I’ve been asked this a couple of times, and I’ve noticed at least one person searching on my site for the answer, so I thought I’d blog about it.
You may have heard of the phenomenon by which a hypnotized person can be instructed to forget something. It’s called “posthypnotic amnesia” and has been demonstrated in brain scan studies such as a well-known Israeli experiment analyzed in Scientific American. If you read that article, you’ll find that posthypnotic amnesia doesn’t actually remove memories, it just makes them temporarily unavailable to consciousness. They continue to exist and can exert an effect through what is called “implicit memory”. Not everyone can achieve posthypnotic amnesia, either.
So what I’ve been telling people who ask me if hypnosis can help them to forget a bad relationship is that unfortunately it can’t. I’ve had a bad relationship experience myself in the past (actually, a bad non-relationship experience, unrequited love) which at the time I would have given quite a bit to forget, so I understand where these people are coming from. But even if I could induce posthypnotic amnesia in them – which isn’t certain – it would leave the memories active and influential on their lives, just buried beneath the surface where they couldn’t access them and, importantly, couldn’t learn from them.
After all, the reason that these memories are painful is an adaptive one: Pain teaches us what we should stay away from. That doesn’t mean, though, that if you’ve been through a painful experience you have to stay in pain.
photo credit: numberstumper
Pain does wear off over time, if you let it. It does so by a process of slowly detaching the emotion from the memories, the same process that psychologists use to help people overcome past trauma by revisiting the memories in a safe environment. But we do have ways to speed this process up.
I’ve already written about using distancing techniques, such as watching yourself in the third person, to reduce the emotional impact of past memories and enable yourself to re-evaluate them in a new way. My British colleague Adam Eason also recently blogged about some experiments around the therapy called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), which is used with people who have post-traumatic stress disorder from experiences such as war, natural disaster or rape. In this disorder, the emotional impact of an experience is so great that the memories keep replaying, accompanied by the emotion. EMDR attempts to correct this by, effectively, distracting you while you replay the memories – another version of the distancing technique.
At least, that’s what the study Adam cites seems to show. It’s called How eye movements affect unpleasant memories: Support for a working-memory account, and it found that vertical eye movements worked as well as horizontal ones, and that other distractions (like copying a complex geometric figure or listening to a voice recording while thinking about the memories) were also just as beneficial. By a happy coincidence, listening to a voice recording is one effective method of hypnotherapy.
The thing about memory is that it’s dynamic, especially recent memory. Each time you access a memory, it’s like taking a shirt out of a drawer and unfolding it. When you’re finished accessing the memory, you have to, as it were, fold it back up again in order to put it away, and the creases won’t be in exactly the same place. The memory changes, in other words, depending on the context in which you retrieved it. This is why, if you look at an old diary or a videotape of an event that you remember quite clearly, you are often surprised at how much your memory has diverged from the record of the event made at the time. Every time you think about it, the context in which you think about it subtly affects the memory itself, and particularly how you feel about it.
So, while hypnotherapy can’t help you to forget a bad relationship, it (and other techniques) can help you to recover from the pain of one. Once you’ve done so, and put your experiences into perspective, you can learn from them and grow stronger and wiser for the future.
(I’m currently working on a new product to help with emotional management, including techniques for reducing the pain of past events. It’s called the Emotional Circuit-Breaker Toolkit, and if you want to know more about it, you can go to the Courses page and vote for it or sign up for my newsletter.)
Technorati Tags: hypnosis, hypnotherapy, relationships, emotion, memory, painful memory, posthypnotic amnesia, trauma, EMDR
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