Can Hypnosis Retrieve Memory? by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

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 fulfill 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 psychotherapist 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.

 

Magic Potions, Hypnotherapy and Memory by Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

August 2015

     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 19^th/early 20^th 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.