August 2015
Magic Potions,
Hypnotherapy and Memory by
Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
Sometimes, but thankfully not often, I see a client bounding down my
stairs to my consulting room starry eyed and full of expectation that I will
hypnotize them and they will remember something or other from their distant
past. I say to them, first, I’ve
run out of magic potion and secondly, neither memory nor hypnosis operates like
that.
I know of a therapist who keeps a drawer full of beautiful wands, and
I’m quite disposed to getting one because they’re rather fun. They are, though,
utterly useless for clinical hypnotherapy. This is not magic the thing we do. It is inspired and
intuitive science, but science nevertheless. In other words, there is a huge
body of sound, peer reviewed, research and literature on the subject of
hypnosis and memory. Our repertoire does not include wands, potions, and
incantations.
Memory is not a photographic cache from which one can miraculously
extract this and that. It is context dependent and co-emergent with situation,
time, space, and people involved. It is not possible to drag out a memory that
you’ve actually never remembered.
During the 90s there was a fad for using therapy, particularly
hypnotherapy to tap “repressed” memories. This idea is based on the belief that
all symptoms are based on past experiences, forgetting that we make meaning of
our world in a continual, here and now, process that isn’t locked in the past
but is continually reinforced by the way we see ourselves. Symptoms are
accessible to our present state of mind, and changeable so we don’t need to dig
out old photographs of our past in order to get well.
Age regression hypnosis has sometimes been used by some very
unscrupulous people to crack open what was at best misguided, but worse,
dangerous to health, family cohesion and mental stability; in other words, not
therapeutic at all. In the latter part of the 90s newspapers, magazines and
courtrooms were full of accounts of
“remembered” Satanic rituals and rapes with demonic weaponry, or
visitations and medical experiments by aliens. But these so-called memories
were mostly implanted in the minds of the patient and the therapists, who did
this false memory retrieval work, developed a following of who claimed to have
very similar “memories”. The problem was, and is, that these so-called
“memories”, or “confabulations” felt genuine, even though they were not
anything historically based, nor possible.
For instance, I had this idea that I saw Zeppelin airships flying over
Nedlands, the Perth suburb I grew up in. Zeppelins were invented in the latter
years of the 19th/early 20th century and used in the
First World War. There is absolutely no way I could’ve seen such a thing when
growing up in the 50s and 60s, though my feelings of anxiety and terror were
real. I can only surmise that I dreamt it. My father had a book on balloons,
and my imaginative self loved looking at that.
Trauma specialists note that things aren’t forgotten; they may be
blocked from full consciousness, but the very presence of symptoms such as
nightmares, trigger responses, agitation, etc shows how the trauma is
remembered: in the physicality of our being. Uncovering memories are not found
to be all that useful in the healing process. The brain does us a service in
blocking out the extremely unpleasant. Such memories may very rarely emerge
later, but in the meantime we have an amnesia for the particulars of the event
for a reason (our mental well being), while retaining a global knowledge of the
trauma.
We may remember bits and pieces of something that happened a long time
ago, but it is not possible to corroborate such memories for the truth of the matter. Hypnosis does not reveal truth, just
like a magic potion cannot be a truth serum.
We do not have any means to locate in the here and now something that happened
a long time ago. Hypnosis can only
work with symptoms and change how we see and feel those
and thereby free ourselves from them.
I am not in the business of confabulating a person’s history. I am only interested in helping a person
feel more whole and better about themselves, whether this is giving up smoking,
restoring a better diet, better sleep, a much more relaxed sense of well being,
less pain, happier relationships, more confidence, etc. I don’t put
ideas into a person’s head, I merely use the images, words, and thinking style
presented to me. I endeavour to keep what I say clean and untampered with from
my own way of seeing the world. I am literally using what they have given me in
ways to change negative patterns of thought, addictions, recursive thinking,
etc. Curiously, and this was told to me
by my teachers when I first started working as a therapist, a patient
gives you much of what you need to work therapeutically with them. Quite often
the solution is found in the first sentence. It’s there to be incorporated in a
healing process. Hypnotherapy, counselling and psychotherapy are all very good
at working with what is present now and allows the patient to move more
confidently forward without being held prisoner to the past.
