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Ep. 30: Hypnosis For Trauma
203 Plays3 years ago
Many people are wanting to let go of the impact that past traumatic experiences have on their life. Discover how and why hypnosis can help.
In this episode you will learn:
- What to consider when getting help for trauma.
- Ways to know that you have let go of trauma.
- How hypnosis works for trauma, and how it differs from therapy and hypnotic regression.
- For therapists, hypnotists and other healers: discover how learning hypnosis for trauma can help you help your clients.
Scott McFall is the founder of the Master Hypnotist Society, and has seen tens of thousands of clients over the past 35+ years. You can reach him at https://www.hypnosisconnection.com.
To find out more about how hypnosis training can help you get your goals, go to https://www.hypnosistrainingcanada.com
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Transcript
Misconceptions of Trauma Healing
00:00:00
Speaker
A lot of people believe that just exposing the cause of the trauma is the solution and it really isn't. I mean, there's the process of letting it go, the process of forgiving it, the process of running its course.
00:00:13
Speaker
and getting them to where acceptance is taking place and adaptation and adjustment is really taking place is the point. And so when they adapt to the trauma or the sensitizing event, that whole strategy of adapting to the sensitizing event is a different adaptation than regular everyday life. That can cause thrill seeking to infinity.
00:00:35
Speaker
because they don't want to come down out of the intensity of it, or it can cause avoiding stimulus and wanting to be almost hiding out, because they can choose many different ways to react to the same event. There's not one way that a person responds to that stimulus, is there?
00:00:53
Speaker
You want to transform yourself and improve your life. You long to help people. You wish to become healthier, happier, and more successful. This show is your opportunity to learn how to use hypnosis to make your life better. Each week, hypnotist Robbie Spear Miller interviews people who have already changed their lives in amazing ways with hypnosis.
00:01:17
Speaker
These models can help you discover your path to making the most of your life. If you want to learn how hypnosis can help you reach your goals, this show is for you.
Introduction to Hypnosis for Trauma
00:01:29
Speaker
Hello everybody, this is Robbie Spear-Miller, your host for the Hypnosis Show podcast. Today we are joined once again by Scott McFall and the topic we're going to talk about today is about overcoming trauma and the path to do that that we would recommend in terms of hypnosis and how that could complement other avenues that people might be taking.
00:01:54
Speaker
Scott has been, he's worked with tens of thousands of clients. He's been doing this for over 35 years. He's been my mentor for about 15 years and taught me everything I know. And he has helped many, many people.
00:02:11
Speaker
I wanted to mention, in helping people to get over what you're talking about, there's just so much to think about because really, in NLP, they call some of that stuff compulsion blowout, or belief blowout, where somebody's going along and everything's fine, and all of a sudden, they have some kind of
00:02:34
Speaker
disillusioning event. Like for some people divorce isn't that big of a deal. For other people it really is as though they've been thrown off a building.
Diverse Responses to Trauma
00:02:44
Speaker
I mean, the terror of it is awful, right? For some people having a health problem is something they're accepting while other people are completely traumatized by it. So what is one person's trauma?
00:02:59
Speaker
may not traumatize another. What is one person's overwhelm might not overwhelm another. And it really does have a great deal to do with expectation, don't you think? I think that everyone likes soap operas. Everyone likes a drama at the movies. There's no movie that goes, let's have a tepid hour and a half.
00:03:24
Speaker
Let's have a nice, easy going hour and a half, right? So the issue is that as we grow up watching the movies, you understand that not only do we have the secondary benefit of sympathy that comes from other people after we get overwhelmed or shocked or go through some kind of trauma, but we also have the fact that our life starts to fit almost like the plot of a film. And we have more of our expectations built by cinema
00:03:52
Speaker
than we do by academics. We have more of our expectations built by certain stories than we do by real life. So I think as a practitioner recognizing that the client is telling you a story and you're empathizing with them and you're in rapport, and it becomes pretty hard to remember that it doesn't have to be a trauma.
Therapist Approach to Client Narratives
00:04:14
Speaker
Maybe it started out as a trauma, maybe it started out as that bad,
00:04:17
Speaker
And it could be a trauma like a soldier in war or in a way getting injured. It could be somebody finding out that someone they were close to was trying to kill them. It could be as simple as losing a job, or it could be the terror of having something very bad happen to a child in our family.
00:04:40
Speaker
But what we'll call these are deal breakers in the brain for why we're allowed to like life or calm down or chase a dream and whatnot. So if you've never been through one,
00:05:03
Speaker
It's hard to recognize how much of that can be physical. And that's why often, you know, if you're a licensed track professional, working with these cases is a certain way. You need to check with your jurisdiction to find out if you're a consulting hypnotist, what you can and cannot do with these types of cases should always operate in your scope of practice. But I think that our first big thing to recognize is that, wow,
00:05:27
Speaker
you know, their nervous system is in a type of shock, fight or flight, or in an alternative universe trying to deny what they've been through, or not cope with what they've been through. Because there's no reference for how or why you would cope with such a thing. Right? So, you know, I think that our first framework has to be
00:05:56
Speaker
recognizing that you might be dealing with someone going past that shock. I mean, true, like physical shock threshold when it doesn't seem like what they're reporting in their history is that big. Whereas you also could be hearing a story that's truly sounds traumatic and their nervous system, that person's nervous system may never have got anywhere near shock or trauma.
00:06:23
Speaker
So it's difficult to wrap our mind around that the actual story, the actual historical things that happened, aren't what determined this shock or this trouble. It's hard to, hard to process. So the perception of the person in relation to what happened is the thing that makes the difference. Yes, it sure is.
00:06:49
Speaker
It sure is. Now, how this helps us is we start to not get sucked into the story and believe that there's no other way for them to see it. You get that idea? So, I mean, that's just my opening frame to the topic. I mean, ask away anything you'd like from me.
00:07:12
Speaker
So with what you just said, a lot of people who like to help people think that to be a good person, they must get sucked into the story or feel sympathy for the person and approach it from that point of view.
00:07:27
Speaker
And so I've found with people who train here to be hypnotists that that's something that we need to help people row through so that people like soap operas and they also like to feel like they're a good person. So sometimes that's the focus that people have when they're helping people with this sort of thing. I guess all I can share on that subject is what my belief is.
00:07:53
Speaker
In order to be a good person, I must follow the process for that client to get them where they need to go. Now that is different then, in order to be a good person, I must go into sympathy to prove I care. I'll get in rapport with that person to a degree, but if I need to interrupt a pattern or if I need to go a different way or I need to use a different modality,
00:08:23
Speaker
including possibly the ending of the therapeutic relationship with that person or, or shifting and creating a conflict, which is definitely a very small percentage of cases. But I mean, that does come up and you need to be flexible enough to do what that person needs. Do you not? Yes, for sure. So I think that my belief on it is in order to be a competent person in that role,
00:08:51
Speaker
I need to be willing to do what it takes to take them through going from denial to anger, to bargaining, to sadness, to acceptance, and then from acceptance to the way that they're going to heal at this point.
00:09:06
Speaker
Now, if they have real physical trauma, I'd probably take them through it until they can become neutral about it in hypnosis, but not much. And I would use a structure like timeline from an LP rather than traditional regression, which we'll talk about on a separate podcast someday. But like why, why use modalities that work better than
00:09:27
Speaker
you know, associated regression, because we don't wanna really install a false memory and we don't wanna cause false cause and effect relationships or get them to miss other things or whatever. So there's all kinds of reasons why we would use a certain way to process what they've gone through physically. What you're looking for is that they come down off of that heightened sense of alert or that heightened sense of dissociation.
00:09:55
Speaker
And you're looking for their being able to associate and dissociate in a normal flow like they would to some degree if the trauma hadn't occurred. I mean, you're, you're trying to either see them not coping by always dissociating and over analyzing, or you're trying to see them not cope by, you know, being in hyper vigilant intensity.
Post-Trauma Life Enjoyment
00:10:17
Speaker
You know, you're, you're trying to see that they can,
00:10:20
Speaker
their mind can focus on others in a normal timeframe, focus on themselves in a normal timeframe, focus dissociated in thinking and associated and enjoying or whatever in, let's say, a casual, easy going way, or at least a useful, mostly accurate way. And you're doing various techniques until you see that taking place. But I think that
00:10:47
Speaker
A lot of people believe that just exposing the cause of the trauma is the solution and it really isn't. I mean, there's the process of letting it go, the process of forgiving it, the process of running its course.
00:11:00
Speaker
and getting them to where acceptance is taking place and adaptation and adjustment is really taking place is the point. And so when they adapt to the trauma or the sensitizing event, that whole strategy of adapting to the sensitizing event is a different adaptation than regular everyday life. That can cause thrill seeking to infinity.
00:11:24
Speaker
because they don't want to come down out of the intensity of it, or it can cause avoiding stimulus and wanting to be almost hiding out because they can choose many different ways to react to the same event. There's not one way that a person responds to that stimulus, is there? So, you know, whatever technique you're doing, you're looking for them loving everyday life.
00:11:52
Speaker
enjoying everyday life, having a relationship with everyday life where they're not feeling different than the rest of the population in a radical way.
00:12:04
Speaker
A few months ago, I had an inquiry from somebody who said that they had been sexually abused as a child, and now they're happy in their life now, but it still crops up every now and again. It's still an issue, but it's not like a major issue. And so this person was concerned about getting help because they were worried that it would open a can of worms when mostly things are going well.
00:12:30
Speaker
And so I was wondering what your advice would be to somebody in that situation. Well, there aren't just there isn't just one type of person in that situation. There's a population of people who really went through it. There's a population of people who have created false memory because of bad therapeutics or there are people who have that happen because they're trying so desperately to figure out why they feel a certain way.
00:12:55
Speaker
So you have people who really went through it. You have people who are pretty sure they went through it, but may or may not have, may or may not have. You have a population of people who have really adjusted pretty well. You have a population of people who very much did not adjust very well. Okay. And so if you're a licensed track person and you deal with those kinds of cases, I'd have one set of advice.
00:13:22
Speaker
if it's outside of your scoped practice, I would refer it out to somebody else. There's all kinds of insider information based on the thousands of cases I had in the 80s and 90s that I would be able to give feedback about an individual case with someone that was working on it. But there's a lot of variables when a person says what you're saying that this person said. There's hundreds of possible truths.
00:13:50
Speaker
And it's unfortunate, but we have a jump to conclusions, Matt, as we hear the various statements of a client, because we have sociologically been trained to be very careful how we respond to those types of things. And so we don't really have a freedom sociologically to really
00:14:15
Speaker
realize there are probably at least a hundred different ways that that may be either the whole truth, not the truth, really need more investigating, might've been politics and the family in a different way that's unrelated to that specific process or incident.
00:14:40
Speaker
You know, I like to remind people of the case of the guy I regressed who was found
Truths and Hypnosis
00:14:44
Speaker
beaten in his garage. And I've talked about this on your podcast before and the first time he thought it was Martians and then he thought it was demons. And then he finally realized it was his neighbor and his wife. So what people say under hypnosis or what they think in their memory is what they will allow themselves to think and realize that sometimes that can get really peculiar.
00:15:10
Speaker
And hypnosis isn't truth serum. As a matter of fact, truth serum isn't even truth serum. People don't sometimes even know what's going on. So if you want to help people who are wounded, if that's your mission, if you're helping people who've gone through traumatic experiences, a person can be traumatized and not really have a good idea of exactly how they got traumatized.
00:15:43
Speaker
Or even if they think they know, it's just their perception. So they might not... That's true of all of the memories in our life completely, 100%. But what I'm getting at is that the process of getting somebody over a trauma, whether it's a process from NLP or the lexicon of hypnosis activities that we do, or even if it's a traditional therapist trying to, you know, pocket out, let's say,
00:16:13
Speaker
Um, the process of getting somebody through that sort of thing is the process and the content of what actually took place. That's the purview of people like law enforcement. That's the purview of people like attorneys and whatnot. That's not the purview of somebody helping someone to get over a traumatic experience.
00:16:38
Speaker
And so one of the things that we have to know is that the motives of someone coming into our office might not be to heal. The motives might be to be punitive or punishing because they're going through life in resentment or their motives might be to lie in order to create a dynamic for one reason or another because of their own pathology. So there are the people who are the genuine,
00:17:05
Speaker
folks who have gone through very unfortunate things, but they're not the only population of people who present with those problems. And of course, we don't really want to buy us in one way or another, we want to follow a process, whatever that process is.
00:17:23
Speaker
Right. And so how we look at it is that we're focused on what needs to happen next for this person. How do they want to function in their life now and in the future? And so we're just helping them free themselves to do that. We don't really care what happened. The story doesn't matter.
00:17:40
Speaker
Well, not the details of the story. Maybe we know they need to forgive the past, whether it's forgive themselves or forgive the other situation, or maybe we know that they need to adjust and reframe their experience in one way or another from the past. Maybe we know that, but we know it in a very general way, in a context. Then we are also focusing on what do they need to do in the future, in a context. But the very specific things
00:18:07
Speaker
The details of it are not where the person is going to adjust, adapt or change. That's where they're going to convince themselves they're stuck or they're going to label themselves. And of course that's not what our outcome is, is it? So we, meaning the ubiquitous, all people who want to help people to heal or change or grow,
00:18:34
Speaker
all the various teachers and coaches and therapists and people who are in that role, we have our own biases and our own beliefs. Some people need to be a hero and some people wanna be, they're a healthy helper where the most important thing is that they've helped the big trauma. I met one therapist once whose entire life was that he believed he was the only person who could do all this stuff. And the thing that was ironic about this guy is he was a dentist.
00:19:02
Speaker
but he believed he was the best change worker in hypnosis. And the thing is, the basic point is that we have our own personality and we have our own biases and we have our own egos and we have our own all kinds of stuff in the way. And what the processes do is they help us to get those out of the way.
00:19:24
Speaker
So I'm not really focused on which processes to use in this kind of a podcast. That's more for a training or a, you know, a paid environment or whatever. And of course we teach different things if your scope of practice is that your license track versus if you're a consulting hypnotist because the jurisdictions in various areas allow different activities. So, you know, we have to understand who should be doing which activity, of course. But I think that our, our main,
00:19:54
Speaker
point is that there's no direct correlation between the specifics of what happened and what that person might need to do to adjust, heal, grow, adapt, change, right? So did you have any other questions or thoughts about this?
00:20:17
Speaker
Yeah, so for people who may not know about how we use things like forgiveness or some other techniques in hypnosis to help with this sort of thing, can you just generally address what the difference is between something like talk therapy or regression and the approach that we will use with people? Well, think about it sort of like this. Some approaches to change are what we'll call
00:20:48
Speaker
relationship-based, like they go from dependency to independence to intra-dependence, or they take the person from dependent to independent, for example. And the whole idea is that they're, they're depending on the therapist and then they're no longer depending on the therapist, for example, and so on, right? So when you think about things like, oh, the fact that some, I once heard a psychologist joke, I have 60 clients my first year in practice, and I'll retire with the same 60 clients.
00:21:18
Speaker
Oh, that doesn't sound like a very good way to go about it, right? So some activities are based upon in that mode are based on the relationship itself. Other modes are based upon revelation that the revealing of the cause is curative in itself.
Nature of Change: Beyond Content
00:21:39
Speaker
And I find that to be false most of the time. I think that you know a lot of people who've been complaining about the same thing that they know happened for 20 years or more. And the revealing of it did not make them change their mind or make them better or make them different, right? So there are certain modalities with regard to how the nervous system sees something in the brain in the visual storage of the brain, or hears it in the auditory storage of the brain, or feels it in the body in the neurology,
00:22:08
Speaker
that is sensory based, the talking in the head is only labeling those real senses, sight, sound, and touch, taste and smell, and the actual kinesthetic response within the body to those emotions, which is why sometimes when people are getting massage therapy, a muscle will let go in the cathart, for example, because they're storing that in the way they're holding the body or whatever. That also happens sometimes during acupuncture.
00:22:35
Speaker
We are aware that, or at least the evidence seems to support that an approach that has to do with how they're seeing it, how they're hearing it, how they're feeling it, how they're shifting it, and whether or not they can shift their perspective upon it determines whether they can change, heal, grow, let go of something and so on.
00:22:58
Speaker
So the first way that it's different is it's not content driven. It's how the sensory storage is working and where and how they're storing it and what that means to that individual with regard to how they're feeling in the body, how they're seeing it, what their strategy for adapting happens to be. So we're working on that general overall strategy and how that feeling is in the nervous system far more than we're dealing with content, for example. That's one difference.
00:23:28
Speaker
OK. But there's other ways to look at it, but it starts to get complicated enough that it, again, would deserve a whole training. So I don't think we should go anymore in the weeds there. OK. All right. So if we have people who are traditional therapists who are wondering, should I get training in hypnosis to my practice, talk a little bit about how this complements or works with what they may be doing already.
00:23:59
Speaker
Well, it doesn't always.
Trial of Hypnosis in Therapy
00:24:02
Speaker
Sometimes they're better off trying this on its own in its purest form first before trying to blend it. You might have a good salad and good ice cream, but you don't want to put the salad and ice cream together. So sometimes they need to try it on its own and step away from what they were doing for a while to realize why this works and how it works in the way it works. It's very difficult to get them to do that because most of them want to be very eclectic and just add it to what they already know.
00:24:30
Speaker
They want to pick and choose based on their previous experiences. To those people, I would say talk to Daniel Burrow, talk to Julie Nice, a lot of the license track people we've trained in the past, perhaps read Dan's book, A Bigger Picture, where he moved from being a psychologist traditionally to using a lot of the modalities of hypnosis and so on. And I would say perhaps check with the people who've done this before to realize the various
00:25:01
Speaker
things that people do in license track to make this take longer than it should take to learn or how they can dismiss something that works great because they're trying to blend it with a different theory too early. So sometimes it really is a compliment to what they were doing in the past. And sometimes it really does plug in, right? But there are a high percentage of people who come in and train where it takes them an extra chapter because they're trying to combine things too early.
00:25:29
Speaker
They're not mastering what they're learning here with enough purity to understand what's happening and why it's working.
00:25:38
Speaker
Right. And I've seen that as well with some hypnotists who've been trained elsewhere and perhaps they already use regression. Sometimes they've healed themselves or they believe they've healed themselves with regression. And when they've had that experience, they feel very attached to it. And so them willing to be open to discovering something new and something that really is generally safer and easier for people can be challenging.
00:26:06
Speaker
Well, the thing is the emotional drama of catharsis and abreaction makes people think that catharsis and abreaction are curative in themselves. And I radically disagree with that. But the basic point that I'm getting at with your point is well taken. And I've gone through decades of retraining hypnotists.
00:26:26
Speaker
and the vanity of being able to have the intimacy and emotion and drama that surrounds associated regression. It's very difficult to get them to let go of the transference and reverse transference that happens around that model and the admiration they think they're getting from clients. And it's hard to get them to understand that it would be different and better or that they'd have even more admiration with a different model.
00:26:57
Speaker
because there's so much transference, so much reverse transference, and so much what they're thinking of as magical revelation and drama. And of course, I practiced that way my first five years. I know what they think. I know how they're feeling. But you know, they're the only one who's ever done it in their head or something. You know, because their clients are telling them, oh, you're the only one who ever helped me. Oh, thank God you're here. And they don't realize the client is telling that to every therapist they saw.
00:27:26
Speaker
Right. And there is an ethics point here too, because if we have a safer way to help people than them having to go through something like regression, it really is a good idea for people to learn it who are helping others so that they can.
Ethics and Liabilities in Regression
00:27:43
Speaker
Well, it's a huge ethics point, but it's also a huge ethics point with regard to most of the lawsuits or issues that happen with hypnosis happen around regression.
00:27:54
Speaker
Okay. So it's not just the client that is handled better. It also protects the hypnotist better because the hypnotist has less liability problems if they're not opening the client to false memory and so on. And then rates are proof of that because the insurance company is charged extra for people that do regression. Right. And so, and the, and the reason for that is not
00:28:21
Speaker
because of its wild results, it's because of the problems with it. But of course, you know, that's not how the industry talks about it. But this call isn't really about that. And I know that, so I don't want to get too caught up in that either. But in order to help people with past trauma,
00:28:39
Speaker
The point that we are making is that you want to learn steps that tend to assist in that process. And then after you learn those steps, you want to apply those steps as routinely as possible rather than getting caught up in the story. You don't want to empathize to the point where you are not effective. And the best analogy for that is don't get into the quicksand with the person you're trying to pull out.
00:29:09
Speaker
and you just have two people dying in quicksand. So do you have other questions you're after? I think that that covers the key points that I felt the audience would like to hear about this. So unless there's anything else you want to share on this theme. You know, we're doing the advanced training down here in Orlando this weekend. And a lot of those people have already been hypnotists for decades. And when we're doing an advanced training, what we're talking about is blending many dozens of techniques that happen simultaneously in layers.
00:29:40
Speaker
And so a lot of the time when people are in basic or in there and maybe the intermediate, the amount of experience that it takes to recognize what might be wrong with a technique, a lot of people don't have enough clients to realize what a person who's advanced and has seen thousands and thousands of people knows. Because if you see 10 people in a row that you think things went okay with, you're thinking this is going great.
00:30:10
Speaker
But a hundred people later, you go, oh, wait a minute. This isn't how I thought it was. To even add to that, it may seem to be growing great in the moment, but what happens when they go back into their real life and life unfolds? Well, what you're adding is very smart. And that's why we have programs instead of single sessions. We don't allow single session processes because if you never have any follow-up, you never have any accountability, not for the hypnotist or for the client.
00:30:39
Speaker
And that's just nonsensical. Personally, it's hugging. Everybody thinks everything's great. High five, high five. Nobody knows what happens after that. And just calling them and asking them is not enough. So I agree. Accountability is the key. And I appreciate that. Thanks for interviewing me, Robbie. I look forward, are you, I can't remember, are you coming to this or are you showing up in? I'll be there tomorrow, one o'clock. All right, well go have fun. We'll talk to you soon. All right, great. Thanks a lot. Bye.
00:31:09
Speaker
If you are wondering how hypnosis can help you with weight loss, next week you will get the chance to meet two people who have tried everything and finally learned how to realistically lose weight with hypnosis. They will share with you their experiences of how hypnosis was the difference that made the difference for them.
00:31:26
Speaker
And to find out more about how hypnosis training can help you, go to HypnosisTrainingCanada.com for more info and to schedule your free consultation. Remember to click the button to subscribe, share the podcast with a friend, and please leave us a review so you can help others benefit from the podcast too. Until next week.
00:31:48
Speaker
You've been listening to The Hypnosis Show with Robbie Spear Miller. Tune in next time to learn more about how you can change your life with hypnosis. And if you are interested in learning more about training opportunities, go to hypnosistrainingcanada.com and schedule a free consultation.