Dr. AJ: PRIMAL PRINCIPLE: You know it’s funny. Drugs normalize. The reason you get addicted is because you try to normalize the system. And then they are taking away drugs – why? Until you get normalized here, you need them.
The whole system is on its head. I tried to offer the NIMH my cure for addiction, and they said, “See my friend in L.A.” The guy’s name is Allen Leshner – and I said, “Why do I have to go to your friend in LA when you are right here?” and he said, “You have to go through my friend because I just don’t deal with that.” Anyway, that’s my shit. What about you, Frank?
Frank: Well, one of the first things I thought of when you were asking why did it keep coming up there like that and why did it affect your thinking? My thought right then was, “Don’t bug me, I’m trying to survive. I don’t have time for this crap up here. This studying. I could never do my homework. I was always scared. I’d sit on the couch and tying myself in knots (physically) and my dad screaming, “Sit on that goddamn couch like you’re suppose to! Straighten up!” And I’m just terrified – my whole life growing up.
Dr. AJ: You were terrified of your father?
Frank: Oh, yes.
Dr. AJ: (to David) And you were terrified of your mother.
Frank: I was terrified of her too.
Dr. AJ: (to Ken) and you, your mother?
Ken: Oh, yeah, she was a razor.
Dr. AJ: So that’s how you exacerbate the whole thing from the start.
David: What it does, in my opinion, is it keeps the gates from having any chance to close. For me, I developed no defenses. I tried to develop them later on but I had none. I was just….
Frank: My only refuge was to go in my head and have fantasies of being Captain Marvel or some omnipotence fantasy, or saving the world or….
Dr. AJ: Could you study as a kid?
Frank: I couldn’t really study because it was so hard to keep focused in a book. And even to this day I still depend a lot on audiobooks because I’ll either space out, or, because I only have one eye, my eye won’t stay focused, even with glasses, because the focus is changing, or nod off, or go off thinking of something else. And virtually everything I read triggers a new thought pattern I have to think out.
Dr. AJ: (at Ken and David) Do you have that too?
David: I’ll be reading something and then one sentence will grab me and I’ll start ruminating about it – all the different angles and…
Dr. AJ: Because?
David: It’s the gating. There’s the ability to focus and prioritize. Now, I’m better at it but it still grabs me. It’s very hard to pick out the most important thing. They all have a very similar level of importance. And we’ve talked about this, whether it’s the bird chirping out the window or the boring English teacher.
Dr. AJ: That’s one of the hallmarks of ADD – it’s the inability to get the values and priorities, the most important thing, straight.
David: Because they all have import, and like Frank says, the vigilance is always coming up.
Dr. AJ: Is that right? (turning to Frank) It’s that way with you?
Frank: Yes, when I was listening to him I was thinking: That’s why he knows my defense system so well. He can relate to it directly. It’s not through books or anything. He knows those feelings I’m having… those gwizshy-gwizshy feelings. It’s the only word I could think up that approximates the feelings I have that are just tearing me apart. I have to jump up and…
Dr. AJ: Do you know what’s causing it?
Frank: What it always goes to is: I’m trying to get out of here!
Dr. AJ: Isn’t that interesting.
Frank: I’m literally trying to get out of my own skin.
Dr. AJ: You’re trying to get out.
Frank: Yeah, it certainly works out in my birth sequence – and I do a little head banging too. But I’ve never been able to focus in on exactly what’s happening, when I’m going through a birth thing. After I come out of it, I can’t tell you if I’m in utero or in vagina or if I’m out. When I think I’m in utero is when I feel completely crushed. And I feel like somebody is trying to twist my head. Of course my whole process is the “curse of Sisyphus.” In my birth I’m trying and trying and trying to get out until I think I’ve made it – and then phew! Everything just turns to shit and I just give up to die…
Dr. AJ: Because?
Frank: Because I can’t do it no more. I’m done. I’m finished. And that’s been a pattern throughout my life. I come so close to success. I think I’ve made it; I think I’ve made it, and then pshew. My whole life turns to shit.
Dr. AJ: Was that because your mother was drugged?
Frank: Well, she smoked. She drank. They thought it was “ Oh, well, lets let him get a little tight too.” But you have to remember, this was in the 30s. They had no idea what they were doing.
Dr. AJ: It’s funny, you know, in the 30s my mother was psychotic. And they didn’t have shock therapy in those days, so we had to move to the beach where she had to go in cold water every day to have shock. And that shocked her and tried to keep her sane.
David: The cold water, it closed her gates.
Dr. AJ: Yeah, it did. Isn’t that funny? But I’m not sure how much it did, she was so wacko. But that feeling “I’ve got to get out of here.” I think no matter where you are in a confined space, like a classroom, that feeling, “I’ve got to get out of here.”
David: I’ve got both: I’ve got to get through and I’ve got to get out of here. It’s actually more “I’ve got to get through.” If I’m feeling blocked, If I can’t get through to someone, if I can’t make them understand what I’m trying to say… Boy, that sensation of uumph comes. It’s a frustration. It’s a frustrated need if you will, to be understood or get through to someone. And at the very bottom, just to get through.
Dr. AJ: When you had a project, did you get through, did you finish?
David: No, I mean I had to wait until the last minute. The pressure on the outside had to be greater than the pressure on the inside.
Dr. AJ: Now, have you got that? (motioning to everyone) This is really important and it probably is good for you too. This applies to everybody.
David: And I want everyone who’s out there watching this to know. It probably sounds just like words, but the suffering people go through with this thing is really not to be taken lightly.
Dr. AJ: Well, you can’t concentrate, you can’t sleep.
David: If you want to put a word on ADHD, for me the word is failure. Failure, I failed to get my parents to love me, I failed at the projects I used to do, and I failed at my birth.
Dr. AJ: And you felt like a failure.
David: Yes, and I felt like a failure. That’s one of the things I liked about this program on PBS, again I know they’re only words, but it had a little palliative effect. It doesn’t last long but nevertheless, you know when people call you crazy, lazy, and stupid, you know that little thing, well, that’s what I was called. My parents called me all of that, and then I get tested and my IQ is kind of high, in the 130s or something… “Well, gee, he’s not stupid, then he must be lazy.” But all the time, I can’t focus, I’m trying to survive.
Dr. AJ: Because there’s so much to focus on inside.
David: Yeah, there’s so much to focus on inside, exactly.
Frank: I get a hundred projects going on at the same time. Even now, I have a hard time with that. I’m busy working on a fiction novel, and I’m busy working on a nonfiction book, I’m busy with my Primal Therapy, I’m busy with my therapy at FSA, and now I’m in training here, and I’m trying to shift my priorities and get rid of all the stuff I don’t need so I can focus on just here, and take care of my FSA patients.
Dr. AJ: I should add, that these guys are on their Masters and Doctors. So here we’ve got three guys that are messes but can function and get on with their advanced degrees. Now how do you account for that?
Frank: But wait a minute. I couldn’t really function until I came to Primal Therapy. I mean I came here so I could feel a little bit better before I died.
David: That’s right. I remember that’s what brought you in.
Dr. AJ: What’s that?
David: When I asked Frank what brought him here when he started therapy, he said he was coming here just so he could feel a little bit better before he died. Those were his exact words.
Frank: I mean I’d given away my Martin D21 guitar, 40 years old. I thought I had no more use for it. I mean you were the last thing on my bucket list. And then when I came here… after a year and a half I thought… what am I going to do with the rest of my life. So I thought: I’ll go to graduate school.
Dr. AJ: And you did.
Frank: Yeah, thanks to you, and thanks to David.
Dr. AJ: I know how hard it is, yet you guys do it. It’s a miracle. The question is, what kind of feelings allow you to do this now?
Frank: Well, Ken said it in his dissertation. I get in touch with me – the real me. Down here. What do I want? And as long as I can stay with that the failure doesn’t take over. But otherwise, every time I hit a real hard spot… Whew, I collapse.
Dr. AJ: So that’s a repeat of the birth sequence.
Frank: My whole life has been a repeat of my birth. And now I can say, “Oh, here come those feelings. I’m ready to mess it all up and give up to die. I mean it’s over and over I’m in a suicidal…
Dr. AJ: I just understood it. He’s always next to death. That’s what’s coming up all the time.
David: Yes. That’s exactly right. That’s the failure.
Dr. AJ: (turning to Ken) You too?
Ken: Yeah, but not the ADD. I can’t sleep lately. The anxiety is always coming up… and it’s to die… and the terror thing that you are talking about, it just so rings a bell. And when I get to that in therapy… it’s not therapy anymore. It’s not like “Oh, feel that.” It’s fuck that I’m out of here. There’s not an option to feel it. It’s just terror.
Dr. AJ: Do you know where it comes from?
Ken: Yeah, I know being trapped and stuck and not being able to breathe and being alone… it’s just all that…
Dr. AJ: And when you’re trapped, what happens – like being in a classroom and having to study. What happens?
Ken: I’m antsy, I’m moving around, I do other things. It takes me, I mean doing my dissertation, it’s been years. I’m great at procrastinating, or doing something else. You know, just sitting down to do it…it’s been really hard. Like I was saying… reading, that’s so hard, like I fall asleep. I get so bored.
Dr. AJ: Procrastinating. That’s one of the key points of ADD. What’s causing it because I know, but do you know?
Frank: When it gets too hard, I can’t take it anymore so I’ll go to something that’s easy and I’ll keep going and going with that until it gets too hard and can’t do it anymore and I’ll switch over to another one.
Dr. AJ: Right.
Frank: But I get going until the pressure of the old pain has made me so nervous and so upset and tense, I’ve got to go on to other stuff. And I had such a startle reflex that when I watched a TV program, as soon as it got really tense, like someone was about to get killed or something, I’d jump up and run out of the room. And when I’m out of there… “Why’d I do that?” and then I stop to think.
Dr. AJ: Wow. How about you guys, do you procrastinate a lot?
David: I can tell you what it is for me. To sit down, focus, and finish a project, for me that is a sensation of confinement. You’re asking me to go into a very small space, that is my subjective experience. You are hurting me by asking that. I’ve got to move. No, I can’t. You’re going to kill me.
Dr. AJ: And you can’t get down to anything.
David: No, I can’t. You’re putting me in a real bad situation.
Dr. AJ: Why can’t you get down to something? And you too, Ken?
David: Because the feeling is very overwhelming. I know this sounds so melodramatic and people watching this, trust me, it’s not melodramatic. I’m using words that sound melodramatic but that is how big the feeling is. I’m being crushed to death. I mean you want me to go and sit here and read and concentrate on a book that is as boring as the day is long, and if not enjoy it at least be there with it and learn from it… and my brain is just crackling. Trying to get out of it. Trying to get out of a space, it’s confinement. You’re blocking me. You’re blocking my movement. You’re blocking air, it’s terrible.
Ken: A couple of things resonated. It’s just, I get this feeling… it’s the only way I can answer it… about procrastinating. I get this feeling that I’m being held down. It’s like this rage. I’ve got to move. I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to move and… I’m not sure how it applies but I guess that’s what it’s like making myself sit there and do something like that. And the only way I could do my dissertation is because I did it about something that meant something to me.
David: That’s right it means something to you and if that meaning overpowers that in there, you can lock in and you’re ok.
Dr. AJ: What makes you finally get down to something?
David: Like I said, the pressure from the outside has to be greater than that on the inside. For me that’s a lot. And number two, if the thing is so stimulating for me, like the research I used to do and do in here. That is so stimulating, it can abate – it can ameliorate, and kind of put a lid on…
Dr. AJ: It soups up the function of the prefrontal cortex, which pushes the top gating.
David: Right, and helps focus because of the gating. That’s right.
Frank: And when you have so many thoughts coming in – like if you’re writing something, and all these thoughts come in, pretty soon it’s like there’s no way possible I can get all these thoughts in here and make them all right… and so I get up and pace.
Dr. AJ: But how do you finally get down to it?
Frank: Tenacity. One, go back, and go back, and go back.
David: You asked me to do the ADD thing. You ask me on a Friday and say, “Can you have it to me by tomorrow.” What? And then I sit down and start to write a little and there’s this thought attached to it and this thought attached to it and you can go into each channel and it’s like ha.
Frank: Little things get real big.
Dr. AJ: I ask you guys to have something done in three days and you couldn’t do it because?
David: Well, I have a great rationale for it. I’m doing sessions every day, and all that but nonetheless the point is well taken. I sit down and start to write it and it’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming. There is so much to it. It’s not a “just write it”, there’s so much to it and then there’s making sense of it, and then there’s putting it together into coherence. And there’s a thought here, and a thought here… and yes they relate but… coherence, yeah, and on to resolution.
Frank: To get a first draft done, the first thing I’ve got to do is to get my judgments to get out of there… because always… it has to be right. So help me God, that better be right! You know… my dad… That, and then another thing with me, when I was a toddler, I had severe eczema, and they would put this real stingy salve on me – underneath that is a big itch – then they would put socks on my hands, so I couldn’t scratch myself and then they would tie my hands to either side of the crib, and then leave me there to go to sleep – to cry myself to sleep.
Dr. AJ: Unbelievable. You know, by the way, Primal Point: that the best treatment for this eczema stuff is to rub the person to sooth them – to do what should have happened to them in the first place.
(To be continued next Sunday)
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
On Hypnosis (Part 23/26)
Hypnotherapy: Painwashing, Brainwashing?
The therapist-client relationship is generally not, perhaps never is, one of equals...The client is in a position of revealing his problems, inadequacies, and fears to a person who seems to be going through life successfully and carefree...The relationship is characterized by the therapist being the expert, the authority, and a client's uncertainty or inability to detect personal choices can easily induce obedience to authority...The need for acceptance and the need to belong are also factors present in the hypnotic relationship.
Avoiding confrontations with the authority, doing things to please her (ranging from generating therapeutic results to knitting her a sweater), conforming to her language style, values, and theoretical ideas are all ways this need can be discovered...
In order to be truly influential, discovering where (not whether) a person is open to suggestion (and everybody is at some level) is the task of the clinician.
Yapko, Trancework[1]
Long-range effectiveness in hypnotherapy depends upon the success of posthypnotic suggestion. Suggestions implanted in the mind of the patient during the session must continue to exert an influence long after the session has ended. The suggestion that an obese woman will eat less during the next week as she learns to dislike fattening foods must stick in her mind if it is to work. In order for suggestions to accomplish this they must somehow alter the patient's ideas and attitudes about the problem being treated. Recall that Erickson repeatedly described hypnosis as a process of presenting new ideas. Indeed, the phenomenon of suggestion makes it possible to replace a negative state of mind with a more beneficial one suggested by the therapist. What must be understood, however, is that a new state of mind is at once the achievement and the limitation of suggestion. For it is at best ephemeral -- never able to eradicate years of childhood experiences that summated into a feeling of worthlessness, for example. Only the belief in magic could imagine otherwise.
If one understands that early traumatic experience is imprinted, impressed into the neurophysiologic system permanently then one quickly sees that a suggestion in the present, no matter how powerful, is at best palliative; the business of repressing Pain and distorting reality goes on as usual throughout the body. In short, suggestion is never a match for an imprint.
Let's review what characterizes the hypnotic trance experience. As described in the previous chapter, someone who is in a trance:
- waits passively for information as to how to behave
- pays attention only to the hypnotist and follows hypnotist's directions ("selective attention" and "redistribution of attention");
- accepts distortions as reality (reduction of "reality testing");
- is highly susceptible to the hypnotist's suggestions (heightened "suggestibility");
- will readily adopt a role of being someone else ("role enactment"), and
- may forget and recall the hypnotic experience ("post-hypnotic amnesia")
The attraction of suggestion therapy is that it offers an apparently speedy and effective means of bringing about change without having to deal with the troublesome contents of the unconscious in their own terms. But precisely because this approach keeps aloof from the generating experiences behind the problematic mental states, suggestion therapy can never be resolving. It can only paper over the cracks, rearrange defenses and symptoms, further dissociation and disconnection and, in effect, streamline the neurosis.
Because neurosis is the post-hypnotic state in which we carry out the "suggestions" of childhood, we may see hypnotherapy as offering counter-suggestions. This might be well and good were not the original suggestions of neurosis bound to physiological imprints laid down in the course of development. Suggestion therapy is really only the offer of a better looking and more hopeful defense. How different is all this from a psychoanalyst who "suggests" that his patient is suffering from this or that, and perhaps she ought to leave her husband, go back to school, try harder to be nice? Are these not suggestions? That is why the best therapy involves no suggestions whatsoever.
Once the patient is the center of all therapeutic power, suggestions are superfluous. It is then she who suggests to the therapist what is the possible motivation behind certain behavior; it is the patient who thinks perhaps she ought to try this or that. Her feelings will dictate, not the words, however reassuring and mellifluous, of a therapist. Power to the patient!
Within the experience of each Pain is a unique and complex spectrum of responses -- responses which, as I have said, are mediated by ongoing neurophysiological processes. An early trauma may diminish the effectiveness of part of the immune system, such as the natural killer cells. The trauma may change the thyroid output (our hypothyroids often are able to normalize with reliving of Pain). The entire body and brain is thus involved in each Pain response, and it is the entire body and brain which must be involved in each undoing. Otherwise we are fighting against the Primal tide, and that tide is not easily overcome.
Look at it another way. Suppose someone steals and is caught. He is beaten every day for a year. Chances are this will encourage him not to steal. But the tendencies are not beaten away. You can't beat a childhood away, nor can you encourage it away, any more than you can encourage the physiology to change permanently. To think otherwise is again to believe in magic. Never forget the "why" in therapy. If you do forget it, then the therapy is bound to fail. Why does she do this? Why does she have migraines? Why does he steal? Can suggestion erase twenty years of ghetto life? Not likely.
Hypnotherapy: Reality or Delusion?
Most hypnotherapists today contend that hypnosis does not involve control and manipulation, as was originally believed. They contend that the patient is not merely a passive recipient; he is instead an active participant, accepting suggestions that suit him and rejecting those that do not. To me this oversimplifies and makes the situation a matter of semantic. It ignores two important factors: the vulnerability inherent in being a patient, and the passivity inherent in the act of receiving suggestions.
Being vulnerable means "capable of being wounded; assailable; open to attack or damage." A patient is vulnerable because he is in the hands of someone else. Vulnerability detracts from one's judgment and common sense, which is why accepting or rejecting suggestions as a patient is no simple matter. If a patient were so clearly able to determine what did or did not suit him, he wouldn't be a patient in the first place. He would be a healthy, feeling person. How can a patient even know what kind of suggestions will help her problems if she doesn't really know what her problems are? Disconnection characterizes neurosis.
Vulnerability is precisely what makes hypnotherapy so appealing. A beneficial reality can be superimposed over Pain and problems by a kindly father figure. Beneficial suggestions are seen as the perfect antidote to the vulnerability of tension and anxiety. But how truly beneficial are these suggestions? How beneficial is it to be told you are feeling comfortable and relaxed when you are really feeling otherwise? Doesn't this also replay the parent-child paradigm where the child is admonished into smiling when she doesn't want to, into acting happy when he really feels sad.
Hypnotic suggestions for comfort, relaxation, stress-reduction, and the like really require the same compromise the neurotic has made all his life. This is what can and does happen not only in hypnotic past-life regression; vulnerable to the hypnotist's suggestions and expectations, the patient produces a fantasy disguised as a traumatic memory, and believes that re-experiencing it makes the current symptoms that it supposedly generate disappear. Such is also the case in hypnotic age regression in which the patient does not fully relive and integrate the early trauma but instead shoves it back down.
To say that the patient has control over the hypnotic situation, as modern hypnotherapists contend, is a double contradiction in terms. First of all, the neurotic is never in control; that is part of the problem. The neurotic's history controls him; it is the unconscious reference point around which his life revolves. Perhaps he overeats, for example, and why? Because he has no control over the arcane forces at work. The neurotic who has reached the point of seeking therapy does so because he has at least a dim realization that his Pain is controlling him.
We can have no control over our Pain as long as it remains unconscious; and that is the most that hypnotherapy can do -- make us unconscious. This brings us to the second part of the contradiction: the patient cannot be in control of something of which he is unconscious. As long as Pain remains unconscious, as it must in the hypnotic situation, it wields the force. To say that the neurotic has control in the hypnotic situation is to contradict the meaning of both hypnosis and neurosis.
I believe that passivity is inherent in the hypnotic relationship. No matter how much the patient supposedly "participates," it is still in response to the hypnotherapist. The hypnotherapist is really the active agent, the one who defines the situation, however broadly.
Erickson believes that hypnosis is an active process for the patient because hypnotherapists base their suggestions on the patient's "repertory of life experiences and learnings." Carefully worded suggestions, "utilizing the patient's own frame of reference," can then stimulate the patient to reassociate and reorganize his associative processes." But basing suggestions on the patient's life experience does not make them any more valid therapeutically. For one thing, fitting suggestions to the patient is not a clear matter of incorporating life experiences. The hypnotherapist can only incorporate the patient's life experiences as he (the hypnotherapist) understands them; as he relates to them. The suggestions can never be a pure product of the patient's past but only a subjective interpretation and rephrasing of that past by the hypnotherapist. Compounding this problem is the interesting fact that neurotic patients do not really know their past in the first place because it is so repressed. Until they relive it their reports of past experiences can only be fractionally accurate.
[1]_pp. 91-102.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)