Hypnotherapy and Visualization - The Method

by Eric Greenleaf PhD

All manner of modern psychotherapies use visualization as part of their approach. So, exposure therapies may employ imagining of the feared trigger; EMDR asks patients to call forth a traumatic incident , and positive psychologists employ imagined futures to allow new pathways away from old patterns.

These are very natural uses of the human brain’s function of representation. Not only does language represent reality with symbols, each of which calls forth visual imagination in the mind, but our dreams and daydreams offer spontaneous narratives of imagined pasts and futures. Each narrative is accompanied by emotion and thought. In addition, mental images are imitated in muscle movement sequences in the body. So, if we imagine hitting a tennis ball, our neurons are stimulated in the same sequence as when we actually strike the ball.

To a greater or lesser extent, then, we revivify actual experience in images. Obviously, this gives us the great evolutionary advantage of experimenting with actions without risk to our bodies, and inventing social forms and other tools as well. In therapy, the metaphor of hypnosis has the advantage of promoting realization of experience even when the experience is virtual, or imagined. That is, hypnotized persons, in the close relationship with the hypnotists called “rapport,” experience as real and current those shared imaginings suggested by the hypnotist.

Importantly, these shared imaginings, though literal to the hypnotized person, have metaphorical implications for that person’s life. The hypnotist may speak of a leisurely voyage through the Panama Canal, which the hypnotized person may utilize, while imagining the journey in visual imagination, to soothe his own digestive troubles. This utilization occurs unconsciously through the association of patterns of visual narrative with patterns of neurophysiological function. As Stanislavski says [An Actor Prepares], “Through conscious means we reach the subconscious. … Wherever you have truth and belief; you have feeling and experience. You can test this by executing even the smallest act in which you really believe and you will find that instantly, intuitively and naturally, an emotion will arise …. If you just feel the truthfulness of this (imaginary) act, your intention and subconsciousness will come to your aid. Then superfluous tension will disappear. The necessary muscles will come into action, and all this will happen without the interference of any conscious technique.”

Both Milton Erickson MD, the superb hypnotist and Daniel Day-Lewis the superb actor, would instantly recognize the truth of this depiction. When we enact thoroughly, representing some complex human reality to others and feeling it emotionally and physically within ourselves, we are in a thorough state of trance.

As good improvisers pace and lead their fellow actors, good hypnotherapists pace and lead their patients. In both cases there is a common goal and a shared technique. For the hypnotherapist, the goal is the patient’s goal of healing, wholeness and independence of thought, feeling and action; living life, as Dr Erickson said, “In your own way, in your own good time.”