Hi, I'm Dr. Tracey Marks a psychiatrist,
and I make mental health education videos.
When I think about hypnosis,
I think about someone sitting on a stage
while a hypnotist swings a pocket watch
back and forth in front of them.
The person is instructed to keep their eyes on the watch.
The hypnotist says, "You are getting very sleepy."
Then the person falls asleep.
Once they're asleep,
the hypnotist can tell them to do things,
like quack like a duck, and they'll do it.
When the hypnotist snaps his fingers,
the person comes out of it,
and can't remember anything that happened
while they were under.
That's the television or entertainment version of hypnosis,
and not the way it really works,
at least not in a therapeutic setting.
Let me start by telling you how hypnosis came to be.
It was developed by the work of German physician,
Franz Anton Mesmer, in the late 1700s.
He believed people were influenced
by an invisible fluid in their bodies,
that's controlled by gravitational forces.
He termed this force, animal magnetism.
He believed that the fluid's behavior affected your health,
and a trained person could manipulate the force
to heal clinical conditions.
The medical community believed this force manipulation
was quackery, and ran him out of town,
but his methods became popular in the public space
and generated a movement called mesmerism.
This is where we get the term mesmerized,
which means to be intensely captivated.
Fast forward and Scottish surgeon, James Braid,
picked up the baton,
and introduced the concept of being in a trance-like state
that he termed hypnosis.
Modern hypnosis, also called hypnotherapy,
is considered a complementary or alternative treatment,
and it's still not accepted
as mainstream evidence-based treatment.
But that doesn't mean it isn't helpful
for things like general anxiety, phobias, and body picking,
just to name a few issues that people use it for.
Hypnosis works by creating an altered state of awareness,
where you're deeply relaxed
and selectively focused on something.
It's like taking down your psychological defenses
so that you can process an issue presented to you,
without resistance.
Hypnosis is performed by someone trained in hypnotherapy.
You can learn to induce a hypnotic state yourself,
but you'll have better results
if you have a few sessions with a hypnotherapist,
who could help you identify goals of the session,
and develop scripts that fit your goals.
There are prerecorded hypnotherapy audios
that you can listen to,
to help you enter into a hypnotic state
and incorporate suggestions.
Here's how the process works.
There's an induction stage and a suggestion stage.
The induction stage is about directing your focus,
using your senses.
It can be visual, auditory, kinesthetic, or imaginal.
With visual induction, you focus your intention
on something in the room, like a clock on the wall.
With auditory induction,
you can focus your hearing on music, or sounds like tapping.
Kinesthetic induction involves using movement,
like progressive muscle relaxation.
With this method, you start at one end of your body,
either your head or your feet,
and then you contract and then relax muscle groups.
You continue to contract and relax muscles,
as you move to the other end of your body.
Imaginal induction uses mental imagery.
You would immerse yourself in a past experience,
as if you're daydreaming about it.
The next part of the process involves hypnotic suggestion,
and there are many ways to do this.
One example, is for your therapist to tell you
to imagine that your limbs are heavy,
and then you experience your limbs
as if they're really heavy.
You can also use the postural sway technique,
to pretend that you're holding heavy suitcases
with the wind blowing on you.
If you're responsive to this suggestion,
you'll find yourself moving slightly
as you sway back and forth with the wind,
It takes practice to let yourself relax and yield
to these suggestions.
Once you reach the trance state,
that's where the work begins.
In this state of relaxation,
your mind is open and receptive to change.
You're still awake,
and you're still aware of your surroundings,
but there's a level of detachment from your surroundings,
as you're selectively focused on your thoughts and emotions.
It's like having serious tunnel vision or tunnel awareness.
Because you have reduced awareness of your environment,
you've entered a controlled dissociative state.
Not everyone does well with hypnosis.
The more suggestible you are, the more hypnotizable you are.
And there are some suggestibility questionnaires
that measure your suggestibility.
But in general, people who have very active imaginations
or have a tendency to zone out and daydream,
have the highest levels of hypnotic suggestibility.
There are different goals for hypnosis.
If you are addressing anxiety symptoms
that result from trauma,
hypnosis can allow you to revisit the trauma
in a way that's less threatening,
so you can process your painful emotions around the trauma.
For example, let's say you have an experience
that is so devastating, that you can't remember parts of it.
Not being able to remember certain events,
means that you're not consciously aware
of everything that happened,
but your mind has not forgotten.
And your mind will stay on threat awareness duty,
watching out for things that are similar to what happened.
These similar events can trigger intense anxiety,
but since the memories are unconscious,
you don't make the association
between your anxiety and the trigger.
In this case, you could use hypnosis
to reach a state of focused awareness of the events,
to recover the memories and manage your emotions
related to those memories.
Why would you want to recover the memories?
Because stuffing them away and trying to forget about them,
doesn't make you heal from the trauma.
You just turn your attention away from it momentarily,
until your mind brings it back into focus
and makes you anxious.
Hypnotherapy can also help you overcome
anxiety related to phobias.
Once you reach the hypnotic state,
a goal could be to help you understand
the root cause of your phobia.
Another goal, could be to help you or give you suggestions
on how to eliminate your aversion
to the feared object or situation.
The length of the hypnotherapy session
varies depending on the problem being addressed,
but common session times are between 30 minutes to one hour.
You may find that you get sleepy
if you spend too long in the relaxed trance state.
After you've processed suggestions related to your issue,
the last phase is to come out of the trance
and return to full awareness.
During this transition,
the therapist or audio recording if you're using one,
may give you a post-hypnotic suggestion.
This would be a final suggestion
that you would carry with you,
that applies to the issues that you addressed.
So in the trauma example, suppose something happened to you,
and now the sound of a whistle triggers a panic attack?
A post-hypnotic suggestion could be,
that the next time you hear a whistle
you will know that you are safe.
If the session and the suggestion was effective,
when you hear a whistle, you may still feel unsettled,
but because you feel safe, you don't have a panic attack.
I mentioned that hypnosis puts you
in a state of controlled dissociation.
Some people dissociate uncontrollably,
and it causes a lot of distress.
Watch this video on how to deal with dissociation,
and this one on the dissociative disorder
called depersonalization and derealization disorder.
Thanks for watching. See you next time.