Selena is a precocious five-year old girl who could not stop sucking her fingers. Her teeth were beginning to protrude. Because she still believes in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, I was positive that she would be very susceptible to hypnosis.
I asked Selena to “move to the magic chair where kids stop sucking their fingers .” Then, at my request, she named each finger. She responded with, “Bunny Rabbit,” “Robin” and other similar titles. I directed her to ask each finger if it liked being sucked. She said, “No.” Then, I asked her to find out what her fingers would rather do instead. After some conversation with her fingers, she told me they would rather play dolls, jump rope, and do puzzles. → Read more
Oct 07
The Critical Inner Voice
Our life is what our thoughts make it. ~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
The critical inner voice is made up of a series of negative thoughts and attitudes toward self and others, which is at the core of a person’s maladaptive behavior. It can be conceptualized as the language of a defensive process that is both hostile and cynical. The voice is not limited to cognition, attitudes, and beliefs; it is also closely associated with varying degrees of anger, sadness, shame, and other primary emotions. It can be thought of as an overlay on the personality that is not natural or harmonious but rather learned or externally imposed.
The voice is a form of internal communication – usually critical, yet sometimes self-nurturing and self-aggrandizing, but in either case opposed to one’s self-interest. It is experienced as though one were being spoken to. It includes attacks such as, “You’re so stupid!” “You’re a failure!” “No one could ever love you.” “You can’t trust anyone.” “They don’t appreciate you.” → Read more
Oct 02
Facing Panic
People who are hit with panic attacks have a common response. They feel compelled to fight the symptoms with all their available resources. They brace for the fight as they approach any feared situation. And if they predict this on-guard approach will fail, they avoid entering the scene as the only way they can guarantee their safety. But this resistance and avoidance come with a price: a restricted lifestyle, anxious hypervigilance, and often depression.
Over the past three decades, specialists in the treatment of panic disorder have helped their clients move from a commitment to resist their symptoms to one of acceptance. By allowing the racing heart and spinning head and wobbly legs to continue in a permissive mental environment, clients discover that they don’t actually have a heart attack, go crazy, or faint. As they adopt this new permissive attitude – “It’s OK to be anxious here.” “I can handle these symptoms.” “I’m willing for people to notice my nervousness.” – then each panic attack runs a more limited course with far less intensity. → Read more
When asked about James Braid, Ernest Rossi said, “Braid is the true father of hypnosis (personal communication, Dec. 7, 2001). His work forms the basis of what I’m doing today.” This praise becomes understandable after a quick look at Braid’s contributions. He not only popularized the terms hypnosis and hypnotist; he first explained trance states as the interplay of physiology and psychology.
Historians credit Braid (1795-1860) as both the first researcher of psychosomatic medicine and the father of modern theories of hypnotherapy. → Read more
Sep 25
Tom
Tom, a young adult, has had a bipolar mental illness with episodes involving complex paranoid delusions. He had been hospitalized four times during the eight-year interval since his diagnosis and the time I saw him. Tom’s latest admission followed a trip, with his parents, in December 1991. Tom’s delusions intensified, on that trip, and he believed the name of a town where they had stopped (Winslow, Arizona) held a special message for him. He walked the streets through the nights, “circling around a U-turn exit and ending back at the hotel.” Tom said he could “…WIN the battle if he went SLOW.” → Read more
Sep 18
The Boxer
The 21-year-old client did not want to be in therapy. Charged with assault on his girlfriend, he had been ordered to counseling as a condition of probation. The intake, conducted by another therapist, noted, “Client is reluctant to focus on violence-related issues.” The client, muscular and sullen, entered the first session in silence and sat slouched in his chair with a cap concealing most of his face. He had described himself as “a boxer” and had explained that counseling should not interfere with his “career,” which consisted solely of daily sparring at a local gym.
After preliminaries, I began giving the client an explanation of the negative effects of emotional stress. I told him how “industrial psychologists are paid high wages to ensure workers have their lives in order at home.” The role of sports psychologists was also described in detail with some impressive statistics about successful results. The client was then offered psychological training in order to benefit his boxing career. He responded with increased enthusiasm toward treatment. → Read more
Sep 11
Think Fast
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 46 seconds.
An athletically built young man in his mid-20s, neatly attired in a business suit, consulted me to deal with “rage issues,” “depression,” and a desire to get to the “root” of his relationship with his mother. He told me that he had been raised by a single mother who was alternately extremely dependent upon him, and then physically and emotionally absent. They had suffered poverty when he was a child, and he was determined to continue to rise financially in the world as an adult.
Recently, his last two therapists, both women, had dismissed him because he had refused to enter a drug rehabilitation program as a condition of therapy. He thought that he might be a “borderline alcoholic” because of his daily use of alcohol, marijuana, and opioid pills, which left him “faded,” but still able to work in a high-pressure, high-stakes business environment. → Read more
An admonition from William Alanson White, M.D., then Superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, was given to this writer early in his psychiatric career, and a year or so later he was again given the same admonition by Adolf Meyer,
M.D. Both strongly advised the writer never to refuse to consult with a patient. A single interview graciously granted during which the patient’s story was listened to attentively, while not especially remunerative, had often permitted them to encounter many unusual instances of psychopathology and to achieve, in many cases, astonishingly effective results. These results had sometimes proved to be far better than the doctors had considered possible at the time of the interview, even if long-term therapy could have been instituted. They likened such instances to the processes of behavior wherein “love at first sight” has drastically and positively altered the lives of various individuals. One such historical example was the schoolteacher who thought it wrong for an adult man making his living as a tailor (Andrew Johnson) to be so uneducated. The events that unfolded began with teaching and led to love, marriage, a law degree, a judgeship, and eventually the presidency of the United States. → Read more
A 28-year-old male physician, who had done well in medical school in Japan, began working on a doctoral thesis at the surgery department of a national university that was not his alma mater. He also was working at the hospital where his father was a staff physician.
He started having difficulties with his doctoral thesis. As a consequence, he began to suffer from severe insomnia. He decided to treat his own insomnia by taking prescription sleeping pills (methaqualone), a type which is no longer manufactured in Japan because of their severe side effects. Soon, the young physician became dependent on these pills as well as tolerant of them. He increased the dosage and finally began taking them during the day as well. → Read more
Aug 30
Svengali in Arizona
TIME, OCTOBER 22, 1973
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 18 seconds.A shy, gap-toothed young woman arrives at the simple home of a doctor in Phoenix, Ariz. She says she is embarrassed about her teeth and bashful with men. Then, with sudden force and apparent malice, the doctor commands her to practice spurting water through her teeth until she is sure she can hit the young man who often meets her at the office watercooler. Soon after, the woman carries out her mission. The next day, the young man lies in wait for her with a water pistol. Eventually they marry. Her problem seems to have vanished magically.
This and many other oddly simple cures are credited to the foxy grandpa of American hypnotism, Milton H. Erickson. At 71, Erickson stands in the forefront of a revival of hypnotherapy -in eclipse since Freud rejected it as too superficial and impermanent. “Erickson is the most innovative practitioner of hypnosis since Mesmer,” says Dr. Thomas Hackett, chief of the psychiatric consultation service at Massachusetts General Hospital. Although Erickson sometimes uses deep hypnotic trances to work his will on his psychiatric patients, he often limits himself to straightforward commands. He does not, however, explain the exact cures. → Read more
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