Conclusiones del capítulo

The asking of appropriate questions is a theme which runs through the whole book. One particular aspect of this is asking questions of the Client. Problems can arise when we want to know things about subsystems of which there is no conscious awareness. This chapter deals with some of the techniques specific to Hypnotherapy which deal with such a situation. In brief they involve bypassing the verbal system and connecting the system of interest to some other system (using the characteristic Hypnotic techniques of eliminating distractions, amplifying responses by means of feedback loops, etc.). The alternative systems are usually the visual imagination or the motor or emotional systems. Examples are given to illustrate this.

A THEME WHICH has run through this book is the asking of appropriate questions. In Part B there were many examples given of the types of questions that might be asked of a Client during the process of diagnosis. We have seen the repeated use of the questions, "And what is the resultant of that?" and, "And what is the cause of that?" We have seen the problem of determining the best form of intervention reduced to the repeated asking of four questions.

It will be apparent by now that accurate Hypnotherapy depends on obtaining the answers to many questions, at many different levels.

The questions are there to help us to think clearly. At times the answers are obtained by directly asking the Client. But we have already seen that a slightly indirect approach is more useful. In this chapter we are going to dwell on this matter of indirect answers, and in particular on obtaining answers which cannot be obtained by asking the Client directly, because the answers are not consciously known. In terms of the language of the previous chapter, we may say that the information is dissociated from conscious mental processes.

Let us begin with an example which might arise if we were exploring resultants of a change.

Suppose we want to know how it would make a person feel. Now there are people who can come

out with a quick response if asked, but for many others there is no direct answer. So how can we proceed?

Our approach to Hypnotherapy can help us to analyse the situation in the following way. The primary systems of interest are the verbal (V) and the emotional (E). If we were getting an accurate answer to our question then the following processes would be strong:

Ê V Æ Ê E,

so that the verbally suggested thought of the change would lead at once to an arousal of the consequent feelings, and:

Ê E Æ Ê V,

so that these feelings would then be able to create a recognition of themselves in the verbal mind, so that they could be reported.

If verbal answers are not being obtained, then there is a failure of one or both of these processes.

(In terms of the definitions in the chapter on Dissociation, there is a unilateral or total dissociation between the two systems.)

Now we have seen in the chapter on "inductions" that a Hypnotherapist has quite clear ways of establishing whether or not the above processes can be expected to proceed easily or with difficulty.

Two different pictures may therefore emerge. It may be that the above chains are normally weak, or it may be that they are normally strong, but for some reason are weak in the particular case being considered. (Usually this distinction is the distinction between weak and strong dissociation.) The difference is often of vital importance, for in the latter case the reason can throw a lot of light on the matter in hand.

Let us be more concrete and consider a specific instance of finding the answer to a question that cannot be answered in response to a direct question. We will suppose that a woman in her thirties is unhappy because she has never been able to find a satisfactory husband for some reason. In exploring this problem we will naturally be asking ourselves, in line with the analysis of Chapter 12, "What would the consequence of marriage be?" In a case like this the emotional response is by far the most important. And we will suppose that the woman finds it rather difficult to answer the question in that she reports that she seems to want to get married, but in practice whenever things seem to be moving in that direction, something always seems to go wrong.

A characteristic approach of Hypnotherapy to this situation is the following. It is recognised that the internal visual system is usually more directly connected to the emotional system than is consciousness and so steps will be taken to activate it. These steps are those which are common to a lot of Hypnotic procedures: a systematic reduction in activity of other functions, so that the Client is sitting or lying, comfortable and relaxed, with closed eyes and no distractions and with mind focused with no strain on the visual imagination. We might then, slowly and gently, get the Client to start to unfold, in her imagination, pictures relating to being married, in response to gentle guidance by the Hypnotherapist.

There is no way of knowing in advance what these pictures will be, of course, and it is very unlikely that any two cases will be the same. If we had no evidence to guide us we might conjecture that there might be some hidden fear of sex, or of having children or some generalised inadequacy - the possibilities are endless. And any of these might arise in a particular case. It is

the absence of any such specific theories of the origin of problems that is one of the hallmarks of scientific Hypnotherapy. We don't conjecture: we find out. But to give an idea of how things might proceed I will summarise one case of mine.

This woman soon started to report pictures of a happy house, with plenty of evidence of young children around. There was a very lived-in kitchen and a garden full of swings and toys. The atmosphere was relaxed and domestic. In fact everything went well until we reached the master bedroom, and there the problem turned out to be NOT what you might be anticipating. The problem was that the wardrobe was filled with a man's formal suits! She reported a very strong aversion to these.

So there, in a nutshell, we may see her dilemma. She was drawn to a certain kind of relaxed wife-style. But this coexisted with a preconception that a husband had to be suited and formal, which she did not like at all.

At that stage a Hypnotherapist may instantly move on to the next stage in therapy, which is to change things. In this case the problem system is the limiting belief about husbands, and a suitable change can be promoted by inviting the Client to do something about those clothes in the wardrobe if she chooses. In this particular case it took her very little time indeed to throw out all those horrible stiff suits, and to replace them with jeans, jumpers and so on. She was able to report that this gave her great satisfaction. It was even more satisfactory when she was reporting within months that she had found a wonderful man, and later that they were to get married, and later that the house they were living in was filled with the same feeling and light that she had imagined in her vision, and later that she was pregnant, and later a mother. Her husband does not wear suits!

In this example, then, we have seen one of the major techniques whereby the Hypnotherapist will find answers to questions that cannot be answered directly by the verbal mind. The pattern is simply that if:

Ê E Æ 0V,

i.e. we cannot get information about a feeling directly to the verbal mind, then we can often proceed indirectly via the imagination:

Ê E Æ Ê Im Æ Ê V.

The idea of obtaining information about feelings via the visual imagination goes back at least as far as Freud, and his interpretation of dreams. But the more modern practice is not to wait in a hit or miss way for a dream to reveal something, but instead gently to guide the imagination towards the required area.

This is far more informative than dream analysis, partly because it allows far more questions to be asked regarding the matters of interest, so that it becomes possible to sift out the important from the irrelevant; but there is also so much more time. A recalled dream may have taken up only a few minutes, while a guided daydream can easily run for ten times that.

In the above case we have an example also of the reverse process:

Ê V Æ Ê Im Æ Ê E,

i.e. instead of the Hypnotherapist attempting to activate feelings in the Client by means of simple words, he is instead talking only about the images, and allowing them to evoke the corresponding feelings.

Such an approach is of course by no means unique to Hypnotherapists. Film- makers and advertising executives pour billions of pounds down the same channel. They provide images whose success is primarily measured by the extent to which they evoke feelings.

But at this stage we are considering primarily the reverse process: not of changing the Client's deeper thoughts or feelings, but of finding out about them. The case quoted above, however, shows that a very precise idea of what the problem is, presented as an image, allows an intervention to be equally precise, elegant and ecologically sound.

Here is another example of the gently guided daydream to illustrate the principle. This time it is of a young man who was, for some reason, not finding a girlfriend. When images started to come to his mind they were of walking down a rather arid valley. Every so often he would meet an older man who would advise him of the dangers of leaving the valley. But he found nothing of interest in it.

This image gives an insight into the probable cause of his predicament, which is that he has been discouraged by his father or other older men from involvement with girls.

The same image was then used to improve matters by suggesting that it might be worth seeing for himself what dangers lay outside the valley. He climbed the hill out of it; walked for some time through a very lifeless region, and then came to fertile farmland on which he found a farm where - surprise! - there was a very attractive daughter with whom he was soon on very good terms.

His discovery of this for himself was possibly one of the more effective ways of creating a change in his attitude to his situation.

In all such explorations notice that the tone of the Hypnotherapist is totally non-forcing and typically of the form, "I wonder if you would like to ... ?" or "I wonder what would happen if ... ?"

That is, questions are being asked, but of a very indirect and open kind. It is important that he or she should not interfere too strongly, or the thing which is looked for will be destroyed or missed.

This aspect of our work is as unlike the strong, commanding, authoritative Svengali image as possible. We tread as softly as a butterfly on the flowers of which dreams are made.

The above method is the richest and probably the most powerful strategy which is used in Hypnotherapy to obtain answers which are not readily available by direct questioning. The second most common method involves the activation not of the visual system (V) but of the muscular system (M). So if S is some system for which it is impossible to establish the process:

Ê S Æ Ê V,

then instead we establish:

Ê S Æ Ê M.

The most common response chosen is probably a finger movement, identical to the small movements that arise at the beginning of a hand levitation process. It might be established, for example, that if the answer to a question is "Yes", then a finger on the right hand will move, while if it is "No", then a finger of the left will move. This is sometimes called Ideo-Motor Signalling (IMS).

The problem with such a method is that it is comparatively uninformative, especially if we do not hit on the right question. It is also very slow. A single Ideo-Motor response may easily take more than a minute.

There is one instance in which this particular method can be more informative and faster, which is if it becomes possible to allow S to activate the system of handwriting. This phenomenon goes by the name of Automatic Writing. In some individuals it is possible for the hand to be writing something (often out of view of the Subject) which is making sense, but of which the Subject seems to have no conscious awareness. This is most likely to be possible if there is some high-order subsystem of the mind which has become disconnected from the normal system of consciousness - a phenomenon which is dealt with in more detail in the chapter on Dissociation.

Mechanisms which could facilitate the above methods are the Ouija board, which is like automatic writing in that it can, in time, produce sentences, or a divining rod or a pendulum which, like finger levitation, can produce "Yes" or "No" answers. A divining rod is designed so that a small muscular movement is amplified, and a pendulum uses a dynamic form of the same principle: it takes imperceptible movements of the hand to change a side-to-side movement ("No") to a to-and-fro movement ("Yes"). These do not seem to be in common use in modern Hypnotherapy, probably because those who use IMS find that the amplification of the response which Hypnotic techniques provide makes such artificial amplification unnecessary.

If we are interested in knowing more about the emotional system, however, it makes much more sense to activate NOT a muscular response, but a response which is naturally associated with emotional arousal. Even without making any effort in this direction it is often easy for the therapist to notice rapid breathing, a slight smile or tears as easy pointers to the current emotions. In most cases, of course, the Subject is aware of these and they are interpreted correctly. If, on the other hand, the Subject gives a verbal statement about his or her feelings which is NOT what the signs indicate, then there is a strong presumption that the emotions and the verbal mind are disconnected to a significant extent: a situation which is usually of great significance in therapy.

We may extend this principle by using Hypnotic techniques - suggestion may be enough - to amplify such signs still further. For example we might say, "As you think about what I will be saying, your body will respond quite freely. You need not feel any distress but if your body wants to cry, it will cry freely. You need not feel any anger, but your face or body may show it."

Strangely, although Ideo-Motor signalling is a phrase often encountered in the literature on Hypnotherapy, I do not recall meeting the phrase Ideo-Emotive or Ideo-Affective signalling.

Consequently I presume that the use of the above device is rare, despite the fact that it can be very useful. I suspect that the reason for the rarity is the absence of a sufficient clarity of thought on what are our goals and our means: a clarity which I believe that a systems approach enhances.

The value of noting emotional reactions is vouched for by those practitioners who make use of an electronic amplifier of emotion. It is a fact that emotional arousal tends to produce a small increase in the production of the sweat glands. If the arousal is intense then the sweat may actually be seen, but for more moderate arousals it is only enough slightly to moisten the skin with salty water. Since this conducts electricity quite well its presence can be detected by measuring how easily a small current of electricity can flow between two points on the skin. A machine which does this is called an Electric Skin Resistance meter. Such machines are often used in the context of biofeedback. Another name for them is Lie Detectors, where it is supposed that they will detect a lie because the liar will be slightly more stressed and aroused when speaking the lie than when telling the truth.

The weakness of the machines is that they cannot distinguish clearly between different forms of emotion, but they can nevertheless be useful in practice as a means of detecting emotional activity which is not great enough to affect the verbal mind.

In this context we should note that one of the more useful detectors and amplifiers of feelings is the human being! There are some people who seem to be extraordinarily sensitive to the moods of others. I presume that they are able to pick up small cues from movements, tone of voice, expression and possibly even smell (as animals do) and integrate them into an accurate representation of the other person's emotion at that moment. The representation will often take the form of feeling the same emotion as the other person.

As an example of this, in a small way, I can cite something from my own experience which also leads to a general principle.

Early on in practice I noticed that with some Clients, and for no obvious reason, I was feeling nervous: with me this was signalled primarily by a shakiness in the voice. This could have grown into a considerable problem for me had I not considered the possibility that I was simply feeling the other person's emotion. I tested this by asking, "How are you feeling at present?" On each occasion the answer was, "Very nervous." As I then calmed the Client down, the feeling in me went also.

The general principle is that, for many Clients, there may often be times in which they think that they are nervous, when in fact it is the people around them who are nervous, and they are simply picking up the mood.

I have a daydream that in an ideal world there would be a class of therapists who would be termed Empathists. They would have learned to develop an innate skill in assessing the feelings of others in the above ways into a consistent and accurate faculty. Working alone, such an individual is in danger of being swamped by the emotions which are being detected, which can reduce the ability to help. The Empathist would therefore act as a part of a team in which her (or his) role is purely passive - reporting on the feelings of the Client or patient - while others, less able to empathise themselves, would take the lead in directing change while all the time being

I have a daydream that in an ideal world there would be a class of therapists who would be termed Empathists. They would have learned to develop an innate skill in assessing the feelings of others in the above ways into a consistent and accurate faculty. Working alone, such an individual is in danger of being swamped by the emotions which are being detected, which can reduce the ability to help. The Empathist would therefore act as a part of a team in which her (or his) role is purely passive - reporting on the feelings of the Client or patient - while others, less able to empathise themselves, would take the lead in directing change while all the time being