Ericksonian Hypnosis Is Totes A Thing

Sometimes People Are Just Very, Very Tired


A few weeks ago I was talking to a mate about a mutual friend whose husband died last year. She is struggling. He told me she wasn't suicidal, but she was ready to go. She’s tired of it all. It just feels too hard. I nodded and blurted, unthinkingly: yeah, me, too.

He looked at me with an odd, sideways appraisal. And I felt the need to explain. When I wrote this post to further explain, I took it down because I still hadn’t got it right. Chris on twitter sent me a Direct Message to check out if I was ok. (Thanks, bro). I was basically ok, but I was also incredibly tired. I hope this third explanation makes things clear.

I’m not really suicidal. Seriously.

But the last few months have been very, very hard.

This is a post about Milton Erickson. He was the most astonishing psychiatrist. Ever. Fair dinkum. He was the most influential hypnotist in history. He’s so cool, he’s getting three blog entries on this site. Yes. Three. Pick your jaw up, gentle reader.

This is also a blog about my bad dreams, my weight, why I needed to love Julieanne so much, and why I hate my life some days. I seem to be facing some hard realities. I may as well take advantage of this, and further my own journey, by inflicting my whiney little diatribes upon you. Yes, you. Never mind. I will feel better, at least.

Ok, so let’s start with young Milton. He was born on 5 December 1901. That’s important, because he was of that generation which was at risk of polio. And he got it.

At 17, he was already dyslexic and colour blind, and then he scored the trifecta and got polio, too. (And here I thought my life sucked).

Can you imagine what it was like for him to lie in the hospital and hear the doctors tell his mother he probably wouldn’t last the night? Put yourself in that hospital bed for just a moment. Oh. My. God. He got angry, and he asked his mother to adjust the mirror. She didn’t know why he wanted it, but she did it. Remember, she thought he’d be dead in the morning. He was determined to watch one last sunset before he died.

Imagine being that mother for a moment. Imagine having a son who asked you to move a mirror for him. You don’t understand why. All you know is he’s going to be dead by morning. The doctors said so.

He watched that one glorious sunset. Think of the best sunset you ever saw.

Imagine if you thought you were dying while you watched it. Try not to cry.

I dare you.

Milton lost consciousness for three days, but he lived.

From my own perspective, I envy him those three, dreamless days. Because from an early age (about grade three), I have had a thing called night terrors. And counsellors, doctors, psychiatrists and sleep therapists have not been able to cure me of it. The nightmares come and go. I have been free of them for years some times. But there is no cure. This is what drove me to become a psychologist. And there is no cure. None. Not ever. I was talking to another psychologist, again, about it, this week. Concerned look. Shrug. Invitation to talk about my feelings. Sigh.

But let’s consider Erickson, who had far worse to put up with.

He spent a long time in a room watching his sisters, knowing he’d never be a farmer like his dad. He watched how sisters communicate with sisters. He saw the raw, savage power of children interacting. He watched his baby sister learn to crawl, knowing he’d need to learn how to walk again.

Imagine if you were paralysed and an invalid. Imagine the experience of wasted, weary tiredness. Take a moment to appreciate the use of your limbs. Your lungs move when you want them too. That, in case you hadn’t noticed, is handy.

My lungs don’t work so well lately. Complicated set of reasons: I was always an asthmatic, but kicked that when I was sixteen. Sixteen till roughly twenty-three, I was seriously thin. I was accused of being a male anorexic at a time when such a thing was theoretically in dispute. Referred to psychiatrists, yada, yada, yada. I started to put on weight properly at about 25. Until then I hovered between 63 and 76 kilograms. I can remember lying awake in the early hours of most of the late seventies listening to 3GL, the local radio station, with a familiar feeling of hunger, and even weakness. But that did yield some benefits. I am often sought-after for my friends' tables for music trivia nights.

Erickson didn't squander his sleepless hours on popular culture. He invented a new branch of hypnosis and he refined it, using himself as the test case. Often I listen to people dismissing hypnosis as a showbusiness trick, as a sleight-of-hand or sleight-of-mind. I heard a friend say in conversation the other day: Hypnosis? Is that, like, really 'A Thing'? I wanted to tell her, from my own personal experience, that Hypnoisis Is, Indeed, A Thing.

Various altered mind states are so infused within our lives (listening to music, zoning out when driving, exercise 'high's - that we might not notice how real they are, how useful they are, how much we rely upon them. I accept you may feel a bit sceptical about that - but I'd hope I don't need to convince you about tiredness. I'm sure you'll agree my widowed friend feels tired, that Milton often felt tired, and that I feel tired.

So there are plenty of ways in which people can feel very, very tired.


People Have A Range Of Responses To Day-To-Day Stress

I got married at 25, and several things occurred. I started to put on weight and my nightmares reduced. They didn't stop completely, but they occurred less regularly I accumulated fewer new ones. Then when my marriage failed I lost a lot of weight, got back to within cooee of 76 kilo. I am 5’ 11”, or 180 cm. People I worked with asked if I had cancer. It shocked me because for most of my 20s I had been lighter. All these changes are a consequences of ways of responding to stresses.

OK, so since then I have progressively put on weight and exercised less. My alcohol intake varies, but basically I am accumulating more calories than I am burning. About three years ago I met a woman I’ll call Julieanne, and things paused briefly – but otherwise I have been progressively getting fatter and the nightmares have been getting more frequent. Again, these are consequences of unconscious ways a person may cope with stress.

It is getting on for 18 months since I last saw Julieanne face to face. In that time I have put on a huge amount of weight. My life has been different. I am different. I am not sure I'm adapting healthily - but I am also well within the range of normal functioning. I have a very typical set of issues around being too heavy - I am, like most people, struggling to lose weight, not to gain weight.

I'm labouring this point because I have come to see weight gain as a typical, if unhealthy, way of responding to life's stresses. I kinda like the normalcy it implies. Because for a large part of my life I have viewed my dreams and my sleeping as abnormal, weird, different and strange. Being overweight is a pain and a problem, but there's a sense in which I kinda like it.

It's like I am a real boy, if you'll forgive my Pinocchiosis.

And weight gain often occurs in relation to stress, or perhaps even to feeling tired. And from time to time various people make claims that hypnosis can help with weight loss.

Another of my responses to stress is a fairly standard compulsivity for overwork, and a lot of 40 something middle-class people have that. Unless I have my kids I pretty much work every hour I am awake. My workload, like my nightmares, is not really anything new. One idea about nightmares is that they occur in response to stress, or to trauma. Whatever. Working too much and not sleeping well cause tiredness, they’re responses to stress, and sometimes hypnosis is held up as a solution.

While I have had patches of incessant nightmares before, about eight weeks ago they returned once more, in earnest. For a period of six weeks I slept between three and six hours per night. Once a week I might have caught up with two four hour stretches in a single night.

Napoleon slept five hours a night, and so did Churchill. Churchill went to the trouble of having two beds, so he could sleep in the other if the first didn’t work for him. My own father slept five hours a night, but always napped in the afternoon. I don’t do naps. I hate sleep. I try to avoid it.

I know the minimum I can get away with, without psychosis, is 4 ½ hours' sleep. Typically, this patch aside, I manage about six. But my dentist is worried because I am slowly grinding my teeth (and his expensive teethguards) to dust.

But let’s get back to Milton. Imagine a young man thwarted in becoming a farmer, who taught himself to banish pain and learn to walk with a cane. He did this using his own hypnosis techniques.

Imagine a young man who did that, in part, by embarking on a thousand mile canoe trip. The bloke was made of iron. He leaves me ashamed of my own reactions to adversity.

So Milton was a self-taught hypnotist who used his skills to respond in an extraordinary way to extraordinary obstacles.

I am currently more than 101 kilograms: roughly. I vary, week to week, and sometimes am under 100. Exercise, in particular the many kilometres I used to walk each day, are a thing of the past. I defer everything ‘cos I am exhausted, and I rarely walk any more. I am too tired. I am now flat-lining on the tiredness I used to walk for a couple of hours to achieve.

This is all part of a cycle. A very unhealthy cycle.

I have given up, somehow.

I can’t have Julieanne, and somewhere late last year I accepted that.

Nothing took its place. I just got sadder and sadder. I occasionally see photos of myself, or catch myself in a mirror or a shop window. I am always shocked by how fat, sad and old I look. But mostly sad. I can’t believe how I came to look so sad. Imagine not being able to look at yourself, because you look so sad. I actively avoid mirrors these days. I don't like admitting that, but hey, I made a commitment to myself about this blog. And I can only change when I fully look at myself. And sometimes a cycle of low mood occurs as a response to everyday stress.

Interestingly, in Australia the Australian Society of Hypnosis strongly advises against using hypnosis for depressed or suicidal clients for fear it will result in increased suicidal ideation. I have been to significant psychology conferences in Europe and the USA where such arguments are dismissed out of hand. There are experienced hypnotists in Western society who argue hypnosis can be used to treat depressed mood.


Ericksonian Hypnosis Is Totes A Thing

By contrast with my shameful mirror-phobia, Milton Erickson had much to be proud of. He studied hard, and achieved a psychology degree while studying medicine. In the field of clinical hypnosis, he is without peer. His followers speak of him reverently, and repeat anecdotes of his life as a guide to their own behaviour. Milton Erickson is just this side of a religion. Ericksonian Hypnosis Is Totes A Thing.

If I responded to my own challenges in life the way Milton Erickson responded to his challenges, I would have climbed Mt Everest by now. Not that I want to, but you get my point. None of this hanging about pining after some woman I cannot be with, and getting progressively fatter. I’d love to have sat down with young Milt and discussed my nightmares with him.

God knows, I have talked to everyone else about them.

So apparently I can’t breathe. I can’t draw breath properly, and haven’t been able to for about two months now. My GP called it a virus. Well, ok.

Actually, I’d say that it is associated with a poor sleep regime and being overweight.

But we could all see that diagnosis coming.

So, ok. Here’s the deal. It is entirely possible to argue that Ericksonian Hypnosis is the answer to all our woes, and that it is the answer to my own woes. Erickson used his self-taught techniques to alter the entire field of medical hypnosis, and to influence: brief therapy, hypnosis, object relations theory, family systems theory and neuro-linguistic programming. (I hate neuro-linguistic programming). He also used it to achieve physical functioning which most polio victims never managed, and to manage the pain of post-polio syndrome in a way which was, frankly, emblematic.

But I would argue that use of the hypnotic techniques of Milton Erickson is not the solution to achieving a life of contentment. Not the whole solution, anyway. And my argument includes an exploration of the limbic system of the brain and the modern ethics of psychology. It also has reference to Seligman’s positive psychology. And it is hard-won and personal. Milton could not help me to escape my personal hell. I wish I had met him before he died, age 79, in 1980. Maybe then I’d have a different view.

Either way, though, I swear to you: Ericksonian Hypnosis Is Totes A Thing. (I can probably stop saying that now).


Ericksonian Hypnotic Techniques Can Be Extremely Valuable In Addressing Non Conscious Phenomena

There are two points I wish to make explicitly clear about the mighty and amazing Milt’s rockin’ treatment techniques.

First, Milton Erickson cured himself of being confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He was a self taught medical hypnotist, and his techniques have saved many, many lives. On top of that, he has improved the lives of many more people who suffered from a variety of maladies including sexual dysfunction and chronic back conditions. I have personally seen people who gave up smoking as a consequence of his techniques, and who undertook surgery without anaesthetic as a consequence of his approaches.

Milton rocks.

Second, I just spent six weeks in hell. For all my wonderful knowledge of Ericksonian hypnosis, and other psychological techniques, I can see that, at times, I am struggling to step up to the challenges that beset me. I am 41 years old. My career is thriving in two disciplines. My relationships with mates, and my children, and my family, are better than they have ever been. And, recently, every night of the week - for six weeks – my life was hell.

Each night, I plunged under a truck on the corner of Melbourne Road and Bell Parade, Geelong. Or I’d fail to save victims falling from a monorail in the Swiss Alps. Or I failed to stop a 10 year old being raped and mutilated in a slave market. (That one has been going on since the third grade). And there are more. Rooftop running from the devil. Fights with a bunyip. Drowning in a tar pit. Being stabbed in a knife fight. Burial alive. And others.

There are a lot more, but lucid dreaming and the techniques of Ericksonian Hypnosis have saved me from most of them. In the average nightmare, I can pretty much rip your average bogey man a new one. I am 41 years old and I am the kind of warrior who can tear your average nightmare to pieces. Nothing defeats me anymore. Nothing scares me. I am iron.

When I was 16, I learned of lucid dreaming and I learned how to fly. In the next blog post I can teach you the same trick. Soon after, I learned how to create an iron fist in my dreams. Ever since, I have evolved rat cunning about ways to avoid being boxed in and how to defeat demons.

I hate the Bell Parade dream because I am in a car - if I was driving a convertible (and one night I f**king well will be), I'd be able to escape the b-double which turns in front of me. (By the way, there's no way that truck can get to that turn. It wouldn't make it through the Ballarat Road roundabout or the subsequent Rippleside turn into Bell Parade. I have never seen a truck like it at that set of lights. It is impossible).

Lucid dreaming is actually fairly easy, and there are few dreams which can resist its few basic techniques. It is actually not that hard. I haven’t screamed in my sleep in years.

The worst challenge in fighting the kind of war I am fighting is, often I let others die in my dreams. They can’t fly or fight with an iron fist, and I usually have to choose which one I let die. That is the Swiss Alps scenario. It sucks. The worst of my life is, I’ve become hardened to the experience. There are some people I have seen die so many times, I no longer scream. I just sigh inside. And sometimes I am tired of their inability to help themselves and a secret, nasty part of me quietly decides they deserve it.

What I am trying to explain is, I have been able to utilise a range of techniques, many of them having originated in Milton Erickson’s practise, to combat my problems. But these tricks are not enough, and the key aspects of humanity which are intrinsic to a life of contentment depend on other things. On knowing ourselves. On sincere reflection. On a commitment to decency, sometimes despite our life’s experiences.


Hypnosis Is A Tool, Not A Therapy, And Personal Growth Is Ultimately The Key To A Life Of Contentment

But it shocked me, when I said I was ready to die. The unrealised truth of it escaped my lips and I suddenly realised: some days I have nothing to look forward to. Some days it is all just too much effort.

Last night I didn't have a nightmare but I couldn't sleep. So I woke up, got up, and went to work (yes, on a Saturday). Julieanne texts me occasionally. There was a flurry of contacts recently when I was in Newcastle. She was in Broke, about an hour away. That kinda hurts. But it is better than when she doesn’t contact me. Milton has helped me to survive, where sleep therapists and other psychologists failed. But there are very real human pains which no trick will overcome.

How we respond to our dreams is a practice for responding to real life, and there are aspects of me which are paranoid and defensive; an angry, tired man. I try to be pleasant and I sorta function healthily. I could do better, though. In real life, it can be good to be boxed in. In real life environmental scans are not compulsory. And the experience of today can be something which doesn’t replicate what has happened a thousand times before. Novelty happens. And writing this blog post has reminded me of these things.

Next time, we’ll look at lucid dreaming and the way hypnosis affects the limbic system. If you have night terrors, it’ll help you stand up longer. Lie down longer. Whatever.

As we discuss hypnosis, though, we need to remember we’re playing with defence mechanisms which exist for a purpose. I have come to understand that I was clinging to my love of Julieanne as a smoke screen for the harsh reality that is a regular fight with my own unconscious. It had, in some ways, nothing to do with her. Like object relations theory dictates, I am the center of my own universe and I was using her to shield my own experiences. As I let her go, my nightmares returned with a ferocity I was unprepared for. The same thing had happened when my marriage ended.

But it is easy for me to reduce her to a defence mechanism. Simplistic. Untrue. She sent me an email last week, and my heart sang. The truth is, we're all hoping to escape the thing which causes us pain. We all hope to be impervious. We all want to be bulletproof. I’d like to shut down my nightmares and ride off into the suntet with Julieanne. I know if I did, though, that someting else would arise to deal with basic existential conflicts which are a part of who I am. And it is very important to see basic psychological mechanisms for what they are, and also to see people as people. That is a skill called mature ambivalence, and it is the most important skill we can have.

So Milton's techniques weren't a cure-all for him, and not for me either.

They are incredibly useful, though.

And next time I'll explain how.