You can run into all sorts of unexpected situations that hypnosis can help you resolve. Here are two??"out of hundreds??"of my cases that you may find interesting. They are excellent illustrations of the power of hypnosis.
Cut Chin Case
In this case, I was both the operator and the subject. It illustrates how self-hypnosis can be valuable in an emergency.
My wife and I were vacationing at the lake one summer, spending most of our time out on our nineteen-foot power cruiser. This particular day we had been lying at anchor, and I walked out onto the bow to pull in the anchor so we could get under way. I slipped on the bow and fell, hitting the point of my chin hard on the metal bow rail.
When I pulled myself up into a sitting position, blood was pouring down my chest from my chin.
My wife’s face was ashen. "My God!" she screamed, "I can see the bone!" I immediately pinched the wound shut as hard as I could. As I sat there on the bow, I closed my eyes and almost instantly altered my state of consciousness. In retrospect, I think I probably went all the way down into theta.
I visualized my chin in perfect condition. I bathed it in white, healing light and mentally said, "No bleeding. No pain. No scar. No infection. No swelling. Just perfect healing at one thousand times my normal healing rate." I sat there for perhaps five minutes, pinching the wound shut, while I remained in an altered state with eyes closed. I maintained the vision of a perfect chin while mentally repeating the words several more times.
Then I brought myself out and opened my eyes. I stopped pinching the wound.
There was no more bleeding. A blood scab had formed. It didn’t hurt. My wife wanted to return to shore to cleanse and dress my chin. I said no, I was OK. We got under way and enjoyed several hours of boating before going ashore.
When I awakened the next morning, I found that the blood scab had come off during the night. The only reminder of the accident was a thin, red pencil-like line about an inch long on my chin. Within a week, even this pencil line was completely gone. No evidence of the accident was left. And at no time was there pain or swelling.
Cut Foot Case
A young client came in for her appointment on crutches and wearing a cast on her lower left leg and foot. A couple days previously she was running barefoot in her yard and stepped on something that lacerated the bottom of her foot to the bone from toe to heel. She told me how many stitches the doctor had to put in and that he told her she would be in the cast for at least three weeks and perhaps longer and that she probably wouldn’t be able to wear a shoe on that foot for several more weeks after the cast was removed.
She was coming to me for diet control, so I hypnotized her and performed the diet control suggestions. She was one of the most receptive hypnosis subjects I have ever had; I could practically hypnotize her by just saying "Close your eyes and relax." She responded just marvelously.
So before I brought her out, I took her through a procedure and suggestions very similar to what I had done to myself three years earlier when I had cut my chin as related in the case just discussed.
The next week she returned for her next appointment without crutches, without a cast on her leg, and she was wearing high-heeled shoes. She took off her left shoe to show me the bottom of her foot. There was a thin, red line from toe to heel and that was all. No swelling or discoloration. The wound was healed.
But this story has a punch line, and she was bursting to tell me. She had gone to her doctor the day after the hypnosis session and insisted that he remove the cast. He refused, and a heated argument ensued. She vowed to take a hammer and break it off herself. To save her potential injury from doing it herself, the doctor reluctantly removed the cast. But he warned her it was at her own risk, was going to cost her more money, etc. She said the look on his face was priceless when he saw a healed foot.
"I don’t understand," he muttered. Then the young lady told him about the hypnosis session.
The doctor became furious. "I thought you had more sense than to go to quacks!" he scolded. "Obviously, you don’t trust me to be your physician. Consider this your last visit to my office. Find yourself another doctor, or should I say find a quack!"
Unruffled, the young lady asked, "Doctor, how do you explain the healing?"
"Obviously, I misdiagnosed it!" he snorted, leaving the examining room. I’ve often wondered how you can misdiagnose a lacerated foot.
This case does illustrate very vividly the blind, fanatical opposition that does exist against hypnosis in the minds of some people. People tend to oppose anything they do not understand.
Our role as hypnotists is not to meet these opponents in head to head confrontation, but rather to provide patient, knowledgeable education about hypnosis. Most importantly, provide our services with integrity, honesty, and sensitivity. First learn your skill well, then practice it with honor.
The purpose of this booklet is to provide truth and hopefully shed light where there is presently darkness. Ignorance and superstition are terrible things because they rob people of the full quality of life to which they are entitled.
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