Hypnosis and Regression

Hypnosis and Regression

HYPNOSIS IS THE MAIN TECHNIQUE I USE TO HELP PAtients access past life memories. Many people have questions about what hypnosis is and about what happens when a person is in a hypnotic state, but there is really no mystery. Hypnosis is a state of focused concentration, of the sort many of us experience every day. When you are relaxed and your concentration is so intense that you are not distracted by outside noises or other stimuli, you are in a light state of hypnosis. All hypnosis is really self-hypnosis in that you, the patient, control the process. The therapist is merely a guide. Most of us enter hypnotic states every day—when we are absorbed in a good book or movie, when we have driven our car the last few blocks home without realizing how we got there, whenever we have been on "automatic pilot." 

One goal of hypnosis, as well as meditation, is to access the subconscious. This is the part of our mind that lies beneath ordinary consciousness, beneath the constant bombardment of thoughts, feelings, outside stimuli, and other assaults on our awareness. The subconscious mind functions at a level deeper than our usual level of awareness. In the subconscious mind mental processes occur without our conscious perception of them. We experience moments of intuition, wisdom, and creativity when these subconscious processes flash into our conscious awareness. 

The subconscious is not limited by our imposed boundaries of logic, space, and time. It can remember everything, from any time. It can transmit creative solutions to our problems. It can transcend the ordinary to touch upon a wisdom far beyond our everyday capabilities. Hypnosis accesses the wisdom of the subconscious in a focused way in order to achieve healing. We are in hypnosis whenever the usual relationship between the conscious and subconscious mind is reconfigured so that the subconscious plays a more dominant role. There is a broad spectrum of hypnotic techniques. They are designed to tap into a broad spectrum of hypnotic states, from light to deep levels.

In a way, hypnosis is a continuum in which we are aware of the conscious and subconscious mind to a greater or lesser degree. I have found that many people can be hypnotized to a degree suitable for therapy if they are educated about hypnosis and if their fears are discussed and allayed. 

The majority of the public has misconceptions about hypnosis because of the way television, movies, and stage shows have depicted it.When you are hypnotized, you are not asleep. Your conscious mind is always aware of what you are experiencing while you are hypnotized. Despite the deep subconscious contact, your mind can comment, criticize, and censor. You are always in control of what you say. Hypnosis is not a "truth serum." You do not enter a time machine and suddenly find yourself transported to another time and place with no awareness of the present. 

Some people in hypnosis watch the past as if they are observing a movie. Others are more vividly involved, with more emotional reactions. Still others "feel" things more than they "see" them. Sometimes the predominant reaction is that of hearing or even smelling. Afterwards, the person remembers everything experienced during the hypnosis session. 

It may sound as though it requires a great deal of skill to reach these deeper levels of hypnosis. However, each of us experiences them with ease every day as we pass through the state between wakefulness and sleeping known as the hypnagogic state. We are in a type of hypnagogic state when we are just waking up and can still remember our dreams vividly, but we are not yet fully awake. It is the period before everyday memories and concerns reenter our minds. Like hypnosis, the hypnagogic state is a deeply creative one. When we pass through it, the mind is completely turned inward and can access the inspiration of the subconscious. The hypnagogic state is considered by many to be a "genius" state, without any boundaries or any limitations. When we are hypnagogic, we have access to all our resources and none of our self-imposed restrictions. 

Thomas Edison valued this hypnagogic state so highly that he developed his own technique to maintain it while he worked on his inventions. While sitting in a certain chair, Edison used relaxation and meditation techniques to reach the state of consciousness that is between sleep and wakefulness. He would hold some ball bearings in his closed hand, palm down, while resting this hand on the arm of his chair. Beneath his hand he kept a metal bowl. If Edison fell asleep, his hand would open. The ball bearings would fall into the metal bowl and the noise would awaken him. Then he would repeat the process over and over again. This hypnagogic state is very much like hypnosis and actually deeper than many levels of hypnosis. By helping the patient to reach a deeper level of his or her mind, a therapist who is skilled in the techniques of hypnosis can dramatically accelerate the healing process. And when creative ideas and solutions extend beyond personal problems, large segments of society can benefit, as all of us have benefited from Thomas Edison's invention of the light bulb. The process can touch the world. 

Listening to someone's guiding voice aids in focusing concentration and helps a patient to reach a deeper level of hypnosis and relaxation. There is no danger in hypnosis. Not one person I have ever hypnotized has become "stuck" in the hypnotic state. You can emerge from a state of hypnosis. You are in complete control. In hypnosis, your mind is always aware and observing. This is why people who may be deeply hypnotized and actively involved in a childhood or past life sequence of memories are able to answer the therapist's questions, speak their current life language, know the geographical places they are seeing, and even know the year, which usually flashes before their inner eyes or just appears in their minds. The hypnotized mind, always retaining an aware￾ness and a knowledge of the present, puts the childhood or past life memories into context. If the year 1900 flashes, and you find yourself building a pyramid in ancient Egypt, you know that the year is B.C., even if you don't see those actual letters. This is also the reason why a hypnotized patient, finding him-self a peasant fighting in a medieval European war, for example, can recognize people from that past lifetime whom he knows in his current life. 

This is why he can speak modern English, compare the crude weapons of that time with those he might have seen or used in this lifetime, give dates, and so on. His present-day mind is aware, watching, commenting. He can always compare the details and events with those of his current life. He is the movie's observer and its critic and usually its star at the same time. And all the while, he can remain in the relaxed, hypnotized state. Hypnosis puts the patient in a state that holds great potential for healing by giving the patient access to the subconscious mind. To speak metaphorically, it puts the patient in the magical forest that holds the healing tree. But if hypnosis lets the patient into that healing country, it is the regression process that is the tree that holds the sacred berries he or she must eat to heal. 

Regression therapy is the mental act of going back to an earlier time, whenever that time may be, in order to retrieve memories that may still be negatively influencing a patient's present life and that are probably the source of the patient's symptoms. Hypnosis allows the mind to short-circuit conscious barriers to tap this information, including those barriers that prevent patients from consciously accessing their past lives. Repetition compulsion is the name given by Freud to describe this often irresistible urge to re-dramatize or reenact emotional, typically painful, experiences that occurred in one's past. In his Papers on Psycho-Analysis (1938), the famous British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones defines repetition compulsion as "the blind impulse to repeat earlier experiences and situations quite irrespective of any advantage that doing so might bring from a pleasure-pain point of view." No matter how harmful and destructive the behavior, the person seems compelled to repeat it. Willpower is ineffective in controlling the compulsion. 

Freud discovered that bringing the initial trauma to consciousness, cathartically releasing it (a process therapists call abreaction), and integrating what has been felt and learned is effective. Hypnotic regression therapy performed by a skilled therapist first puts the patient in a hypnotic state and then gives the patient the tools needed to bring an incident like this to light. Often, the incident occurred during childhood. This is standard psychoanalytic theory. But other times, as I discovered while treating Catherine, the initial trauma stretches backward much farther than that, into past lives. I have found that about 40 percent of my patients need to delve into other lifetimes to resolve their current life clinical problems. Regression to an earlier period of this present-day life￾time is usually fruitful enough for most of the remainder.

For those first 40 percent, however, regression to previous life-times is key to a cure. The best therapist working within the classically accepted limits of the single lifetime will not be able to effect a complete cure for the patient whose symptoms were caused by a trauma that occurred in a previous lifetime, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of years ago. But when past life therapy is used to bring these long-repressed memories to awareness, improvement in the current symptoms is usually swift and dramatic. 

A pattern of compulsive sexual acting out would be one example of a repetition compulsion syndrome. I know of a young man who is compulsively driven by a form of exhibitionism, specifically of exposing his genitalia to certain women while masturbating in a car. This behavior is obviously dangerous and destructive. This young man has outraged women, and he has been arrested several times. Yet, his destructive compulsion continues to occur. 

His therapist has traced the origins of this behavior back to sexual incidents that occurred between this young man and his mother when he was quite young. This mother used to fondle her son while she bathed him, and he would consequently have erections. Confusing, arousing, and disturbing feelings were elicited in this child. These feelings were extremely intense, and part of the young man's compulsion seemed to be a desire to recreate the intensity of these earlier emotions. Despite this excellent therapist's success in uncovering an early trauma , this man's therapy has been successful only in part, and he suffers frequent relapses. Even though his behavior causes him to feel profound guilt and shame in addition to subjecting him to other dangers, he experiences overwhelming urges to repeat it. 

Based on my experience with over three hundred individual past life regression patients, there is a good possibility that the reason this therapy has been only partially successful lies in the fact that the original trauma may have occurred in a prior lifetime. The scenario may even have been repeated in several lifetimes. 

Perhaps the most recent manifestation, the one experienced in his current life, is only the latest in a series of similar traumas. The recurrent pattern has already been established. All of the traumas, not just the most recent, need to be brought to awareness. Then complete healing can occur. 

Many of my patients have recalled different traumatic patterns under hypnosis that repeat in various forms in lifetime after life-time. These patterns include abuse between father and daughter that has been recurring over centuries only to surface once again in the current life. They also include an abusive husband in a past life who has resurfaced in the present as a violent father. Alcoholism is a condition that has ruined several lifetimes, and one warring couple discovered they had been homicidally connected in four previous lives together. 

Many of these patients had been in conventional therapy beforethey came to see me, but their therapy had been ineffective or only partially effective. For these patients, regression therapy to past lifetimes was necessary to completely eradicate symptoms and to permanently end these recurring cycles of harmful, maladaptive behavior The concept of repetition compulsion seems valid. However,  the scope of the past must be enlarged to include past lives if uncovering the present lifetime's sources proves unsuccessful. I am certain that the young man who is compelled to masturbate while driving needs to explore his past life realms, to identify the traumas, and to bring them into his current awareness. When the pathological foundation is still covertly present, the symptoms will inevitably recur. Only when it is brought to light can he really be cured. 

I have found that hypnosis combined with regression therapy plumbs the unconscious more deeply than do psychoanalytic techniques like free association, in which the patient remains in a relaxed but conscious state while merely closing the eyes. Because it promotes a deeper strata of associations by tapping memory storage areas unavailable to the conscious mind, hypnotic regres￾sion therapy offers many patients deeper and dramatically rapid results. 

The material tapped by past life therapy is in some ways like the powerful universal archetypes described by Carl Jung. However, the material of past life regression therapy is not archetypal or symbolic but actual memory fragments of the ongoing current of human experience from ancient times to the present. Past life regression therapy combines the specificity and healing catharsis that is the best of Freudian therapy with the healing participation  and recognition of deep symbolic meaning that is the hallmark of Jung. 

But regression therapy consists of much more than hypnotic technique. Before the hypnotic process can be initiated, a skilled regression therapist will spend a great deal of time taking a history, asking questions, getting answers, and going very specifically and in great detail into particular areas of importance. This increases the success rate of regression from about 50 percent to about 70 percent. And after the regression is completed, after the patient has emerged from the hypnotic state, it is then necessary to integrate the feelings, insights, and information the session has elicited into the current life situation.

This integration requires considerable therapeutic skill and experience because the material evoked is often powerful and emotionally charged.