Dr. David Spiegel

He's in that same mental state.

People go into dissociative states when they're traumatized.

So, in a way, hypnosis is helping them remember and deal with the memories better because they're more in the mental state that is more like what happened.

And most rape victims will tell you, I was floating above my body feeling sorry for the woman being assaulted below.

People in traumatic episodes, they just say, you know, I blank out.

I don't know what's happening.

I'm on autopilot.

Yeah.

That's a kind of self-hypnotic state.

So when you use hypnosis to help them deal with a traumatic memory, you're making the state they're in right there in your office with you more congruent to the state they were likely in when the trauma happened.

And I think that is part of what helps facilitate treatment of trauma-related disorders.

In a way, the principle, Andrew, is like you need to reconfront a traumatic situation before you can modulate your associations to it and then figure out how you can approach that problem or how you did approach that problem from a different point of view.

And I think what happens is that people are sometimes too good at being able to separate themselves from the recollection.

So it's in there somewhere.

It doesn't.

It's out of sight, but it's not out of mind.

It's having effects on you, but you can't deal with it.

You can't reprocess it.

The issue is control.

And hypnosis, which has this terrible reputation of taking away control, is actually a superb way of enhancing your control over mind and body.