*TRIGGER WARNING*
I have been experimenting with some “holistic medicine” or alternative practices that I was discouraged from using as an Evangelical Christian. I want to share my experience with you, not because it was amazing or spiritually enlightening, but because it wasn’t the complete opposite: it wasn’t demonic or evil.
I am deconstructing the idea that therapies like reiki and hypnosis are evil
I have had one session of reiki, one session of healing touch, and one session of hypnotherapy this year.
My experience of reiki was that I felt like I was almost asleep, but would jerk more awake every ten minutes or so, over the course of about an hour while lying on something like a massage table. I felt like I was going in and out of consciousness or alertness while a lady’s hands hovered over my body, feeling vibrations and clearing negative vibrations (or so she describes it).
After the session, she asked how I felt and I described almost feeling asleep and waking. She suggested that I was dissociating and then I burst into tears. That rang true. She described me hovering just outside of my own body, trying to protect myself from various harms. She further suggested I have been doing this all my life (and I’m 42). That was the most powerful thing I “learned” from reiki. I find it difficult to be a truly embodied.
I was going to see her for more reiki, but then I decided I would try other things instead. I had a specific amount of money that I received for Christmas and planned to spend on alternative therapies. I have now spent all that money and can’t afford repeat sessions.
So anyway, I had healing touch a month or two after reiki. This was very similar to reiki, except the woman using healing touch actually laid hands on my body (with my consent), very gently, pressing here and there, releasing negative energy and replacing it with her positive energy. I felt like this was more effective than reiki, but I think I also approached reiki with a level of fear, and healing touch with more openness. I felt as though I’d had a relaxing massage and some things had been put right in my body, despite the fact that this wasn’t a massage at all. I felt rejuvenated by the end of it. I could sense a positive transfer of energy. The practitioner also told me that she used a pendulum above my body which revealed that my energy was out of balance, and by the end of the session my energy was back in balance.
This was fascinating. I liked hearing it at the time. Truthfully, I know very little about our energy fields and vibrations, but this particular woman was a friend, and almost every time I have come into contact with her, I have shed tears while she prayed, spoke words of affirmation, and used her healing touch technique. I lean into believing that she knows more about this than I do and her goal is, in fact, healing touch!
Finally, just a week and a half ago, I had hypnotherapy for the first ever time. I was skeptical that anyone could ever hypnotize me and what I learned, experientially is that hypnosis does not work the way it is presented on movies and TV shows. A person is only “hypnotized” to the extent that they want to be hypnotized. What I mean is that if you have a level of deep trust and you believe what the hypnotist says to you, then I suppose if he said “cluck like a chicken” you might do that. If the hypnotist had told me to cluck like a chicken, I would have opened my eyes and said “don’t be ridiculous.” Because I was fully aware that I was in a room, sitting in a very comfortable chair, with my eyes closed, being lulled into relaxation by his voice. I chose to trust his voice enough to be relaxed, without losing my five senses or even my sixth sense, if you will.
Relaxation can help us open to our unconscious and subconscious minds and I felt this was the most “real” aspect of hypnotherapy. I allowed myself to relax enough to talk deeply with myself—with my inner children. I did not find this exceptionally different to talking to a therapist. In fact, what I found most remarkable was that the story I told the hypnotherapist about the memory I wanted to uncover, was essentially the same as the story I told my therapist twenty-three years ago. I was trying to find that same memory, which is the extremely vague, disjointed, emotional memory of a toddler.
My therapist, in 2002, asked me to close my eyes, said “Jesus shine your light” and then I told her I was molested as a toddler. But my memory is more like a photograph. It feels unattached from my body. The therapist told me I dissociated while I was sharing the information with her. I switched from a terrified two-and-a-half-year-old, to a matter-of-fact, borderline angry, detached teenager telling a story. What stood out to me in therapy was that “something” happened when I was a toddler that caused me to dissociate and form what is now known in psychology as “internal family systems.” I created three inner children and I operated as whichever one served me best until I was nineteen and became almost suicidally depressed (I knew that I would get to the suicidal part if I didn’t seek help).
What happened in hypnotherapy was almost exactly the same. The memory of whether or not I was sexually assaulted was just as detached and vague as ever. The hypnotherapist was convinced that it happened, just like every therapist I have ever seen. No one doubts my story more than I do. My doubt comes from how dissociated I am from this memory, and unfortunately hypnotherapy did not bring me any more clarity. It did not awaken the memory any more clearly than I had already seen as a nineteen-year-old. It was the same story I have been telling myself for twenty-three-years, sometimes with more doubt, sometimes more faith.
But here is what hypnotherapy did do for me. I experienced my inner children at the surface of my consciousness in a powerful way. They will always be part of me (or so I believe). I have sensed them and worked with them sometimes much more consciously than other times. This was a very heightened awareness of my internal family system. I met with anger especially. I met with shame. I met with pleasure. These sensations and emotions are so real to me. The hypnotherapist asked me to picture them dissolving into me, so to speak. Re-integration is work a lot of therapists seem to want to do, so that the person (me in this case) doesn’t dissociate as often. But for me, I have never dissociated to the extent that I lost time: the hours of the day don’t disappear and I don’t think “what the heck have I been doing for the last four hours?” That’s a more extreme form of dissociation. I consider myself integrated enough, and I don’t feel a great need to be further integrated.
I indulged the hypnotherapist, I answered the questions he asked, I deeply experienced my own emotions with tears pouring from my eyes and I envisioned my inner children integrating, skeptically—I’m pretty sure I could get in touch with them again and that they are no more or less integrated than they already were. I’m not trying to get rid of my internal family system, I just want it to be more healthy. Less easily angered, for example, or to find healthier ways to express anger than swearing and lashing out—which I have been known to do. Not that I’m saying people should never swear or never lash out. I personally am concerned that I exhibit limited control over these things when I feel triggered, and the triggers are not that threatening. My husband and children, for example are not threats, they’re my family whom I love and they love me. I want to learn not to lash out in anger and I want to learn not to swear so frequently in front of children who can repeat that language in really embarrassing contexts. For whatever reason, I have never accidently sworn in front of the people I know who are truly offended by swearing.
All of that to say, I think hypnotherapy served to confirm that whatever happened to me when I was a toddler, caused me to dissociate and form very specific internal family systems that I still struggle to reconcile. I am no longer going to chase my specific memory of trauma. The only thing I might do in the future, is try to find the location I think it happened in, to see if the rooms look the way I “remember” forty years later (which is unlikely for a million reasons).
I have written about my trauma in detail in my memoir, Deconstructing Sexual Shame. I have pieced together what I “think” happened. And it will always be dissociated from me because that is how I coped with it. And there will always be this element of reinforcement from therapists and hypnotherapists, that doesn’t actually prove me right, it only proves that I believe my own story: deep in my psyche is an emotional experience of sexual assault that results in deep shame, furious anger and embodied pleasure that is guarded by anger and shame… My memory is far more emotional, than visual, physical, or rational. And that is fine with me.
In the end, I don’t know whether hypnotherapy works. The particular therapist I saw is actually a progressive Christian pastor, he was kind and gentle, not threatening in any way. And honestly, his voice was hypnotic! I would suggest that hypnotherapy could help you make contact with deeper parts of yourself, your unconscious and subconscious and even your higher self.
Leave a Reply