Recovering Personal History
Organizations known roughly as uthe law," and also organizations that exist to protect people from too much justice, frequently hire experts in hypnosis to aid them in recovering information about past events. One of the things that people do exquisitely in altered states is relive experiences. In fact, most of the psychotherapies that have people relive past experiences use hypnotic technology to get them to do so. Some psychotherapists use these hypnotic techniques much more effectively than many professional hypnotists.
The easiest way to get someone to relive an experience is to do the same thing you did when you practiced the induction method of accessing a previous trance. All you do is begin with the first thing that you know led up to the event, have the person recall that in detail, and then proceeded from there. If you do this, the person will have the same responses he had the first time.
Once I worked with a businessman who told me that he went into a meditative state when he got on airplanes. He said 'The way I experience it, one moment we're taking off and the next thing I know, the plane is landing." I was curious about what happened, so I had him reaccess that experience. First I had him walk up the ramp onto the airplane, sit down and put on his seat belt, and then have the usual conversation with the stewardess about his coat and whether he wanted a drink. Then as the plane was taking off, I had him listen to the captain announcing how high they would be flying. As soon as I went through all that, his head dropped forward, and he ceased to respond to me. 1 hen he started snoring. He didn't go into a meditative state on airplanes; he went to sleep. Each time 1 led him through the same progression, he fell asleep, and I had to shout "Hey, you! Wake up!" Later on I discovered that if I just made the sound "Urp Urp" and jiggled his chair a little bit, he'd arouse and ask "Are we there yet?" If you want to know what happened in the past, you'll find out if you have the person relive the experience fully enough.
A man who is fairly skilled at using these techniques came up to me in a workshop and told me about two young female clients of his. They had been abducted and raped when they were out somewhere together. One of them remembered the event vividly, and had given the police all the necessary information. The other one had complete amnesia for the event and didn't quite believe the story that the first one had told. The one who remembered the rape vividly was a psychological mess as a result of it, while the other one had no response to it. She was fine.
In a situation like this, you need to consider carefully whether there is any point to her knowing what happened. If there isn't, recovering the memory may only give her pain.
This well–intentioned therapist was working diligently to get the woman who didn't remember anything to remember the event in detail, so that she could feel all of the pain. He decided that she had repressed all that unpleasantness, and he was right! However, repressing unpleasantness is an excellent choice in some situations. He placed a value judgement upon "truth" and assumed that since it was repressed, it would come out and be harmful to her later on, so she might as well have the pain now and get it over with.
If you use hypnosis to lead people into awareness of unpleasant experiences, I think you should first make a choice about whether that is worthwhile. Many of us were taught that reliving unpleasant experiences makes them less harmful, and that absolutely, categorically, is not so. If there is one thing that academic psychology has learned, it's that that assumption is false. Academic psychology has learned that if a certain set of experiences teaches you to have a generalization, going through the same experiences again will only reinforce whatever you learned from them. If what you learned from an event causes you limitations, reliving that event over and over again in the same way will only reinforce your generalization and the limitations that result from that generalization.
Therapists like Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson all have people go back and relive events, but they have people do it differently than the event occurred the first time. Satir describes this as "going back and seeing with new eyes," whatever that means. Erickson had people go back into the past, and then he changed things totally. He reorganized history so that it had no alternative but to be different.
Once Milton did a fascinating thing with somebody. A client came in who had made a mistake as a very young child; he had committed a crime. Something about the course of events convinced him that from that point on he would engage in criminal activities. He became convinced that he would always make the same mistake, and so he did.
Erickson took him back into his personal history and gave him an experience in which he became convinced that he would no longer engage in crime, because he wasn't good at it. That event never actually occurred. However, if you ask that man today about that event, he will recall it for you with a great deal of detail, and it will be as real to him as anything that actually occurred.
Sometimes there is some meaningful purpose in taking a person back through unpleasant memories. It might provide you with information so that you can catch a criminal and prevent him from committing a crime against someone else. Possibly information from that event may be needed for some other purpose.
A friend of mine worked with a couple who had been assaulted, and they both had complete amnesia for having been assaulted. In fact, the only way they knew they had been assaulted was that they were both covered with bruises and lacerations. They were told that the lacerations were inflicted by some weapon, and that their money and their property were gone. The police kept insisting that they had been beaten and robbed. The man and the woman both said "We don't know. We don't remember anything."
I did some hypnotic investigation and discovered chat this couple had not been attacked; they had gotten into a car accident. After the crash, somebody pulled them out of their car and stole the car and their belongings. When I went through the experience with them to find out what had occurred. I chose to do it with only one of them, and took the other one out of the room; there was no need for both of them to suffer. Being the sexist I am, I decided it was best that the man suffer. However, I had him go through the experience in a different way to minimize any unpleasantness for him. Instead of going through the experience in the way he had before, I had him watch himself go through it.
I took this precaution both because I wanted him to be able to do it comfortably, and because he had been knocked unconscious. If someone got knocked out the first time through an experience, if I have them relive it in the same way, they will get knocked out again.
A student of mine had been in an accident and wanted to relive the experience. A lot of people had tried to work with him to get him to do this. They would have him start out with the feeling of the steering wheel and the sound of the engine, and then the visual experience of the trees, and then a horn honking, and then he would pass out. They would have to do all kinds of things to wake him up, and then they'd try again.
They could have anticipated that he'd pass out, because in the accident he hit a tree and got knocked out. If you relive something and do it in exactly the same way, you will go through the same experience in the way that you did the first time. If you got knocked out the first time, you'll get knocked out when reliving it.
If somebody has been attacked or raped or been in a car wreck, reexperiencing–the feelings they had then is not going to be useful, If someone is telling you about his heart attack, you don't want him to relive it in exactly the same way. "Oh, you had a heart attack last week. What happened?" That is the craziest thing you can ask somebody. If you do it well enough, you are going to give him another heart attack.