Methods of Treating PTSD: Hypnosis

By Eric Greenleaf PhD

The convention in recovering from difficult life events and emotions holds that it is beneficial to “get it all out” by talking about the particulars of traumatic experiences with sympathetic other people. A reluctance to engage in this is seen as “defensive”.

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In dynamic psychotherapies, this notion is enshrined as “resistance” to the fundamental rule insisting that patients disclose everything openly to their therapists. The idea of resistance, itself, comes from early hypnotic experiments witnessed by Freud, in which Bernheim, treating individuals who claimed not to remember the contents of trance experiences, would press firmly on the patients’ foreheads, insisting that they would remember, and only lifting the pressure when they disclosed what they knew in words .

At the same time, Janet, in separate hypnotic experiments, produced the idea of “dissociation” to describe the discontinuities in a patient’s reported experiences. His idea was that, rather than being “repressed” under super-ego hydraulics, the experiences were divided, side by side with regular memory. When Freud renounced hypnosis, psychotherapists often adopted the hydraulic model of repression and resistance and treated the principle of dissociation as one of the various defenses against anxiety.

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Treating traumatic experience psychologically then, has frequently involved a presumption that rapid debriefing of the patient was key to recovery. In more recent times, however, men and women who work extensively with trauma, like counselors to victims of abuse or returning combat veterans , have severally developed a different standard of treatment. Their experience dictates that the description of details of a trauma comes much later in therapy. First, there is the establishment of physical safety and the slow development of alternative paths returning to ordinary life, before the patient is encouraged to disclose everything.

This reflects therapeutic experience in which nightmares, flashbacks and other realized reenactments of the trauma intrude into the everyday lives of patients, overpowering the naturally protective trance that allows dissociation from the preliminary ravages of traumatic experience. Employing a routine and benign human environment, safety and gentleness, therapists teach patients techniques of distracting, or dissociating from the intrusive malign and realized memory of the trauma.

Here, teaching hypnotic trance and allied imaginative and relaxationmethods to patients can assist in two crucial ways: establishing trustworthy uses of dissociative methods that again protect the patient from flooding terror, and providing them triggers which initiate calm and benign experiences and memory to offer a place to land within their own emotional experience, a place of security, trust and reliability.

When ordinary life and regular emotion are reestablished, patients may gradually come to communicate challenging traumatic experiences with those who have themselves experienced similar terrible things; similar horrific emotions and scenes . Telling a true account to “someone who’s been there” is much easier than telling that same story to an uncomprehending stranger the majority of the time.

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The first group hypnotherapy I ever conducted, at the Veteran’s Hospital during the Vietnam years, had only one posted rule: No one will be asked to talk about their experiences. It was billed as a “Compulsion Group,” for anyone who experiences compelling actions, feelings, thoughts. The group was always full, and consisted of hypnotic relaxation and imagination exercises, couched in visual metaphor, that provided safe reassurance (drinking “special milk, whenever you wish”), safe expression of aggression “a punching bag, and others.

Utilizing the mental distance from traumatic experience that hypnotic dissociation supplies, and incorporating that with the comfort, physical safety and emotional calm of the trance , in a group of people who have experienced the same terrors of life, provides patients with tools and experiences aiding healing.