willingness to experience a wide range of feelings and thoughts and connections. If something has terrified anxiety and/or depressed people and caused them to get stuck in their fear, being gently supported, perhaps a little bit rocked, in a sea of guided ambiguity allows for the possibility of healing. This is a healing that isn’t imposed, but arises from a person’s own resources; resources that had hitherto been submerged under iterative thoughts. 

A few years ago I toyed with the idea of offering water therapy. That is, taking a client into the sea and being with them as they encountered their fears, offering them an entré into relaxation and choicefulness in an environment that cannot ever be fully known. I still like that idea, but maybe my insurance company wouldn’t cover it. Some hypnotherapy sessions, anyway, have this quality anyway, at least this is what is sometimes reported to me by my clients.

A hypnotherapy session begins usually by inviting the client to close their eyes and start to focus on themselves: sensations (skin touching the leather of the chair, softness, supportiveness, etc), perceptions (the sound of my water fountain - little whirring pump and water splashing, faint tinkling of bells, a car going by, wind, thoughts, the sensation of breath, rising up of imaginary ideas, noticing what happens when images are evoked, and so on. From this focussed place I can then introduce ideas of how misinterpretations can occur and then reorient the person to other ways of seeing.

Depressed and anxious people tend to see ambiguity in negative ways, but actually ambiguity merely offers a multitude of possibilities and, like the sea and the rest of life, we can learn to not fight it, but let go and relax – with awareness -into what we choose to focus on and act with acuity and right-mindedness, doing whatever it is that helps us deal with whatever life offers us.

Learning what one is and is not. by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

A boy was born thirty or fifty or one hundred years ago to a woman who had lost her parents in tragic circumstances. This little boy was very much loved, but his mother would not leave him alone, always checking on him, checking to see if he was alright, checking to see if he was hungry or thirsty, or in pain, or whether something was missing – a toy perhaps, or a blanket – checking that everything in his life was in order. The little boy did not know privacy, nor even the concept of privacy, for himself or anybody else. His mother came into his room all the time, checking on him, asking questions, demanding the “truth” as she saw it, and he felt compelled to please her. He saw that she was angry, but didn’t know why.  The little boy never knew what he was, and what he was not, nor did he know what his mother was and what she was not, and where other people and he began and ended.  In essence he did not grow into a self identifiable to himself, and himself alone.

It took many years to realize the notion of privacy, and it came a cost. He got into trouble, but, interestingly, although not surprisingly, he became, from that point, very jealous of his own space. Obsessively so. Everything in his place had to be kept clean and untainted by the lingering presence of another person, his clothes had to be washed after visiting other people, his furniture had to be taken outside and scrubbed down if anyone else had touched it; his place was his place. Still, though, his mother came and entered his place, still telling him what to do, to think, to eat. His life outside his mother’s presence was indeterminate and a bit chaotic, because he still didn’t really know who he was. He was getting older, but still trapped in that purgatory of undifferentiation. 

A girl, born twenty or sixty or two hundred years ago to a woman who was dislocated from her family by war, thrown out of sync with usual ordinary things, develops severe asthma and needs, according to her parents, constant monitoring. She was never left alone. All the little girl knew was struggling to breath. The more she struggled, the tighter the parental vigilance and control of her life. Literally, there was no air to breathe.

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It is critical that children find their own feet. For sure, support and security is essential, indeed critical for human and animal development. Without security and support a little infant does not develop confidence to venture out into the world without intense anxiety. This is the principle of attachment theory as described by John Bowlby (1907-1990). Security and support, and low levels of caregiver anxiety, where a crying infant is attended to straight away, gives the little one a sense that it is safe to simply be him or herself, in process of self differentiation. The process of self differentiation (learning what one is and  is not responsible for) is in turn, the development of emotional intelligence.

Depression, anxiety, certain psychosomatic disorders, and obsessive compulsive disorders are associated with not being able to determine the boundary between oneself and others, as well as knowing that the mind of others cannot be completely known and is not one’s own, though an empathy with them is possible. In these conditions, ambiguity is not tolerated and conclusions about things is fitted, far too quickly, into a familiar account of things, even though a non-differentiated state is an ambiguous one. The familiar account of things can be the stories of family, culture, and personal experience that has become ingrained, and offers some sense of security.  For example, the person who says, “I can’t have a normal relationship because I am always rejected,” stymies themselves right from the word go by the story they have. “I will be rejected because I am always rejected.”  But, really, maybe it isn’t so.

When we develop a capacity to look at our circumstances by gathering and discriminating and weighing up other explanations for what we have hitherto assumed to be true, we can begin to untangle assumptions about our world and work out where we individually stand on matters concerning ourselves. Untangling our accounts of things as we know them, is part of the process of increasing emotional intelligence and lowering our propensity for depressive illness. Such a process also loosens us from our past.

Learning what one is and is not is the basis of discovering our uniqueness and celebrating it. Learning what one is and is not is a work that continues throughout life. Mothers and sons and daughters, of whatever age can engage in developing this knowledge, for what used to be a condition of the past doesn’t need to continue to be a condition of the present. Nothing is set in stone.  This is where therapy becomes very useful indeed. I am, and you are.

The man who slept in an earthenware pot by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

November 2014

I was looking for a tube of toothpaste the other day and I found 11 of them. I also found 14 toothbrushes. I realized, with a start, that I have become like my father. Kept in a storeroom was his stash of toiletries: lots and lots of toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste, soaps, and such things. My brother tells me he hoards stuff as well. Certainly my mother hoarded (I found loved objects hidden away in the linen cupboard, and dozens of tinned food and bottles of lentils after her death). Our Estonian aunt and uncle collect used butter containers and endless milk bottles. Our accumulation of  useful stuff is a intergenerational product of knowing scarcity. My mother grew up in the very uncertain times of Russian/Estonian upheaval and my father was born into poverty in Sydney, and then, of course,  were the wars. I was a post-war baby, and I guess, following my parent’s mindstuff,  never quite believed that supermarkets are perfectly good at storing things.

Collecting on the scale I live with is not a pathological problem (I can and do give my things away), but some levels of hoarding is a serious problem.  At the extreme end is a very nasty condition called Diogenes Syndrome, often associated with the elderly, but not always. Diogenes Syndrome is characterized by extreme self neglect, anxiety, social withdrawal, apathy, living in squalor, and collecting random stuff in a disorganized manner. It’s also noted in people who refuse help, preferring to suffer than accept assistance.  

Diogenes? Diogenes of Sinope was a Greek philosopher, circa 412BC, and one of the founders of Cynic Philosophy. He  made a principle of  living a life of poverty, begging for his living and sleeping in a  large earthenware pot. He had rejected his father’s profession of minting coins and  a lifestyle of wealth, seeking the simple and, as he thought, a life closer to nature.

Cynicism is a school of ancient Greek philosophy based on the idea that the purpose of life is to live as nature intends it. Happiness could be gained through rigorous training and rejecting desires for wealth, sex and power. They advocated abnegation of accumulation of possessions, and preached this principle around Greece.  Certain branches of early and later Christianity adopted this idea, and some of us know practitioners of this today. It’s ironical, l then that the extreme syndrome of hoarding should be named after Diogenes. I suppose, though, in the extreme rejection of collecting things, as much as the extreme desire to collect there is a similar energy at work. Fear of destitution and rejoicing in it has a strangely similar compulsion to it.

Those with Diogenes Syndrome are described as aggressive, stubborn, suspicious of others; having unpredictable mood swings, emotional instability and a skewed perception of reality. Linked to frontal lobe brain impairment, this Syndrome is an extreme one, but collecting things is usually quite normal.  For sure, there are the crazy cat ladies with 50 felines and the tea pot and coin collectors with massive barns to house their collections, but many of us gather things around us that give us pleasure. When such preoccupations tip over into chaos, then mere collecting becomes a problem of hoarding.

Television shows that make a drama out of hoarders and their mountains of stuff help and hinder hoarders. Piles of years of newspapers and paper napkins and plastic bags and cardboard and polystyrene boxes and children’s toys and shopping never unpacked and 70 pairs of underpants and socks and so on littering entire houses that the occupant and visitors have to crawl through to get to somewhere else, might make good viewing, but how the television therapist deals with it may not be useful for others. 

What television doesn’t do well is make shame feel better. Nor do they help the person with their intense feelings of pain and anxiety. Yes, the mountains of junk are removed, but what then? The cry of, “You’re throwing away my entire life” isn’t adequately heard.  Unless the underlying psychological issues are addressed, the problem wont go away with the truckloads of bits and pieces. As a researcher into hoarding put it, “It’s not a clutter problem; it’s a perception/thinking problem,” and it doesn’t have single cause. Contributing facts or stressors have been identified, including the following: being raises in a chaotic home or one with a confusing family context, or moving frequently (lots of stuff acts as a sort of anchor), cognitive processing issues that affect decision making and problem solving, attention-deficit disorder, anxiety and/or depression, feelings of excessive guilt about waste (Diogenes felt this), intergenerational and genetic history (because hoarding runs in families), and may be associated with dementia, schizophrenia, and OCD, but not exclusively.

Despite some common misconceptions regarding hoarding as an obsessive compulsive disorder, it is now thought that the anxiety associated with this isn’t the driving force. Some hoarders may experience distress and anxiety because of the death of a loved one, or the loss of important things in their life, or perfectionist thinking, and hoarding calms their minds, but for others something else is at work. Hoarding may produce a sense of identity and continuity with the past, a dynamic that is understandable. Other factors may also be at work, but we can only know those when we talk with specific people. People are not all the same.

The life of a hoarder becomes increasingly difficult, but it is a condition of being that can be effectively treated with counselling and other healing modalities. At least with television shows highlighting the issue of excessive collecting people are now more willing to talk about their own problems in this regard and seek the help they need.

An equilibrium and a good life may be found between the abundance of stuff and an earthenware pot. Home doesn’t need to be a storehouse in order to offer stability and comfort.

The Magic Glove by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, BA, BA (Hons), M. Couns., PhD, Dip CH

Oct 2014 
 

Imagine wearing an invisible glove that, when you touch a really sore part of your body, diminishes the pain, or takes it away altogether. You can look at the glove, and yes, there really isn’t anything there, but yet you can feel it, sort of. There is a  sensationless sensation covering your hand. It’s the magic glove of anaesthesia.

The anaesthetic glove is a technique used in clinical hypnotherapy that is profoundly effective in changing the experience of acute and chronic pain.

What occurs in this hypnotic process is not yet fully understood, but the effect is measurable, just the same.  Brain-imaging studies show a significant and consistent change in how pain feels experientially as well as the reduction in  firing around the associated place in the brain where pain is felt. How successful this change is depends on how receptive to hypnotic suggestion a person is. 75% of people studied in experiments investigating this show a substantial improvement, while some receive moderate improvement; very few are not responsive at all. For evidence based proof, if this is important to us, these are very good odds.

The repeated and prolonged use of pain relief medication in chronic pain conditions such as arthritis, fibromyalgia, headaches, backaches, temporal mandibular disorders, etc is sometimes not advised. Sometimes such medication significantly damages the gut, or causes others reactions that are very unpleasant, like nausea, vomiting, headaches, etc.  Hypno-analgesia decreases a person’s sensitivity to pain when the strength of such pain is interfering with every day life. Pain, obviously, is useful in telling us something is wrong, but too much pain is debilitating. On-going pain also lengthens the amount of time a person stays in hospital. Reducing it, allows natural healing to occur more easily.

The magic, or anaesthetic, glove may be taught during the course of  hypnotherapy sessions so that it may be employed whenever the patient wants to control their own level of pain.

What is going on in the brain, as shown by brain scans, demonstrates that hypnotherapy actually produces a physical effect, and that it isn’t just a psychological technique. We are, after all, whole beings (mind and body united). 

Brain scans have certainly been used interestingly in the observation of what is going on neurologically, but the measurement of hertz levels also shows very interesting things. A paper I read a couple of years ago illustrated how, under hypnosis, the person’s brainwaves showed a dominance of theta, delta, and a  bit of alpha patterns. Theta brain-waves are associated with healing, strengthening the immune system,, creativity, intuition, enhanced concentration, and increased memory. Theta brainwaves are found mostly in sleep, meditation, and hypnosis, as well as deeply relaxed states. The heightening of theta brain-waves in hypnosis points to the especial value of such techniques for sleep disorders. Delta brainwaves are associated with deep sleep, where a person’s heart rate slows down and a deep relaxation occurs. Alpha are active in visualization, daydreams and fantasy. It is said that alpha brainwaves are like the bridge between beta’s wakefulness, acuity, and the analytic mind, and theta’s relaxed state. Interestingly, the same paper said the hypnotherapist’s brainwave pattern exhibited a similar one to the patients, but with one exception. The therapist also showed beta brainwave patterns. The layout of brainwave patterns for the therapist is something I literally experience every time I do a hypnosis with a patient. I can “feel” the different levels of awareness while I shape my language, organize the structure, decide how many times I need to say something, which metaphors to use, observe what is going on for the person (all processes in which beta brainwaves are dominant). At the same time, I, too, enter a state of relaxation, shape what is to be visualized, and feel it in my own being. For instance, the image of lying in a boat might be evoked. I will feel its gentle rocking, even while I speak of it and invite my patient to enjoy it, or not. Sometimes, being with the person as they enter the healing space, I feel it too. It is as though I am sharing their dream. 

Neurological investigations are interesting, but this is only part of what’s going on in the hypnotic process. The bottom line is that what happens in each session needs to be relevant and useful for the patient, as well as how committed they are in their own healing. Without this, there is not much point. Commitment and relevance is the critical thing. While I can write of magic gloves and all that, the intention of a person with regard to their own healing matters more than any magic. 

One session is rarely ever enough. Most responsible hypnotherapists recommend at least three sessions. The deepest change occurs when three sessions are committed to, and participating with the patient in these, I see actual healing taking place and the person’s reports feeling much better.