A unique case. Hypnosis gone wrong- I need help.

pelepone wrote:Ive been to two hypnotherapists. One thought my symptom was psychosomatic and ...
Another tried to ...
the hypnotherapist that made the video ... gave me the same treatment

Would any of you know a hypnotherapist who would be able to help?

Your question has come right after this viewtopic.php?t=108329, where someone else wanted to know pretty much the same thing: how to cure a hypnosis-induced condition with more hypnosis.

I will say to you what, effectively, I said to her: You're unlikely to get a different result if you keep doing the same thing.

Go back to your doctor, I mean a proper doctor not a witchdoctor -- one who actually knows what can and can't be done -- and ask for a referral to someone who's qualified to help you.

Hi pelepone

I would suggest you repeat this post asking your question on reddit, which has a number of hypnotherapist contributors. You may find someone there who would be interested in your case, or who can refer you to someone. This forum has very little activity in the area of hypnosis, as I'm sure you can see.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hypnosis/

Good luck with it.

Hi Pelepone,

I'm sorry that you just got uselessly vague suggestions from the hypnotists you've seen. It's often not necessary to be all that specific, but they really should have figured out on the spot that they weren't getting the response you came for. Someone more competent should be able to notice this and walk you through it with more clear imagery and instruction, even if you didn't tell them this backstory.

Have you tried playing with it yourself at all? You mention a gleaming ball of light and warm energy seeping into your throat and relaxing your gag reflex. What happens when you put yourself back into that same kind of focused state and picture your throat seeping all of this warm and relaxing energy back into a gleaming ball of light, which you can then remove from your throat?

jimmyh wrote:Hi Pelepone,

I'm sorry that you just got uselessly vague suggestions from the hypnotists you've seen. It's often not necessary to be all that specific, but they really should have figured out on the spot that they weren't getting the response you came for. Someone more competent should be able to notice this and walk you through it with more clear imagery and instruction, even if you didn't tell them this backstory.

Have you tried playing with it yourself at all? You mention a gleaming ball of light and warm energy seeping into your throat and relaxing your gag reflex. What happens when you put yourself back into that same kind of focused state and picture your throat seeping all of this warm and relaxing energy back into a gleaming ball of light, which you can then remove from your throat?

Yes I have tried it. I just dont know how to make the muscles constrict normally like it used to. Everything still feels relaxed and open in the throat.

When you tried it, did it feel like you would have been able to relax things further if you had wanted to and just couldn't make things tighter, or did it feel like you had no control either way?

When you tried it, did it feel like you would have been able to relax things further if you had wanted to and just couldn't make things tighter

I think something went wrong in your reply. All that is there is what I said.

it feels like Iwould have been able to relax things further if I had wanted to and just couldn't make things tighter

Okay, so yours is the more interesting type. The good news is that you can "self hypnotize" well enough to reach the lever yourself, and so you don't need a hypnotist per se. What you need is an understanding of why it's stuck only moving one way so that you can fix that and move it back to a better position.

The hypnotists you've seen so far have tried to treat it as a simple matter of suggesting that the lever is reachable and to be fair to them that does work in a lot of cases, at least if the suggestion is accepted (Though they probably should have noticed that this isn't one of them. Oh well). Instead of treating it as a fundamentally "hypnotic" thing (like a hypnotic hallucination for funsies), they should have noticed that it's a matter of an internal conflict, much like the desire to lose weight or quit smoking, and calls for similar procedures. "Quitting smoking" is something that technically does not require doing anything that you don't have conscious access to the levers for (you know how to control your hands, and at any moment you can choose to have them pick up a cigarette or not) but yet there's a "force" pulling things in an unwanted direction and it's this "force" that they actually want help with.

"Parts therapy" is a common way that hypnotists will deal with these kinds of issues, and it is conceptually quite simple. It's a bit of a metaphor and not something to get too carried away with, but the idea is that rather than being this "uncaused" phenomenon, there is likely a "reason" or a "motivation" behind the reluctance of this lever to swing in the other direction. Sometimes hypnotists will ask for subconscious or "ideomotor" responses to their questions, as the idea is to get at the underlying feelings regardless of whether they're things you might consciously believe in or support when you say it out loud. Methods like this can be helpful, but they aren't really necessary if you can recognize the distinction between "it feels this way" and "this is the answer I want to stand by".

For example, the hypnotist might ask for the "part" of the smoker responsible for smoking to give the underlying reason, and that reason might be "to fit in". Sometimes this can be an actual valid and important reason, but other times it can be an outdated reason that no longer applies. When it no longer applies, sometimes people can get caught up in thinking "it would be silly to smoke to fit in because it wouldn't even help me fit in" and forget to notice that the underlying drive to smoke for that reason is still there. That's why it can be helpful to think of it as a different "part", so that self censorship doesn't block the true answers from coming up to be dealt with.

These "reasons" can take all sorts of forms and be more or less compelling upon reflection. Maybe it's "to fit in", or "because it helps me deal with stress". Or maybe smoking just "feels good", and they want to have more things that feel good in their life (in which case, injecting more of that good feeling into other things might be the answer). It could also be simply that they're afraid they won't be able to quit, and the reason it's hard to discard the craving is simply that they don't want to have to try and probably fail. A hypnotist that is familiar with parts therapy (or any equivalent sort of way or sorting out internal conflicts) will be able to help you through this process and find a way to unstick that lever.

However, it's not always required to have outside help either. You probably know why you sought out a gag reflex eliminating video in the first place, and how important it is (or was) to you to not lose that benefit. You probably know to what extent (if any) the previous struggles to overcome this issue have led to you feeling intimidated by the prospect of a solution, and how much that has been getting in the way of allowing yourself to access the change(s) you want to make. If you ask the "part(s)" of yourself that are keeping that lever in the "very relaxed" position, what reason comes to mind? When you ask what it would take to allow the lever to move back to a useful tightness (at least, as appropriate), what do you get in response?