by Dreams End » Sun Mar 12, 2006 5:41 am
Here's an excerpt. It's from the online version at Questia, which is subscription based so I can't link. <br><br>Caution...EXTREMELY triggering.....<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr> Immediately following our session, Leslie and I went to the scheduled session of therapy group. I was conducting this group for dissociative patients who were hospitalized on the adult psychiatric unit. The four patients present in group on this particular day were also all participating in individual psychotherapy under my care. Leslie was somewhat reluctant to talk about her biofeedback experiences in the group, but I encouraged her to do so. She began to remember some of what the biofeedback therapist said to her before she went "out." Leslie recalled, "She kept saying 'feel the feelings,' and 'deeper and deeper', and 'you will soon be cured.'"<br><br>One of the patients in the group, "Karen," expressed anger toward me for my continued questions of Leslie about what had happened. Karen said to me, "Don't say that. Don't say that."<br><br> I didn't understand her. "Don't say what, Karen?"<br><br> "Those words!" She said angrily.<br><br> I was still confused, "What words?"<br><br> "Deeper and deeper."<br><br>But by now, Karen was no longer visibly angry. She was, in fact, in a trance. I looked around the room. Everyone present was in a trance, everyone but myself. The room was completely quiet. The four group members stared, glassy-eyed, with their gaze directed downward toward the floor. I was amazed. In my eleven years of doing group therapy, I had never witnessed anything like this.<br><br>I decided that if the group therapy were to continue, the participants would have to come out of this trance. It should have been easy to accomplish because, I was an experienced hypnotherapist and had never failed to bring a patient out of a trance that I had induced. Although I tried a variety of standard methods, I was unable to bring even one of the group members out of the trance state. The group session was discontinued. Two of the four patients were so dazed that they could not sit upright, and I had to call nursing staff to assist them to their beds. The other two patients were able to walk and went to sit in the unit's day room, but they were too mentally foggy to make sensible conversation.<br><br>Several hours later, all four patients appeared to have returned to a relatively normal state of consciousness. I went to each of them individually and privately to inquire about what had happened in the group. None of them seemed to know what had caused the group trance experience. Two of them could not even remember much of what had happened shortly before or after the trance took effect. Only one of them, Karen, appeared able to recount the events with some accuracy. She reiterated her anger at me because of what she interpreted as my interrogation of Leslie. The words that Karen said bothered her were "deeper and deeper." She also indicated that she felt very sleepy when she heard those words repeated.<br><br>I wanted to test what Karen was saying to me, so I asked permission to use those words. She was initially reluctant but eventually agreed. I told her that I would use the words but that she would not go into a trance. I would simply use the words in conversation, not in a hypnotic induction. I talked to her about her concerns about her financial condition and how she was getting deeper in debt. I inserted the word deeper into the conversation this way several times. Before I knew it, she was out.<br><br>What caused this reaction? I had clearly given her the suggestion that she would not be hypnotized, yet when she heard the words in question, she did enter a trance state. I wondered if she had previous experience in hypnotherapy where a therapist had trained her to respond to those words with a trance. I asked her if she had ever participated in hypnotherapy. In a groggy monotone she replied, "No." "Why are you in a trance now?"<br><br>She was silent for awhile. Her eyes rolled upward and her eyelids fluttered for awhile. I repeated my question. She spoke in a different voice identifying herself as four-year-old "Kathy." Kathy said she could see people inside a house. The house was very dark. There were other people there who were wearing black robes with hoods covering their heads. She saw herself on a table, tied down. She was wearing a flimsy white cotton robe without a hood. She said someone was cutting on her arm with a razor blade saying the words "Deeper, and deeper, and <br><br>deeper" with each painful stroke of the blade across her skin. She expressed an unmistakable feeling of terror. She said she could see herself passing out not so much from the pain, but mostly as a result of her overwhelming fear. Kathy told me that this had happened several times. She also reported experiences of sexual abuse in which her tormentors spoke the words "deeper, and deeper, and deeper" as she was sexually penetrated. She indicated that whenever Karen heard the words repeated over and over, she would automatically enter a trance state as a reaction to this experience, which she called "training."<br><br>What Kathy described was not hypnosis as it is normally conceptualized, being a result of repetitive suggestion to produce a trance. Instead, she revealed what appeared to be the results of classical conditioning 95 in which a trance response produced by trauma was paired with the words "deeper, and deeper, and deeper" until the words alone were able to elicit the trance response.<br><br>I asked Kathy to help me bring Karen out again because my last effort had failed. Kathy said she was willing to help me. She offered, "All you need to do is say, 'Karen I will count you down from 10 to zero, and when I reach zero, you will be fully awake, pain free and relaxed.'" This sounded like a standard hypnotic countdown procedure. Earlier when attempting to bring the group members out of the trance state, I had tried several similar methods but none of them had worked. Kathy explained that I had to use the exact words as she had stated them to me. Kathy said that Karen had been trained to respond specifically to those words and might not respond to other phrases that were worded too differently. I followed Kathy's instructions, and Karen reappeared and resumed executive control of her mind and body.<br><br>I asked to see her arm where Kathy had said that cutting had occurred. Little scars were visible, but it was not clear to me whether the scars were necessarily caused by the abuse that Kathy described. This patient had engaged in some self-mutilation in the past, and it was possible that the scars were self-inflicted. I asked Karen what had caused the little scars on her arm, but she said she did not know. I asked her if she had ever cut herself there, and she said, "Not to my knowledge."<br><br>I asked Karen if she would not discuss what Kathy had said to me in the session that day with anyone else. She asked why, and I explained that I wanted to find out what each group member had experienced in session, and I did not want their views contaminated or influenced by one another, and so for that reason I wanted all to refrain from discussing it with each other. I especially did not want the other patients to know what Kathy had said to me because that might influence their reaction to a similar test of their responsiveness to the words and phrases. Karen agreed to my request. She also said that she did not remember much of what Kathy had revealed.<br><br>I met with each patient individually and requested permission to investigate what had earlier occurred in the group and each person agreed. I did not tell any of the individuals that I had talked to Karen's Kathy nor what Kathy had discussed with me regarding the manner in which these words had been paired with trauma to produce a trance response. However, in each case, the patient in question went into a trance when I introduced some of the words and phrases into our conversations, but the patients each appeared oblivious to what was happening to them and could not initially explain why they were reexperiencing altered states of consciousness while we conversed.<br><br>Karen had specifically responded to the word deeper, particularly when it was used in repetition. Another patient responded most strongly to the phrase, "feel the feelings" when it was used repetitively, and to a lesser degree, she responded to "deeper" and "you will soon be cured." One of the individuals became agitated when I used the phrase, "you will soon be cured." I asked her why, and she did not know. At a later date, an alternate identity in her system said that in her abuse history the perpetrators would sometimes repeat the expression "You will soon be cured of your false virginity" in a sexual abuse ritual. All four patients responded with trance to either one or a combination of these terms and phrases and, to my surprise, they all awoke from the trance when I utilized the procedure described by the alternate identity, Kathy. However, when one of the four individuals emerged from trance, she was in a panic state. With tears in her eyes and a look expressing her mental anguish she said, "Don't say pain free.""Why?" I asked.<br><br>At first she seemed puzzled as if she did not know. Then she blurted out, "Because that means we've been hurt." With further inquiry, only two of the four patients could tell me why they were going into a trance (i.e., identify which words and phrases that they appeared to be responding to).<br><br>I was frankly astonished at what I witnessed, but I thought that in spite of these results, I should further cross-validate these findings. Science is based on the idea that valid knowledge can be acquired through careful observations that can be repeated or replicated. When replicated results can be found with at least some consistency and they defy the chance or random variations in nature, then one can say that there is scientific support for a particular hypothesis. However, in order to properly test these initial findings, I had to insure that some alternative explanation could not account for the observed results. For example, if I had told the other three members of the group what Kathy had told me about the various effects of the words and phrases, it might have implanted the idea in their minds that they were supposed to respond in a particular way. By not telling them what I was doing or what I was looking for, I was getting results that were more likely to be free of the effects of suggestion.<br><br>I decided that in order to continue to test this particular effect, I should do so in an unobtrusive manner and with other individuals to observe their reactions. In the process I also discovered a variety of other specific signals that resulted in producing altered states of consciousness, physical immobility, and other peculiar responses in some patients. I found that most of these could be surreptitiously introduced into a normal conversation resulting in mild to profound trance responses and other anomalies. On some occasions these methods would bring out specific alternate identities, some of whom would appear ready to do anything asked of them. On some occasions, the patient would go into such a deep trance as to appear in a coma-like state.<br><br>Once, during a therapy session, a female patient, "Jenny," went into such a deep trance her speech was barely audible. While in this state, her body was limp and she drawled, "You can have me." I asked her name and she identified herself as "Natasha." She indicated that it was her job to sexually please any male who had the ability to access her. I told her that she would not have to do this anymore and that the decisions about her sexual behavior should not be made or carried out by any individual alternate identity but should be made by herself as a whole person. <hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>Note that I have already met two sexual alters. One was robotic...just showed up in the middle of lovemaking. The other was there from the beginning (differeent time)...and enjoyed herself seemingly but seemed distant..and different. After, Debbie said she didn't know who that was. It emerged later in therapy that this was the alter present when she was raped as a young adult. She'd always assumed she'd been drugged but a year or so ago, had the memories start to return in hypnotherapy (that was not supposed to be the point of the hypnotherapy and I was present...we ended the session when I figured out what was going on...this therapist was NOT qualified, we decided, to deal with this.) <br><br>Avalon, I appreciate you and your down to earth nature and desire not to see a bunch of rightwing whackos start future "witch hunts." And my wife identifies as Pagan. I'm not doing anything here other than gathering info and following what few leads I have. Unfortunately, the behaviors described in this book are VERY much like what I see in my wife. It may be that any sort of childhood abuse could lead to such...<br><br>Above, I posted info on the publishers of this book..so I proceed with caution. But it's really bizarre to see such similarities.<br><br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
