Dr. David Spiegel

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.

Nothing can happen that will harm your body.

but on on the left side of the screen i want you to picture this guy and his approaching and what's happening and she said i really the light was it was getting dark i really can't see much of his facial features but i do recognize something i hadn't allowed myself to remember if he gets me upstairs he doesn't just want to rape me he's going to kill me and so in some ways what she was seeing was even worse so you know you're thinking good spiegel you made her even more frightened than she was before

But as you had pointed out in your PTSD stress lecture, you've got to confront the trauma to restructure your understanding of it.