Dr. David Spiegel

You wake up in the morning, you think, oh, that idiot, yeah, here's what I'm going to do.

So just changing mental state

itself has therapeutic potential and i think we underestimate our ability to regulate and and change responses to be cognitively emotionally and somatically flexible and so we do things you're right that follow similar principles of facing a problem seeing it from a different point of view and then find some way to reconnect to it to substitute something that can make you feel good rather than bad

so that you activate other centers of the brain like mesolimbic reward system.

And so I do that with hypnosis and you can do it much faster.

People don't think they can, but they can.

If you're having right now that physical experience, I'm thinking about this, but I'm not feeling as bad as I used to, that can be a powerful thing and you can do it with hypnosis.

So I had a woman came to see me who had suffered an attempted rape.

It was getting dark.

She was coming back from the grocery store, and this guy grabs her and wants to get her up into her apartment.

It's outside her apartment.

And she starts fighting with him, and she winds up with a basilar skull fracture.

He runs away.

The cops come.

Since she hadn't been raped, they left.

They weren't interested.

And she wanted to use hypnosis to get a better image of what this guy looked like, which is a painful, upsetting thing.

So she was quite hypnotizable.

I got her floating.

I say, you're safe and comfortable now.