So here is this young woman who had no experience doing therapy or anything like it. She knew enough about what this man had looked like before and what he looked like now, to know when he was going back in. Sure enough, as soon as the doctor went running out to get his friend to help, the man started to go back into the catatonic state. Her intuitive response was magnificent: she reached over and grabbed this guy and gave him the biggest, juiciest French kiss you can imagine! That kept him out!
The catatonic is making a decision that the internal experiences he is having in catatonia are richer and more rewarding than the ones he is being offered on the outside. And if you have ever been in a mental institution for any length of time, you might agree with those people! What the candystriper did was put him in a situation in which he would naturally prefer staying out.
We once saw a little woman in her late sixties who had been a dancer. She was having marital difficulties with her husband, and her right leg was paralyzed from the waist down. Doctors couldn't find any neurological evidence for this paralysis.
We wanted to test her to see if her paralysis was psychological rather than physical. In the office we had at that time you had to go upstairs to get to the bathroom. So we took a long time gathering information, until she asked where the bathroom was. We put her off and started discussing some aspects of her life that really got her interest. She got so excited that she put off going to the bathroom, and when she asked, we'd put her off. Just when we thought she was about to give up on us and go to the bathroom without our permission, we opened up the subject of her husband and their sexual difficulties, which was one of her major concerns. Then we told her "Go ahead to the bathroom now, but hurry up and get back!"
She was so excited that she forgot to be paralyzed. She literally ran up the stairs and then ran back down. Then she realized what she'd done, said "Oh, oh!" and went back into her paralyzed posture.
That gave us a demonstration that her paralysis was behavioral, and it also gave us an anchor for the state of not being paralyzed. We used that anchor indirectly by making veiled allusions to "taking steps to overcome difficulties," "being happy to respond to the call of nature," and "running up and down different possibilities."
Jack: How else can you tell when something is a physical problem versus a psychological problem? For example, I get seasick. It would be nice not to get seasick. I'm not sure if this is really a physical problem or a mental problem.
OK. Your question is "How do you distinguish between physical and psychological problems?" and my answer is "I don't usually bother."
Jack: Would you apply these techniques to my seasickness?
Immediately.
Jack: Would you expect to be successful?
I wouldn't bother to apply them if I didn't. I do make a distinction between psychological and physical problems in some ways. Let's say someone arrives in my office after she's had a stroke. All her behavior indicates aphasia, and she hands me a set of X–rays that show a tremendous trauma in the left temporal lobe. That is important information in shaping my response to her.
If a client has difficulties indicating definite physical manifestations, my immediate response is to make sure she is in the care of someone I consider a competent physician. I have several physician friends whom I trust. They have philosophies that match mine — "If you medicate, do it only as a last resort, because if it is successful, it destroys access to the part of the person you need to get to in order to make a behavioral change." Medication isn't for cures; typically, it's for management. That's what medication is designed for.
I can work with a person on medication; it's just that her responses are contaminated. It's hard to know how much of her response is to me and how much is to the chemical. Also, medication creates a severely altered state of consciousness. If you use our procedures with someone who is on medication, when she comes off it be sure to use the same procedures again. You've got to build some kind of a bridge between changes made in a severely altered state of consciousness, and someone's normal state of consciousness.
So if I have a client who is on medication, my first step is to get her off it, so that I have access to the part of her that is causing difficulty in her life. Once I've done that, if the client is supposed to have brain damage, I tell her metaphors about the plasticity of the human brain. The human central nervous system is one of the most plastic things 1 know of. There is a mountain of evidence that people can recover functions that they have lost through organic insult by rerouting—by using alternative neurological pathways. I will often induce a rather profound trance and do this programming in an altered state. That's the difference between a psychological and a physical program for dealing with problems in my way of proceeding.
Man: Does your position on medication include all drugs or are you talking about just "psychoactive" drugs?
I'm talking about anything that changes a person's state of consciousness. Some of the non–psychoactive drugs also have profound effects on consciousness. Since I've never been trained as a pharmacologist, I check with my physician friends whom I trust. I ask them "Are there consciousness–altering side effects to these drugs?" If not, I have my clients continue with their medications.
If you have a person who is diabetic, or something like that, you can teach her how to regulate her internal chemistry so that she doesn't have to be a diabetic. Then you take her off of the medication only as rapidly as she gains control over altering her chemistry. You tie reducing the medication to being able to regulate her own body chemistry in those areas.
Most people don't believe that kind of change is possible. Many people have very strong beliefs about what can and can't be done about
Problems with known chemical or physical aspects. Rather than opposing those beliefs, you can often use them to help you to make the changes that you're going for.
Once I went to a rest home at the request of a friend and worked with a man who had had a stroke. He had something called Broca's aphasia, which impairs the ability to generate language, but doesn't impair the ability to understand it. Someone with Broca's aphasia can understand well enough to obey commands. Another aspect of Broca's aphasia is that there is usually some paralysis, in a right–handed person, of the right side of the body and parts of the face. One of" the most common characteristics is that the right hand becomes paralyzed in a very tense position with the hand drawn in toward the arm.
This man was particularly tense on the right side of his body, and since he had not been responding to physical therapy, my friend asked me to use hypnosis to get the muscles on that side of the man's body to relax. He thought it was possible for this man to get back partial control of the right side of his body, but not until after he had gotten that part of his body to relax.
I knew, partly from reading case histories, that it was possible to use hypnosis to do this. So I went in and worked diligently for two and a half hours with this man in very deep hypnosis, and at the end of that time, his hand was as loose as it could be. I was really impressed, because I'd never done it before. I didn't even know for sure if I would be able to do it. I just went in thinking "Well, I'll pretend as if I do this every day, and it's matter of fact, and if faith healers can cure people of things, maybe that's all hypnosis is. I don't know." 1 went in and took a shot at it and it worked. I thought it was great.
I was still with the man when the doctor and the physical therapist came back in the room. Neither of them was the person who had brought me to work with this man. They told me it was time for his physical therapy, and that I would have to leave and come back later on another day. I was sitting there, gloating on the inside, thinking "Wait until they see this. This is going to blow their minds!" I was sitting there chuckling to myself about the change.