Beyond Hypnotherapy Part I

As a starting point let me just say that I do know hypnotherapy from the inside out. In fact, people have suggested on more than one occasion that I put them into trance through the way I talk and look at them. And I also enjoyed doing hypnotherapy. In my experience however, I do something else now. Instead of hypnotizing a person and regressing them to an earlier stage in their own lives or what we might call past lives, I find it far more powerful to have my clients speak directly to the one who is traumatized. To put it differently, I don’t think my clients are the ones that have the problem, so why would I regress them?! 

In order to understand this perspective, we have to open to the real possibility that all of us are multiples. The only difference between those of us that don’t believe we are multiples and those that we say have Dissociative Identity Disorder (previously Multiple Personality Disorder) is whether our communities have containers or if there are no containers. 

Since in “our” experience, every one of us that has been traumatized is here in the here and now, why not talk with them directly? When we are traumatized in that moment it is like a new person is born into the world. They have a body just like we do. We happen to call their body some kind of discomfort. 

So in our experience, the best way to do trauma work to relieve suffering, is to choose to bring all of our awareness to the body sensation that is associated with the suffering. Then we are talking directly to the person who is suffering, and not to the client. It is that person, whose proper name is “name of the sensation” who has come to share their story.  So why would I talk to the client anymore than if I wanted to know what was going on with you I would ask someone else?

In our experience, the advantages to this are legion. The first advantage is that it externalizes the problem. No longer is it that I am traumatized in the here and now when nothing is happening, it is some other aspect of beingness that is traumatized. So I as the host who holds and witnesses and remembers this other one, no longer identifies at all with this other person or being. So it is like I am simultaneously choosing to bring my awareness to them while holding them. There is an immediacy that happens when we do this that is different from when you “hypnotize” someone and regress them. 

Furthermore, from a pragmatic point of view, not only is this way of working more elegant, but far more efficient. If I hypnotize someone I have to relax them and send them on a journey to find someone. Why should I do that when someone is here right now waiting to be found and listened to? So when we work this way, all we have to do is choose to bring all our awareness to the sensation that is associated with this other being, whether they are younger aspects of the Self or other beings altogether, like our ancestors, and open to them in the here and now. We don’t have to relax them, we just have to have them talk with someone else. 

The biggest advantage of this way of working is that in our experience is that it is virtually impossible to ever be retraumatized. Since we do not regress the client to age 2 but have them host, hold, witness, and remember the 2 year old that is here right now, the client invariably no longer identifies with the 2 year old, but identifies with the witnessing host. In this way it is like on a soul level we are reparenting ourselves. What could be finer?- Andy