My deadline is just hours away, but I’m standing on a chair, singing my favorite tunes from “The Wizard of Oz” to my wife. “I would not be just a nothin’ my head all full of stuffin’, my heart all full of pain,” I warble.

The reason for this pre-deadline giddiness: hypnosis. In the past I hadn’t considered a deadline real until I’d angered an employer, alienated, a friend or convinced the cats they were one claw mark from a trip to the pound. However, I approached this one knowing that, with a little luck, I could go under and come out with a new take on deadlines. Maybe I could actually get the job done before the excruciating “so where’s-the-story?” stuff started.

Stranger things, after all, have been accredited to hypnosis. In fact, many people regard it as a magical trance that can end addictions, reduce pain, conquer phobias, bolster sex drive, help with weight loss, even raise a batting average.

But the path to the hypnotist’s chair had been a long one for me. I’d long been intrigued by the possibility of using hypnotic suggestion to alleviate stress. Unfortunately, that interest had been tempered by a deep skepticism, a distrust that started when a former apartment manager of mine who said he was a hypnotherapist on the side offered to take me through a few sessions. He also had an uncanny way of keying into my apartment just as I was stepping out of the shower. The thought of what he might do if he ever got me into a trance led me to tumble under the spell of…

Hypnosis Myth No. 1: You have no control over what happens during a hypnotic trance.

“[Patients] think they’ll be out of it,” says David Spiegel, MD, a professor of psychiatry and behavrioral sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, and co-author of Trance and Treatment: Clinical Uses of Hypnosis (New York City: Basic Books, 1978). “But [hypnotism] is a technique for enhancing reality,” not altering it.

That enhanced reality allows you to concentrate deeply and fully on a topic, bringing into focus past events or allowing the therapist to implant suggestions that, for example, a smoker can use to stop smoking, or a commodities broker can use to make a killing in the financial markets.

Ruth Roosevelt, a Manhattan-based hypnotherapist who specializes in treating stock, bond and commodities traders at the Wall Street Hypnosis Center she founded two years ago, says one of her traders is “up a hundred and one for the last quarter” after going under. “I drive trading behaviors, such as [knowing] when to buy and sell, deep into their unconscious, which overrides [their] conscious.”

People have been trying to tap into that unconscious brilliance almost as long as people have been thinking, but modern hypnosis is generally traced to Franz Mesmer, a late-18^th-century Austrian physician who used hypnosis to treat patients, despite the fact he linked it with the occult. (We get the word mesmerize from his name.)

Sigmund Freud also used hypnosis early in his career, then abandoned it in favor of free association. By then, though, the practice was gaining acceptance, proving particularly useful in treating shell-shocked veterans of the world wars. In 1958 the American Medical Association gave hypnotism its stamp of approval. All of which dispels…

Hypnosis Myth No. 2: Hypnosis is a parlor trick.

There are as many types of hypnotists as there are new cable TV channels. Some may help people stop smoking permanently; others are in the same league as snake charmers.

This is why organizations such as the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis (ASCH) impose rigorous membership standards. Until recently, ASCH included only physicians, dentists and other health-care and mental-health specialists with doctoral degrees. More recently, ASCH has expanded to included social workers, nurses and therapists with master’s degrees, all of whom have undergone rigorous training, passed tests and completed a certain number of clinical hours before being certified.

Because “hypnotists” calls up sideshow connotations, most practitioners prefer to be called hypnotherapists, which in fact they are, adds Roosevelt, who says hypnosis is a powerful tool that can be used to speed along therapy. Eleanor S. Field, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in Tarzana, California, says that just one hypnosis session in many cases leads to breakthroughs that could take a year in traditional therapy.

But can anyone be hypnotized – or just those who are highly impressionable?

Hypnotherapists claim that most people can be hypnotized, but some – especially more creative, imaginative types – are more receptive to hypnosis than others. A person’s willingness to be hypnotized is also a factor. In addition, Field says, the rapport between a patient and therapist is more significant than the degree to which an individual is hypnotizable.

Hypnosis Myth No. 3: Hypnosis belongs to the lunatic fringe.

Those who have endured crises created by “recovered” memories of sexual abuse, who have witnessed the parade of people claiming to have been abducted by UFOs, who have listened to Roseanne discuss her numerous personalities, or who have wondered about the honesty (or even the sanity) of individuals claiming to have been Cleopatra in a past life, may well blame hypnosis for convincing people that the improbable or even fantastical has occurred.

“People are more suggestively under hypnosis,” says Spiegel, which is why it can be used to contaminate memories. Or, in many cases, to create memories. The ability to think creatively has a lot to do with the success of hypnosis, says Field, and may include using symbolic images that are easily understood by the subconscious and that may give patients a tangible grasp on a problem. For example, envisioning a mental roadblock as a stone wall, or dangerous feelings that have spiraled out of control as a tornado. These images can be introduced by the therapist, patient or both.

Still, more traditional researchers like Spiegel bristle at the mention of past lives regression and “the UFO stuff.” William Hoffman, executive vice president of the ASCH in Des Plaines, Illinois, calls past-lives regression, or going under and seeing yourself as you were in a former life, “the most fringe-y” element of hypnotherapy.

Nonetheless, two of the hypnotherapists I spoke with said patients of theirs had spontaneously regressed to past lives. Glendora, California, hypnotherapist Rick Brown says one of his clients “remembered” dying on a submarine in World War II. And Field claims one of hers regressed to fighting in the muddy trenches of World War I, which could explain his fear of rainy, windy days.

Return to Trance Central Station

Confident that I won’t revert to my previous identity as a vestal virgin during the reign to Tiberius Caesar, I ask Field to take me for a spin on the trance floor.

I sit in a leather recliner, my feet on a stool, my hands resting lightly on my thighs. “Focus your eyes on any object in the room that captures your attention,” Field says. She has designed the office to provide no shortage of interesting objects. Since I’m here to work on my stress level. I fix my eyes on a snarling ceramic tiger. Field’s calm voice helps relax me, as do her soothing suggestions, such as “your eyelids are getting heavier.” I find my limbs growing so relaxed they seem numb. The feeling of focus that comes over me is not unlike that of getting lost in a really good book.

Field asks me to remember a time when I was at my most productive. Immediately, I flash back to a time eight years ago, when I was waiter living in a one-room apartment in Hollywood and trying to break in to the screenwriting business, pounding out script after script on my cheap, old work processor. In my hypnotic trance, I can see the apartment in amazing detail – the green face of the monitor, the newspaper clippings taped to the wall, the metal folding chair I sat on.

I can even see the person in the chair. It’s me – but it’s not me eight years ago. I have long, blond hippie hair and my T-shirt hangs off deeply tanned, impossibly skinny limbs.

Before going into the trance, I had mentioned how creative I had been as a teenager, making up entire football teams and playing four-quarter games in my head every night. Now under her spell, I see myself as that teenager of 23 years ago, but sitting in the apartment I occupied eight years ago during my waiter-screenwriting days.

Just before taking me out of the trance, Field implants suggestions to help me de-stress in the future, a method she calls “anchoring.” She says that my stress is in my left knee, and the resources I need to beat it are in my right knee. In the future, when I cross my left knee over my right, my unconscious will believe that I’ve anchored the problem to its solution. It’s like hearing “Jingle Bells” and getting a warm, Christmas-y feeling.

I leave the office feeling like I’m walking on air. Field says one session can produce results. For lasting effects, reinforcement is recommended. I even manage to turn this story in on time – and without suffering my usual pre-deadline anxiety.

I finish my serenade to my wife with a calm, confident flourish – “…if I only had a brain!” – and wait for her reaction, thinking, ever so briefly, that she might say she liked me better when I blew a head gasket whenever I got within 48 hours of a deadline.

But instead she implants a hypnotic suggestion of her own. “Next time you go under” she says, “see if you can work in some voice lessons.”

Rx for Action

Call the Los Angeles Academy of Clinical Hypnosis
800-56-HYPNO

(800) 56 HYPNO

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