Nightmares ensued, and it aggravated her experience of “frozenness” in therapy. Eventually, after considering hypnosis for 9 months, she decided she would pursue it. Her therapist was supportive but did not advocate for hypnosis, electing to follow the patient’s lead. At that, it took another half year before she scheduled the first appointment. She and her therapist considered hypnosis as a way to process those feelings hypothesized as unavailable for resolution in the verbal therapy modality, and her motivation was high.
The goal from the outset, then, was not to uncover or probe memory but rather to use hypnosis as a vehicle suited to settling or reorganizing unconscious2 material putatively implicated in her discomfort. Thus hypnosis was seen as palliative and potentially helping to resolve the deeper non-specific discomfort. Hypnosis Sessions Because of the patient’s anxiety as described and because her work with her regular therapist would continue, the patient’s referring therapist was present initially for support and to have a context for the hypnosis work.
That therapist and I had a good working relationship and had collaborated on cases before. The patient reported that her therapist’s presence was calming and reassuring, and in their meeting afterwards decided that the therapist’s remaining in the hypnosis sessions was useful. Consequently her therapist was present for all but one of the 25 sessions of hypnosis, missing that one session because of a scheduling conflict. These were spread over a year, and the individual therapy apart from hypnosis continued, though more sporadically.
Sessions occurred every other week, a spacing preferred by the patient to prevent her other therapy from crowding into the same week and, importantly, to give her what she described as “time to absorb it all. ” In the first session we established the context and expectations for the presence of her therapist, elaborated on the information she had read and discussed with her therapist about hypnosis, and conducted the initial induction.
The goals of hypnosis were specified again together as improving autonomie regulation within anxiety management, and allowing the unconscious mind-body system to explore and relieve whatever deeper conflicts might be relevant to the problem. No formal hypnotizability or susceptibility measure was used because the patient was eager to “get right to it” to allay nervousness. It was quickly evident that her absorption capacity was high, thereby establishing a credible baseline engagement.
This is consonant with Smith’s (1996) capitalizing on such apparent involvement without formal assessment, and Telegen and Atkinson’s ( 1974) emphasizing absorption capacity as a valid marker of hypnotizability. Sessions averaged 35 minutes of hypnosis, followed by 15 minutes of debriefing, support, deriving meanings discerned by the patient, and ratification of safety and her control.