The Adventures of a Hypnotherapist

The Adventures of a Hypnotherapist

By Steve Burgess (www.o-books.com)

OUT JUNE 1st

Face to Face with a Death Sentence

Early in 1994 a new client with a life-threatening illness turned up at my consulting rooms desperate for help. Emma, an attractive woman in her early 30s, had to be helped up the stairs to my office by her mother and a friend. She was so thin that she looked like a human stick insect. She flopped down in the reclining chair that I used for hypnosis sessions and told me that she had been given 6 months to live by her specialist at the local hospital. She was suffering from a rare disease called Focal Nodular Hyperplasia (no, I’d never heard of it either until that day). Focal Nodular Hyperplasia is a disease in which non-cancerous tumours grow on the liver. Emma’s FNH was unusually aggressive in that the tumours were growing rapidly. The resulting pain, not just from the diseased liver but particularly from the pressure that the tumours were placing upon her internal organs, was immense. She was in agony most of the time and doped up to the eyeballs on morphine. This meant that she hardly knew which day of the week it was (a Tuesday, actually, though why you need to know that is beyond me). She had experienced surgery twice as the medics tried to help her; both times disastrously.

Emma lived alone with her 5-year-old daughter, but for the past few months she had been unable to look after her daughter or spend quality time with her because of the chronic pain she was suffering from. She was highly allergic to painkillers, so much so that just one aspirin could kill her (I told her not to take any in that case, just to be on the safe side!). She was so ill that she spent most of each day lying in pain on her bed. She had no appetite as she felt sick most of the time (if she did eat, she would often vomit it back up again) resulting in a significant loss of weight. In the weight loss world this is known as the ‘near death diet’ and is not a diet usually recommended by Weight Watchers.

Emma sat in front of me in a daze, lines of pain on her face and on the verge of tears. She felt exhausted by the battle to survive, by the constant, debilitating pain, and by the side effects of the various drugs that she had been given by her doctor and the specialists at the hospital. 

My heart went out to her as I listened to her story. She had almost lost all hope that she could survive the illness. The unremitting pain was dragging her down and the National Health Service Consultant assigned to her had completely given up on her. It was he who had pronounced her death sentence, giving her no more than 6 months to live. With a look of unbearable sadness on her face she told me ‘You’re my final resort, my last hope’. So, no pressure there then!

I wondered just how could I help her? Yes, I knew the amazing power of the subconscious mind. Also, I had often read of people who were close to death suffering from apparently incurable illnesses and who had been given up on by their doctors. Somehow, they had found the miracle that they were looking for and come back to health again. Sometimes they had visited a healer or a complementary therapist and had been healed of their complaint. Sometimes they had changed their lifestyle or their diet, or found that affirmations or meditation had brought them back to life again. I had read of one woman who had only a short time to live as most of her internal organs had stopped working; she had begun sending love over and over to every organ in her body and over time she recovered and was completely well again. 

But here I was face to face with a human being who was clearly on the downward slope and who might not survive the walk back down my stairs at the end of our appointment, let alone get through the next few weeks. I felt completely daunted by the challenge. Did I seriously think that I could help her? And what if I couldn’t? Here was a massively serious situation, quite unlike anything I had been faced with during my previous two years as a Hypnotherapist.

I was used to treating traumas, phobias and anxiety, helping people to stop smoking and lose weight, but nothing as serious as this. I was well-trained and had done a lot of research into different ways of using hypnosis, so I knew the theory of what could help Emma, but knowing theory and putting it into practice in real life are two entirely different things. Something inside me, though, drove me on to accept the challenge. It may have been that I was subconsciously playing out some archetypal knight in shining armour rescues damsel-in-distress role, or it may have been that I was over-confident in my abilities as a therapist, but I prefer to believe that it was my Higher Self, my subconscious mind, that already knew that working with Emma was the right thing to do. Having facilitated so many thousands of therapy sessions, I now know from experience that the subconscious often knows what is going to happen to us in advance of it happening. Before I continue with Emma’s story, let me share with you an example of this phenomena.

The ‘father’ of modern-day hypnotherapy was called Milton Erickson. An American psychiatrist, he became interested in hypnosis and subsequently used hypnotherapy with many of his patients, in incredibly creative ways. He always believed that his patient’s subconscious knew best and he revolutionised the way in which hypnotherapy was used. An example of the way in which the subconscious knows the future is exemplified by the time when Erickson was demonstrating a therapy technique known as ‘Automatic Writing’ to a psychology department at an American university. 

With this technique, the hypnotised person is told that they will open their eyes and write something on a piece of paper. They don’t have to know what it is they are writing but they will find a word or some words will just come into their mind all by themselves when they are given a piece of paper and a pen by the therapist. They are then instructed to open their eyes and are given paper and a pen. They write a word or some words down, give the paper and pen back to the therapist, close their eyes and go back into hypnosis. The technique can be used to uncover a clue or to gain some insights that can be used to resolve the problem that they are working on in therapy. When they come out of trance at the end of the session they may or may not remember writing the words. 

In this case, Erickson demonstrated on a lady called Peggy. In front of a group of students he took her into trance, gave her suggestions that she would write something on a piece of paper and then go back into trance. She did this, but once she had written something she automatically folded the piece of paper up and put it in her bag. Then she closed her eyes and went back into trance. Later, when he brought her out of hypnosis, Erickson didn’t mention anything about this to her, she didn’t talk about it, and she left with everyone else at the end of the meeting. This was in April.

Five months later, in September, Peggy called him at his office, saying that she had found a piece of paper in her bag and she thought that Erickson was in some way connected with it. She didn’t know how the paper got there, but on it (in strange handwriting) was written the words ‘Will I marry Harold?’ 

Erickson confessed that it was something to do with his lecture several months earlier at the university. He asked her if, at the time of his lecture, she was engaged to anyone and she said that she was, but that she was engaged to Bill. He questioned her further and she told him that in April she had no doubts about her engagement to Bill, but then in June she and Bill broke up and in July she got married to a man called Harold! 

In April she had only seen Harold at the university, but she had never met him or talked to him. She only knew him by sight. Her subconscious already knew that she was going to break up with Bill because Harold was the man who truly appealed to her. Erickson felt that the reason that she’d folded the piece of paper up and put it into her bag was that consciously she couldn’t stand facing that fact in April. But the amazing fact was that her subconscious already knew what was going to happen.

So, call it gut instinct or intuition, but my subconscious pushed me into working with Emma, when it would have been easier for me to have turned her down because of the severity of her problem. And I am so glad that I did because it soon transpired that I had two aces up my sleeve. Firstly, Emma was a fighter, with oceans of courage and the determination to beat the illness. Secondly, she was good in trance. This means that she had a natural ability to go into hypnosis, which meant that from our very first hypnosis session her subconscious mind was able to do the work that we needed to do, and to do it effectively. 

When she was ready to go into hypnosis, I asked Emma to gaze on her fingers and I gave her suggestions that her eyelids would start to feel heavy. Within a short time her eyes were closed and she was laid in my reclining chair in a state of deep relaxation. Her breathing was calm and regular, her body was supine and quite still. The speed with which she went into trance told me that she was one of the 25–30% of people who are naturally hypnotic (I call them ‘Number Ones’, for reasons which I’ll explain later). This meant that it was easy for her to enter a state of hypnosis and that she would be able to tap into the power of her subconscious mind in a deeper way than most people. I knew then that we had a good chance of working together to help her to stay alive.

In that first session I simply took Emma into trance and gave her post-hypnotic suggestions that after the session she would feel calm and at peace, that her subconscious would help her to let go of the pain, and that her body and mind would work together to help her to heal. Most importantly, I also asked her to visualise herself completely healed; to run a movie in her mind of how she wanted to be in the future, and to experience the feelings of how that would feel. This type of visualisation, called Positive Future Image Rehearsal (also known as Future Pacing), plants a seed of wellness in the subconscious and gives it something to work towards. If a person keeps imagining themselves how they want to be in the future, and if they regularly experience the feelings of how they want to be, their subconscious will create a journey to take them into that future state. Nowadays this concept has been popularised by the book and the movie The Secret.

When Emma came out of trance, she looked so different to how she had looked 30 minutes earlier. She looked lighter and she told me that she felt calmer than she had felt for months. She also felt optimistic that hypnotherapy might help her. I gave her one of my hypnotherapy recordings to play at home, she made an appointment to see me a week later and she departed, able to walk back down the stairs unaided.

Read more Jaw-dropping therapy sessions from The Adventures of a Hypnotherapist by Steve Burgess available from www.o-books.com or from wherever books are sold.

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