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.
The doctor and physcial therapist went over and helped the man out of his chair and back on a bed, and neither one of them noticed the fact that while they were doing that his arm was hanging loosely at his side! That was astounding to me. But I thought, if you're not really thinking about it, and you've got other things on your mind, that's possible. Then the physical therapist reached over and took the man's arm and folded back in the position that it had been in when it was tense. She did this as if she were making a bed. She laid him there and put the arm back into position, while she and the doctor were talking to each other. She then began a series of exercises to help him open up his hand and relax it. That completely amazed me! His hand was so limp, it was ridiculous. She took his fingers and moved them all the way open, and then moved them back again. She was still talking to the doctor, half paying attention to what she was doing, when she shifted and started to work on his right leg. She stilt hadn't noticed!
Suddenly it occurred to me that I was faced with a really powerful choice. I could astound them by making them notice what had occurred, but I didn't know what results that would have. I was concerned that since hypnosis was not scientifically acceptable, they would believe that his arm and hand were going to go back to the way they had been, and then set about making sure that they did. So I interrupted them and said "I want to show you something." I walked over and picked up the man's arm, and it was just like butter. They both looked at it the way you would look at a ghost. 1 looked at them and said "I want to tell you that hypnosis is not a valid scientific treatment, and that this is only a way to aid physical therapy, and probably it will go back. In fact it usually will go back in 24 hours. But every once in a while for some strange reason, it doesn't. And when it doesn't, it's usually because the person has been treated by a really skilled physical therapist before he was treated by hypnosis."
What I did was to pace their beliefs in order to enlist their support and make the hospital system help me. I kept in mind the outcome I was really after—for the man to have the choice of tension or relaxation. Who gets credit for that is not that important. What's important is that he gets to move his arm. And if people don't like the way that he got his choice, unconsciously they'll engage in behaviors that are likely to undo the change. It's not that they're malicious, just that their conscious minds can't deal with what's happening in front of them.
It's always easier to make changes if you work within the belief structure of the system or individual you are working with–At one seminar a participant, Pam, asked if she could bring in a nine–year–old male client. Dove, who was in really bad shape. She told me that the kid hadn't been able to sleep more than half an hour at a time for the past four or five days, and was now exhausted and starting to get sick. Apparently every time he dropped off to sleep, 15 or20 minutes later he would start having nightmares about monsters, break out with sweat, thrash around and wake up screaming. Pam didn't know how to cope with this, and wanted some quick assistance.