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.
