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

 

May 2025

 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.

 

Sound Knowledge Makes for Good Therapy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

June 2024

 The other evening I did a Mental Health Professionals Network online discussion group event with other hypnotherapists talking about using hypnotherapy for the treatment of chronic pain and phobias. It was nice being in a group of fellow practitioners talking about things I'm passionate about.

 One thing that I couldn't swallow was the uncritical way a couple of the therapists described their use, and training, in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), to the exclusion of other more fundamental studies of human behaviour and, more critically, psychopathologies. You can't treat the habitual use of tobacco or any other substance or behaviour - you can't really understand the psychology behind addictive behaviour at all - just by studying our communication styles (the basis of NLP). You really do have to have made concerted study of the human body-mind beyond what you can achieve in a maximum of 15 days. In 15 days, according to the training websites for NLP, you can get certification as a Master Practitione. And that's all a few of the participants in the MHPN hypnosis group had in the way of other training, apart from hypnotherapy.

 I tear my hair out. I used to teach a unit in Advanced Personality Disorders to Psychology students at Murdoch University, Perth. The human psyche is complex. I also note that I did my Honours dissertation in the area of psycholinguistics prior to researching and writing my PhD in the philosophy of human transactions and interactions.  I know how communication works, and I know much of how the mind works and I am still learning. Why do I mention this? It's to illustrate that the 15 years or so of concerted study in the areas with which we are concerned: treating humans with human problems didn't happen in 15 days.

 It worries me that practitioners of NLP who have not been trained in anything else, and other inadequately trained therapists are garnering lots of money with such a flimsy understanding of what they're dealing with.  Neuro Linguistic Programming sounds good, to be sure. It sounds scientific, neurological; it’s got “programming” in its title; must be good. This ain’t necessarily so. No studies, apart from lived experience accounts, have shown it’s an evidence based therapeutic strategy. Of course, lived experience accounts matter, but – and we have to caste a critical eye over this – how much positive outcomes are of a placebo effect? After all, paying a substantial amount of money and time encourages us to think a therapy is working. And maybe it does work for some people. The philosophical basis of NLP, though, is debateable, as I shall describe.

 Now, to be perfectly transparent, some aspects of NLP are useful and are used, anyway, in most other therapeutic modalities. What the founders (Grindler, the linguist, and Bandler in the 1970s)) of NLP did was, they believed, at least, to distil and systematize the therapeutic approaches of other client oriented therapies (those of Virgina Satir, Milton Erickson and Fritz Perls). It employs anchoring, belief changing, reframing, visualization and visual-kinesthetic dissociation where the client is asked to relive the trauma in a dissociated state (the latter of which could be dangerous in the wrong hands). They also state as a fundamental, that the map is not the territory (which it is true, it isn't). What Grindler and Bandler and their followers failed and fail to realize that while we can study the therapeutic styles of the masters, we cannot decide that success lies with imitating them. Milton Erickson, whose hypnotherapeutic work was legendary, pointed this out to Grindler and Bandler, but his wisdom fell on deaf ears. Erickson’s work really could not be pinned down and his style differed from person to person. Jung, after all, said decades previously, that there are as many therapies as there are people. We are all different and the therapist must work accordingly.

 That's the beauty of being a therapist - and a well trained one: we understand human processes, we've studied when things go wrong and what do with the person to heal them, and we listen to each person's uniqueness and work with that, work with them.

 It's a beautiful work, a study of which never ends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remembering and Creating Memories by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

March 2022

    A friend of mine remembers when he was a little child, his mother talking about the croaking frog they were hearing that morning and then being taken outside to look at it. It was huge, gigantic, massive, the size of a small elephant.

     I remember a Zeppelin airship flying over our house, even though they ceased to fly decades before I was born and they didn’t fly in Australia at all.

   Someone I know has an apparent memory of having sex with his mother. Maybe this actually happened, or maybe it didn’t. Gathering the evidence around such a memory requires much more than relying on a memory reconstruction. It requires close examination of the behaviour of actual people and circumstances and possible situations. Again, maybe it happened, but maybe it didn’t. What is important here is knowing that memory is not to be relied upon as a complete and authentic record of past possible events.

   Memory is not a useful tool for determining actual history and so any technique for digging out possible memories can’t be relied upon as the sole means of determining truth – which is why I refuse to pretend to do any so called repressed memory work using hypnosis. I do not want to participate in the making of  false memories. It is significant that hypnosis came into disrepute over this very thing. Once upon a time hypnosis was used to “prove” the authenticity of an event and used in a court of law as evidence. This was until sufficient research had been done to discredit the supposed revelation of repressed memories through this method, unfortunately dragging down with it, the whole reputation of hypnosis as useful adjunct in psychotherapy. Very fortunately, hypnotherapy is returning to being recognized as useful in psychotherapy for other purposes, and not as an excavator of the past.

     We are creating memories all the time in an attempt to make sense of our life. Memories, as I’ve said already, are not necessarily a record of past situations. Sometimes they are a way to explain things that are poorly comprehended in the first place. A little child sees things, as all little beings do, from a small person’s perspective. They are little in a big world. Grasping at meaning from a perspective that is really limited requires piecing together bits of information from around them. Some of these bits of information could be things half heard and barely understood (like the story of the frog), things seen in books and on screen, some could come from other experiences, and so on. My apparent Zeppelin sighting I realize now came from a book on dirigibles and balloons that my father used to read to us melded into recurring dreams I had and reconstituted as an actual event. The situation of being little, of course, is actually true for all of us as we endeavour to negotiate the complexities of the vast world we live in. At least, though, we adults are generally better able to sort out what is probable and what isn’t – although maybe I’m too optimistic here, given the extraordinary rise in conspiracy theories.

      The less information we have, the less we have to test the authenticity of something and the more likely we are to incorporate the flimsily known into what we think we know, creating a world view replete with false memories. This is essentially the way cults operate: the known world is deliberately limited to a tight and restrictive community. Before long, the most vulnerable among the group start remembering abuses that may, or may not, have actually occurred and so cling to the group more and more.

    Everything needs to be tested. Nothing should be believed simply because someone has said if you remember it, that it happened. Maybe it did; maybe it didn’t. A memory can be changed, rethought, examined, played with, measured with the feeling status of things, but not relied upon to be necessarily a strict re-membering (re-putting together) of the past. Gather as much information you can and test your memory. In the end, though, maybe your reconstruction is real, but maybe it isn’t.

Smoking and Clinical Hypnotherapy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 November 2020

     People come to me for clinical hypnotherapy and counselling  in order to give up smoking and other issues (pain management, sleep issues, speech disorders, eating problems, confidence issues, etc.). Today I want only to talk about smoking and the efficacy of hypnotherapy in the treatment of that. What many people do not realize is that hypnosis cannot make you do anything against your will. If you have no actual intention of giving up smoking, the hypnosis won’t be effective. Hypnosis isn’t magic. It is only an altered state of consciousness where you are in a  trance state, much like the state you enter when you are absorbed into something, like reading, or running, or swimming, or watching a movie. The hypnotherapist is talking to your unconscious and giving you information about smoking that you already know: that it tastes horrible, it’s expensive and is terrible for your health, and that you don’t need to do it. If you really don’t want to smoke, giving up is well within your capacity. Hypnosis, in this case, acts as a trigger to change. No one is compelled to smoke; it is up to a point a choice, even though you may feel it is an addiction to nicotine or something to occupy your hands.

     I’ve known people who had smoked for 50 years and gave it away overnight. One man who told me about  his own experience in this, also said that he cried and cried during that night,  for his smoking had concealed a profound anxiety and depression. And this brings me to a fundamental point. Those who smoke heavily generally do so to deal with emotional and often relational issues that the smoking habit attempts to cover up. At this level, the problem is semi-conscious, that is, it is not something deliberately done, but comes about as a kind of self medication. I’ve be noticing this repeatedly ever since I first trained in this field and then began offering clinical hypnotherapy all those years ago, which is why I now want to emphasize that if you really want hypnotherapy to be successful, you need not only to actually want a given outcome, but to shake off the idea that hypnosis can deal with the problem without your emotional and intentional input and also I suggest that you commit to several sessions of counselling as well as hypnotherapy.

     During counselling you will be heard by someone interested in you.  Connecting to someone (me) about matters that are really important to you are the best ingredients for essential interior change. Hypnosis can beautifully set the landscape up for effective communication. It is relaxing and it feels very good and, with the suggestions presented to you under hypnosis, you have the settings for the beginning of enduring change.  This is not a quick fix, and it has substance.  

      I knew a hypnotherapist who had clients who gave up smoking for a year and then resumed this horrible practice. To my mind that’s not good enough and this is why I continue working for something far more effective.

     Of magic and such, some people expect change without their intention for change, as though with a wave of a wand and sparkles in the air, essential change can happen – whatever your mind set. Such an approach doesn’t work on stage, and it certainly doesn’t work in the clinical setting either.  Hypnosis isn’t magic and change usually cannot be achieved in a small number of sessions. Anyone who claims otherwise is delusional. You really will have to commit to several sessions and, with me, do the actual work to  shift  your relationship with nicotine.  

      Of smoking as an addiction. All the study, conversations and research I’ve done into addiction says the same thing: ‘the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety, it’s connection’ (Johann Hari). When we start connecting through meaningful communication we start to heal. This is why I’m urging potential clients who want to be free of smoking, or anything else, to consider coming to see me and get down to the real work and not just a seek magical removal of symptoms.

 

 

 

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.

Exploring the unconscious for the richness it contains

August 2017

by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     While considering what to write on for this month’s article, I came across some notes I made on hypnosis and dream work in depth psychology some years ago and  thought this was the beginning of a worthy something or other. I remember having the beginnings of a thought then about how both hypnosis and dream work share a very rich interior landscape. Such musings led me then to adding qualifications in clinical hypnotherapy to my counselling and psychotherapeutic training and practice.

      I first came into contact with depth psychology when I was 19, and began a ten year study immersion in the field of Jungian Analytical Psychology in both Australia and Switzerland. Since then I’ve trained in several other modalities, but I continue to mull about the unconscious and wonder, as I work, on its flexibility and capacity for fundamentally changing ordinary lives when properly nurtured and tapped into.

     The unconscious mind is a strange place of figures, and feelings, and sliding doors of perceptions that throw up, in the cracks of our existence, meanings that eluded us previously. Here is a kind of trance-scape that is really interesting not only theoretically but also experientially. This I know from my own inner work, as well as academic study. Here is the space where a richness of half known things are found to be much greater than originally thought. It’s sort of like a Tardis, where the interior is vastly bigger that what appears on the outside.

     I remember when I was a child playing a game that involved only traversing the cracks in the pavement on the street where I lived. This often required leaping around gazelle-like to avoid the plain old pavement with no cracks. It required focus, agility, and – at the same time – something of a relaxed stance. This focused-relaxed attitude is likewise what is required to be engaged in by both therapist and client alike in dream work and hypnosis. In order to move beyond the obvious, we have to connect gently to the subtle in order to know better the landscape of our minds.  Hypnosis provides a useful training for that, as does the work done in a counselling psychotherapy. Both take the natural aptitude most of us have for entering this focused-relaxed state and enhances it so that fundamental change can take place.

     None of this magical nor out of the ordinary; indeed most, if not all, of us already know what it feels like. We watch movies, we read books, we write, we listen and play music, we paint or gaze at an art work, we run, cycle, swim, or just wander around gardens or streets and shops in a present, and yet drifting away type of state. We do not lose control, just we do not lose control with hypnosis nor exploring our inner life in therapy, and no one can do things to us that we do not want. We can move in and out of this state at will.

     In therapy and hypnosis there is safety in the  meeting of minds, a rapport, and it is this mutuality that builds not only trust but a deepening of shared therapeutic experience where change happens.

      I particularly like working with people who, till now, have felt stuck in repetitive habits, negative ways of thinking, and bogged down with worry, anxiety, and a sense of unfulfillment. The artist, the writer, the musician facing the perpetual  blank canvas, or page or unliberating musical silence are perfect candidates for hypnosis and/or the depth psychology of dream work. I know this not only from working with such people, but through my own experiences facing similar sorts of things. There is a great beauty in the release of such blockages and the making of art, the release of iterative habit, and repetitive thought processes. This, by way, is felt as much by me as my clients. I enjoy my work and I bow my head humbly to the courage of those who journey with me.