By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Client: " My last thought is: I have to remember this."
Hypnotherapist: "What is the value in remembering this?"
Client: "So I can remember my religious teacher and his teachings about the nature of the soul."
She had used the emotional pain of anger at herself for failing to save her fellow monastics and her physical pain of being tortured and beheaded to try to remember the teachings of her spiritual source. It is a convoluted way to remember such teachings, but who can account for the decisions we make under such extreme duress. By arriving at one point of the origin of this pain, the pain in her arm began to shift a little.
During a prenatal regression, one of extreme panic and a sense of loss of control (the same emotions which were attached to the images in the past life regression) she realized that the only connection she had to her mother was pain and panic. As an adopted child, this was all she had to remind herself of her birth mother, her physical source.
In both of these instances, it was pain which she chose to keep herself connected to the source of sustenance of her soul. If she had kept running away from the pain rather than facing it, she would never have been able to resolve the pain in her arm. By embracing the pain rather than fighting it, by listening to it rather than ignoring it, she was able to touch her soul again. By seeing her pain as her friend and not her enemy, she was able not only to free herself of the physical pain but to transform the way she manifested all types of pain in her life.
She saw how she had manifested the physical pain. It was impossible to deny it in the same way she had been able to deny the emotional pain she had created in her life. Both were only attempts to return to herself at a soul level. By embracing the physical pain, she was able to take steps to resolve the emotional pain. She realized that she could find and maintain a connection to her physical and emotional source of wisdom and power through other means. She also realized that the conscious-mind personality constructs she had created to maintain that connection through pain had to be transformed. She saw the choices clearly and she chose the path of transformation. It was a courageous choice.
This required considerable effort. She had to dismantle the personality constructs she had created to deal with the pain, a process which, in itself, was very painful. But she did come out the other side of it with a new connection to the source of herself at a soul level. This connection did not require pain to keep the lessons and needs of her soul active in her conscious life. The immense power and renewal she was able to manifest in her life through the process of the transformation of her relationship to pain could never have happened had she not decided to embrace the pain rather than ignore it.
This approach to imbalance is decidedly more involved than simply labeling the dysfunction and assigning a pill to it based on the label. But it is, ultimately, a much faster and surer route to the resolution of pain. The reason that many practitioners who rely on the compartmentalization of pain may fail is because their method of compartmentalization does allow the patient - and the practitioner - to ignore the pain. The focus of attention becomes centered on the label. The curative procedures may only apply to the label rather than to the patient. A client of mine described an encounter with compartmentalization of this type with a well-respected head of psychiatry at a major hospital:
"Her mind was laid wide open before me as she asked me utterly irrelevant questions about my problem. I could see little compartments with little labels on them, and she was trying to figure out in which compartment I belonged. The questions she was asking had more to do with the labels than with me and I realized I could not trust her or her process at all."
While this approach does not serve the client in helping him to return to a soul-level sense of himself, it is safe for the practitioner. This is because the practitioner does not have to be present with the pain once it is compartmentalized. And the client may even think this is a safe course of action for him as well because he thinks the compartmentalization lets him off the hook for taking responsibility for resolving the pain. This is a path most people would understandably choose if they could. But the possibility of true self-transformation and self-understanding through the pain is lost. The client is cut off not only from the pain at the source of the problem but from the possibility of tracing the path to the self at a soul level that the pain provides.
In this process of trying to circumvent pain, the typical therapeutic approach mirrors the adaptation to pain which the larger conscious-mind dominated reality has adapted. The therapist may not be able to step outside culturally-accepted ways of looking at pain, so it is difficult for true healing to take place. As illustrated above, a person who truly transforms himself in relation to his pain may no longer be a willing participant in the culture's agreements which are designed to mask pain. In lieu of transformation, therapeutic approaches may just become descriptions of the problem.
Without the soul and its still point to return to, every description of every psychic, organic, or psychological imbalance is just that - a description rooted nowhere and going nowhere. The big problem with this concept is that imbalance does not arrive and function in a vacuum. It has a very real and active reality within the individual psyche. The psyche has, as its center, the still point of the experience of the self at a soul level. Just because a particular school of thought does not recognize the existence of the self at soul level does not mean that it does not exist. The evidence that it does is clear when it is understood that all imbalance yields to the power contained within this still point when confronted honestly.
The goal of therapy should be to find the individual wherever the dysfunction has led him within the matrix of the psyche. Exploration of all of the facets of our psyche, not just those involved with the conscious-mind reality must be permitted. This process is often best accomplished with as few externally-generated labels as possible. External descriptions and lectures about the dysfunction can have little therapeutic effect on the resolution of the dysfunction. This is especially true when these descriptions only refer to a small sliver of the greater reality of the self. The individual must come to the realization of the true nature of the dysfunction himself in order to see that the realization leads home to the soul. If we do not take the opportunity the path which leads through the source of imbalance provides, we lose a chance to experience ourselves at a soul level.
Unfortunately, this process is impossible when the defenses and constructs of the conscious mind are still engaged and even supported by the interventions of society. Hypnosis allows us to see beyond these barriers and imagine an external reality which reflects ourselves at a soul level. This new understanding of reality may or may not have the furtherance of the current cultural paradigm as its goal.
Freud ran into this problem when he began using hypnosis to treat what he referred to as female hysteria; he reports on his efforts in one of his early papers, "On Female Hysteria." The truth the women, mostly from the upper class, revealed under hypnosis had the potential of dismantling the whole web of lies the members of their class depended on to maintain male domination. This truth was that they were being sexually abused by male members of their family; the strain of hiding this truth was the root of their dysfunction. And this truth was laid bare when the veil of the conscious mind's constructs to safekeep the actuality of the abuse were lifted through hypnosis. Had Freud persisted in the unveiling of this awful truth, the members of upper class Viennese society would have perceived him as a danger to their ability to maintain their status quo. They would have denounced him, called him a liar or hounded him out of their midst; in any case, his budding medical career would have been seriously sidetracked.
He could not face such ostracization, so he fabricated a twisted model of female hysteria. This postulated that the phenomena women were reporting in hypnosis were really the basis of a deep-seated wish that they would be sexually abused by their male family members. This horrendous fabrication, this abject failure on the part of Freud to be honest with himself, his patients and his surrounding society dominated psychotherapeutic models for half a century. Rather than face the truth, Freud abandoned hypnosis. He realized the bombshell effect the truth of the widespread nature of incest in late nineteenth century Vienna would have. Forcing everyone involved to take responsibility for the truth was too daunting a task. To demand this would have jeopardized not only on his own professional survival but the survival of all of the male-dominated institutions of that time and place.
Hypnosis, in the hands of a hypnotherapist who is willing to face the psyche with total honesty, allows the constructs of the conscious mind to rest. It helps the client remove himself for a moment from the confines of the conscious-mind dominated society. This allows the true mechanisms of the psyche and soul to emerge. When the subconscious mind is allowed to express itself, it readily pinpoints the source of dysfunction and allows the individual to discern the path toward the integration of the dysfunction with the larger self. The information and understanding which can set the individual on a course toward the understanding of the workings of his soul easily and readily emerges in hypnosis. The only task is to listen.