I've had people who go way down into trance while I am doing unconscious work, and they are doing fine. Suddenly there's a pause, and they come all the way out of trance. They look at me, and I just sit there and look back at them blankly and wait. They look around and then all of a sudden they go back in. I don't even say anything; I just wait. When people come out spontaneously, I'm fairly patient and let them give me something to respond to. A lot of people are floaters. They go in and out of trance. So when they come out, 1 just wait, and then they will go back in, and 1 can continue. Then later they may float back up again. If you ask people to maintain an altered state, you are asking them to do something artificial. You have to be fluid in responding to their varying states.
Man: Could you use reframing for psychosomatic symptoms like headaches?
Reframing is great with psychosomatic problems. You have the option of using the symptom itself for a yes/ no signal. If the symptom is a migraine, for instance, you can have it hurt more for "yes" and less for "no."
Man: A lot of physicians' wives come to see me with psychosomatic symptoms. The symptoms don't do anything for the wives—the physicians just sneer at them and don't give them any attention or do things for them. It's hard to find a secondary gain.
You've already made an assumption about what the secondary gain is: that is has to do with getting attention. In the cases like that that I've done reframing with, the secondary gain has never been to get attention from the husband. It's usually a way of making a fool out of the husband. It's a way to keep the husband from being too pompous about being a doctor, by presenting him with an illness he can't treat.
They must give doctors courses in being pompous at medical schools. I meet lots of different kinds of therapists. I meet programmers from computer firms, and they are really different from each other. But most doctors have a really standard set of pompous analogues. Not all of them are pompous, of course; there are always exceptions to everything. But as a class, I don't know what they do to those poor people.
Man: If you spend two years interning, following other doctors around, it will make you pompous. It's modeling and mirroring. Susan: I've got a cold. Can you use hypnosis to take away a cold? A man came to me with a cold that he'd had for six months, and I made it go away. But his unconscious specified exactly how long it would take to go away. He'd had it for six months, and his unconscious wanted two days to make it go away.
Susan: I've only had mine for three days.
Well, I'm not going to take the time to do it now, if that's what you are asking. But I'll certainly give somebody else a set of procedures to do it with you. Is that acceptable?
Susan: Yes.
Who wants an interesting task? Woman: I'll do it.
OK. Do the following sequence. Put her in a deep trance and send her conscious mind away. There are several ways you can do that. You can send her conscious mind back to some pleasant memory. You can have it walk down a long tunnel and come out at the end in a place with gardens and fountains where she can swim, and then close the door so she doesn't eavesdrop unhelpfully. Set up a feedback mechanism so that you know when her conscious mind is there, and when it's not. You could have one of her fingers be up when her unconscious mind is there alone, and have it go down when her conscious mind returns. Use something like that so that you have feedback.
Then I want you to ask her unconscious if it would be willing to remove the cold, carte blanche. Get a "yes" or a "no." If you get a "yes" ask it if it will be willing to do so right now. If there is any hesitation whatsoever, whether you are using verbal or nonverbal signals, then go into the reframing format and find out if the cold serves any function whatsoever. If it does, come up with new ways of accomplishing that function. Get the unconscious to specify exactly how long it will take to make the cold go away. You do this with yes/ no questions too. You ask questions like "Would you be willing to take it away in one hour?"
In addition to that, as you bring her out of trance, overlap her into situations that will take care of all the physiological parameters of the cold. Overlap her into an environment where her cold symptoms would disappear spontaneously. If she has body aches, overlap into a hot tub or a whirlpool. If she has a drippy nose, take her into the desert where everything gets dried out. Find out what symptoms she has before putting her into a trance, so that you'll know where to overlap her to when you bring her out.
Woman: Where would you overlap her to in order to take care of a sore throat?
That's a good question. Where does a sore throat go away? What do you do to get rid of a sore throat? Woman: You gargle with salt water.
What are the odds of having a sore throat when you get out of the ocean after swimming in warm, tropical, salt water? About zero. If you actually went swimming there with a really bad sore throat, you might make your cold worse eventually. But if you go swimming in the ocean, especially if you go where there are some good–sized waves, chances are that all the salt water around will dry out all your membranes.
If you ever get a runny nose, and you can't get to the nose sprayer, or you don't want to get addicted to nose sprays, you can do something very simple instead. Nowadays there are some very addictive nose sprays on the market. They are more addictive than cigarettes. You can watch people in drugstores furtively going up to the counter and buying boxes of nose spray. It's really bizarre. All you need to do for a simple, non–addictive alternative to nose spray is to buy one of the nose–spray bottles and pour out all the nose spray. Then you make a salt water solution, put the cap back on, and spray the salt solution in your nose. That will work as well as anything else to dry out your nose.
Woman: Could you use the procedure you just outlined for a stomachache or any ordinary psychosomatic problem?
Yes. Put the person in a trance and do reframing first, to make sure that you give her alternatives if the problem is functional. Then do overlap for each symptom that the person has, as you bring them out of trance.
Susan: My cold is better–not entirely better—but while you were talking, it already started going away.
One time I got somebody's poison oak to go away on the spot as a demonstration. 1 put him in a deep trance and explained to him that poison oak is a mistake. "It's a mistake" I said. "Allow me to tell you the story of antigens and antibodies. Poison oak rash is a response to a plant to protect you from the danger of it, when the plant isn't dangerous. And then you get all this stuff over your skin, but it is your body responding. And it's just a mistake; and when you make mistakes, the best policy is always to go back and clear them up." Within two hours that person didn't have a trace of poison oak, except for little red marks on his skin in the places where there had been open pus wounds.
It is amazing what you can get away with if you are congruent. People frequently send us their "impossibles" to work with. We got one client who had neurological damage that impaired his ability to walk. We referred this man to one of our students, David Gordon, since we don't have a private practice anymore. The man brought lots of X–rays and records to his first session that "proved" that he was unable to walk normally. He hobbled in with a walker, sat down, and showed David all of his records. David did a few things, and sent him out.
The next time this client came in, David remembered something he had seen me do effectively with somebody, and tried it out. He told that man the story of the plasticity of the human brain. You should read neurology journals; they have the best metaphors of all. All of science is a metaphor. Plasticity means that one part of the brain is able to take over the function of another part. They've documented that this actually occurs. If a child learns a language, and then at the age of four gets his language hemisphere cut off, he will learn language again in the other hemisphere, even though that hemisphere wasn't supposed to be the one to learn language. If the part of your brain that moves your index finger gets destroyed, you can learn to move your index finger with another part of your brain. That's what plasticity is all about.