Dimensión 3. Criterial
1.5 Justificación del estudio
T
hroughout the years that I have been using energy psychology methods, I have noticed that an important aspect of the therapeutic relationship needs greater attention. Most therapists tend to ignore what continually occurs hypnotically between the therapist and the client. Since spending many years early in my career studying the complexities of traditional and Ericksonian hypnosis, I have been keenly aware of how verbal and nonverbal communica-tion creates hypnotic impact within the therapy session. Conscious awareness of the underlying dynamics of hypnosis is the foundation for establishing and-maintaining rapport—and thus for engendering openness to new heal-ing possibilities. As Dr. Milton H. Erickson said, sufficient rapport allows the unconscious mind of the client to accept new ideas and possibilities.I have integrated my knowledge of how hypnosis accelerates clientsʼ heal-ing outcomes into Dynamic Energetic Healheal-ing®. Establishheal-ing rapport in the very first session (or even before, when talking on the telephone with a prospective client) is absolutely paramount. Being in rapport means energetic harmony has been established. In rapport, there is mutual understanding and support, resis-tance is minimized, and a collaborative ethos prevails. Simple rapport-building techniques include matching and mirroring clientsʼ movement and expressions, both verbal and nonverbal. This evolves into pacing and leading clients into a deepening internal orientation within the relational context of the therapy.
What exactly do I mean by “deepening internal orientation?” Rapport creates an unconscious agreement with my client to work together on specific
objectives without any mental or emotional resistance. There is agreement about our roles. I am the therapist with a certain amount of knowledge of and experience with the things that the client wants help with. When there is rapport, this agreement provides me with explicit and implicit permission to assist and lead my client to interior places that may be either known or unknown. A deepening internal orientation is the beginning of a therapeutic trance process, one in which clients are able to remain easily focused on cer-tain inner states of awareness that they might otherwise move away from or avoid altogether. Once rapport is established, Process begins to emerge in the therapeutic relationship so that seemingly miraculous events can happen.
Another pacing technique or “intervention” I use is reporting my subjec-tive experience of the energetic releases that I perceive and “feel.” I do this by expressively exhaling in a way that clients can obviously hear. I provide this feedback to my clients to help them create an ever-deepening response potential to their own internal experience. This feedback also teaches clients to become sensitive to another, more subtle aspect of their experience of bio- energy on multiple levels. If I can feel, experience, and express their energetic releasing, I expect that with minimal modeling on my part, my clients will soon become sensitive to their own energy body and begin to own it.
Part of this hypnotic aspect of the therapeutic relationship allows me as the therapist to report descriptively my interior experience. This includes images, feelings, sensations, and energetic releases that relate to and are relevant to the specific Dynamic Energetic Healing® intervention I am using at the time.
This is different from the countertransference experience first described by Freud, which occurs within the analyst as he or she opens to his or her “free-floating attention.” The major difference between countertransference and the hypnotic aspect of the therapeutic relationship that I am describing is the therapeutic model from which each derives. My healing approach includes Mindellʼs processwork model, from which I integrate what he calls the second attention (described in chapter 5). This is a much larger framework for what is happening in the therapeutic relationship.
As a process-oriented therapist, I am extremely open to the richness of the dynamic field within the client–therapist relationship. As a result, I know that what happens in the relationship is meaningful and ought to be acknowledged by processing it in some way. In other words, whatever is happening in this relational context is a field of information shared by the client and the therapist. There are no secrets! The accessibility of the
infor-mation is totally dependent upon the therapistʼs and clientʼs level of aware-ness and ability to be present.
It is also therapeutically useful to acknowledge to clients what is happen-ing in the field, since the therapist takes responsibility for keephappen-ing the field clean. However, there are times when it is important to choose to contain and withhold certain awarenesses if you as the therapist ascertain it is in the best interest of the client and the therapeutic outcome to do so. This is all about the ecology of the field. The therapist either allows the field to stay polluted or chooses to make strategic interventions in order to keep the field clean. To disclose your awareness is to keep the field clean.
Language is inherently hypnotic, and using words such as energy, fields, chi, and soul to describe subtle experiences necessitates that the client expe-rience what is called transderivational search (TDS) in the neurolinguistic programming (NLP) nomenclature. TDS induces deepening hypnotic states.
Essentially, the TDS experience is what occurs when I go inside myself (albeit very quickly) to find a place of reference for whatever the client is saying. If he says the word field, I have to go inside and decide if the reference point is farming, physics, or spirituality. This goes on constantly, and it reflects how we-are always to some degree in an internalized state of being when we are verbally interacting with (or even just listening to) someone. We go inside for the reference point, and then we come outside to reconnect and communicate an interpretation of our own. This is always going on interpersonally.
I recognize that the TDS experience generates varying degrees of ongoing trance states of confusion (i.e., altered states of consciousness) and deepens the clientʼs internal orientation. I also know that transformative change occurs more readily when the individual is in an altered state of consciousness. With this awareness of what is occurring hypnotically, I can more gently guide cli-ents to experience greater openness and perceive more information—informa-tion that they would otherwise be unaware of or tend to deny.
Therefore, as the therapist you must use language judiciously and intentionally because your direct and indirect suggestions are always being communicated to your clients. They are more open to suggestion than they would normally be because altered states are more accessible in this therapy model and because you and the client are maintaining an ongoing rapport. It is important to remember that the therapistʼs suggestions may be interpreted as being positive or negative, while the sharing of my personal experience is often perceived as metaphoric because clients interpret reality subjectively.
Another interesting interpersonal communication phenomenon is what the NLP community calls representational systems. People describe their experi-ence colored by a certain bias that reflects the way they primarily engage the world. Take the preceding sentence, for example. I used the words colored and reflects, both of which describe a visual representation of the world through my language bias. If someone talks back to me using visual representational terms, they are talking my language! At an unconscious level, we are in a beautiful rapport. If on the other hand, you tell me that you cannot get a handle on the computer program you are trying to learn and that this makes you uptight and feels like trying to grab hold of sand that keeps slipping through your fingers, you are coming from a completely different representational system—a-kines-thetic and/or proprioceptive one. One of the reasons couples frequently have
“communication difficulties” is because they are speaking in different repre-sentational systems. In addition to visual and kinesthetic/proprioceptive, there is also auditory, olfactory/gustatory, and extrasensory biases. Being aware of representational systems allows me to establish even deeper rapport with clients (by matching and pacing their language patterns and overlapping repre-sentational systems) and thereby to further deepen and guide their experience.
It should be noted that the more conscious the therapist is of these hypnotic phenomena, the more respectfully and responsibly the therapist will manage the healing process within the therapeutic relationship.
Manual muscle testing (MMT) itself is a very hypnotic interaction. Though it may not seem so, I am often using commands and being very directive.
Clients agree to comply with me by holding their arms out for various lengths of time, and consequently they experience bilateral arm catalepsy or relative degrees of arms-extended rigidity. In the jargon of process-oriented psychology, I am eliciting what for most Western people are the most unoccupied of all of the perceptual channels, namely kinesthesia and proprioception. This combina-tion of authoritative commands (i.e., “Hold your arms out please”), bilateral arm catalepsy, and stimulation of the two least-occupied perceptual channels creates an immediate hypnotic trance characterized by great receptivity to posi-tive suggestions for construcposi-tive therapeutic change. In the therapeutic inter- action, as the clientʼs trance deepens, I simply state “arms,” or even just hold my arms out in front of me, and the clientʼs arms rise up to meet my own as if magnetized to my hands. Directives are hypnotic communications whose goal is to motivate the client to achieve a positive therapeutic outcome. Watzlawick (1978) describes the use of those “linguistic structures which have a virtually
hypnotic effect without the use of trance” as hypnotherapy without trance. He points out that all of hypnosis is characterized by the words “Do this.”
Additionally, the face-to-face positioning that occurs during MMT directs clients inward as I speak and look into their eyes, creating another unconscious, relational agreement to comply. Since respectful hypnosis is always consensual, clients agree by their actions to go into an internal orientation and, therefore, into a state of heightened hypnotic suggestibility. This is largely because my directions and interventions in a new paradigm are constantly disrupting clientsʼ normal cognitive processes.
Another dimension of the muscle testing relational context is how often clients volunteer to close their eyes when I preface questions with “From your inner wisdom” or “From your soul.” These phrases create a mild confusion state as clients use TDS to search for their personal meaning of inner wisdom or soul. Also, clinical hypnotherapists know that eyes closed, eyes opened, eyes closed, and so forth create a deepening hypnotic state of openness to posi- tive suggestion. As a footnote to this, when clients tap on their own meridian points or chakra centers, I frequently observe them spontaneously closing and opening their eyes, going into deep hypnotic trance.
Asking clients who are being muscle tested if they have cleared all “nega- tive emotional charge” at all six levels (conscious, unconscious, body, soul, auric field, and chakras) is another confusion technique. This is because most-clients do not have reliable internal reference points for the words unconscious, soul, auric field, and chakra that they consciously understand.
Thus, I am placing onto clientsʼ other “nonreference points” yet another layer of experience that their conscious minds will probably have trouble fitting into their worldview of everyday experience. This adds to clientsʼ deepening internal orientation, creating greater openness to new possibilities outside of their normal conscious, conceptual framework of the world. This is helpful because searching within the same familiar framework where the problem first originated often is not the most expeditious road to change. As clients con-tinue to wonder what is happening in their experience and concon-tinue to inquire internally, their response potential for deeper healing continues to grow. This is because the therapeutic interpersonal context is being both supported and facilitated by the process of waking hypnosis. Altered states of consciousness are consistently being generated within this larger context of waking hypnosis (i.e., hypnotic trance), and it is within the experience of these altered states that profound, transformative energetic healing occurs.