Do you know that optics is the only field that has ever claimed to be closed? If you read the literature from the 'forties and 'fifties, opticians thought there was nothing more to discover. Now it's opened again. Recently there have been some whackos who blew the field apart completely with light fibers and lasers and holograms. However, earlier introductory texts actually stated that the field of optics was a completely closed science! They claimed proudly that they knew everything that could be known, and that theirs was the only closed science.
The behavior of most modern eye doctors is still based on the idea that optics is a closed field. Most eye doctors have a very strong and very limited belief system about what is possible. Corrective lenses were originally designed to correct your eyeballs. Originally they gave you one set of glasses to wear for about three days, and then a weaker set for another three days, and so on, until your eyes got better. Then you gave all of the glasses back to the doctor. They don't do that anymore. Now they sell you one, and you keep it until your eyes go one way or another, and then they sell you another pair.
Man: So how about myopia? You say your cure for myopia is teaching people how to focus. How do you do that?
The way I go about that is to regress them to a time before they first wore glasses. Then I test their eyes, to make sure that they did not have myopia at that age. When I bring them back to their present age, I leave them with "child eyes" and grow up everything else from the eyeball out. I don't know what that means, but I've done it with a lot of people and it has worked.
I discovered this method when I did age–regression with someone who wore glasses. We used to do weird hypnosis groups where we just went around and zoned everybody out. I had age–regressed a man who was wearing glasses, and as he got younger, he couldn't see anymore. He was regressed to five years old, and he said "Hi there. I can't see anything. Why do I have to have this thing on my face?" and he reached up and took his glasses off.
I became curious, so I gave him a fairly standard eye test with his glasses off. I didn't have an eye chart, but there were letters on a poster on the wall, and I asked him to tell me what the letters were. He didn't know the names of the letters, so I had him draw them for me. He drew whatever he saw with squiggly lines. His writing was just like a child's. Then I brought him back up to be an adult and gave him the same test. Without his glasses he could no longer tell what the letters were. I regressed him to five years old, and he could see again. That was spontaneous. I gave no suggestions for that to occur. When I brought him out the last time, I gave him these instructions: "Now your eyes are going to stay five years old, and the rest of you is going to grow up." That's all it took for him to be able to see.
Woman: Did you do that all at one time?
Yes, during one evening. The results lasted for about two months, and then slowly his eyes started to get bad again. That's when \ started using reframing to find out what his purpose was for having blurry eyes. It turned out that over the years he had learned to do lots of things by having blurry eyes. Ordinarily he had what we call "see–feel circuits." When he looked at something, he instantly had feelings about it. Having blurry vision stopped the sec–feel circuit. During a time of stress, if he couldn't see something unpleasant, he wouldn't have the unpleasant feelings. I had to give him other ways of interrupting see–feel circuits, to take care of the secondary gain that came from having blurred vision.
Man: That's difficult with contacts. I wear contacts and I can't just take contacts off in times of stress like I could glasses. So I've learned how to defocus with my contacts still on.
You have an interesting presupposition, which is that you have to blur things somehow. You're assuming that in times of stress you don't want to be able to see what's going on until you can cope. It seems to me that times of stress are times when it's particularly useful to be able to see clearly. As soon as you have effective ways of coping, you won't need to blur your vision.
As I said before, years ago Bates came up with eye exercises to improve vision. For the most part his program was very successful, although it took time and was a lot of work. The main drawback was that the Bates program didn't deal with secondary gain. So if you were diligent and exercised, you could wipe out the only way you had to do something useful. That part of you would have to come up with a new way. It's a lot easier to change if you don't have to overcome your own internal parts.
Woman: Could you use reframing for weight problems?
That's definitely a heavy subject. Ambiguity is very important in hypnosis, you know. Obesity is no different than most anything else. You can do it with reframing.
Woman: Well, 1 haven't had much success. I've done reframing and clients have lost weight, but then they haven't been able to maintain their new weight.
Well, think about it, There is something which makes it more advantageous for them to be fat than to be thin. One possibility is that none of their responses will work as a thin person. The choices that they have available as a human being work as a fat person, but not as a thin person. If you grew up your whole life being heavy, you were never
the fastest runner. You were never the first one chosen to be on
your
track team. You weren't the first one chosen to be a square dancer. There are lots of experiences that you didn't have, which constitute the basis for knowing how to respond as a thin person.
If this is the case for your clients, you could create an alternative childhood for them—one that contains experiences which serve as a basis for responding in new ways as an adult. I do that with most people in whom I make radical changes.
In what I just said, I'm making assumptions about what the second ary gain is. I would use reframing to find out which part gets her to get fat again. I would find out what it does for her, and then I would know what experiences to provide.
One very nice thing about hypnosis is it gives you the ability to create alternative history. Erickson's story about the "February Man" is a good example. Erickson had a woman come in who didn't know how to bring up children and be kind to them and be a good parent, because she hadn't had one. She had been raised by governesses. Erickson went back into her personal history and appeared every so often as the "February Man" and gave her the experiences she was missing. Those experiences then provided her with the basis upon which to relate to her own children.
Hypnosis is just a tool. You can do just about anything with it. It's a tool to create any context or any response. But you have to know what response you want in order to be systematically effective.
Woman: I have a question about dealing with smoking. Could you regress somebody to a time just before they smoked and then reframe her to go the other way? She decided to smoke at some point, so could you reframe her to make some other choice?
Yes, and then she'll end up having total amnesia for ever having been a smoker. That's a slick move; however, you have to be very careful when you do things like that. I've done that with people. I've hypnotized them and removed their knowledge of ever having been smokers. I have regressed them to before they smoked and then given them an entirely different set of experiences. The problem is that other people in their lives began to think they were nuts.
If you do this with someone who has just moved to a new city, it doesn't matter, I did this with a client who was married, and when she got home, her husband offered her a cigarette. She said " I don't want one of those." "All right" he said, "You quit, huh?" She looked at him and said "I never smoked." He said "Don't give me that. You've smoked for twenty years." "I never smoked in my life!"
Woman: You could give the person amnesia for those conversations, too.
You could, but if you do it that way, you have to keep building on the change. You have to have her go into an amnesic state every time somebody says "Oh, you used to smoke." She will eventually begin to become confused and disoriented, because so much of her experience is in the amnesic state. She has yellow stains on her teeth, and she doesn't know where those stains came from. She asks her dentist, and the dentist says Smoking stains. She says "But I've never smoked." The dentist says "You're kidding!" Your client says congruently "No, I've never smoked." The dentist then writes a journal article about this new phenomenon.