Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

I’m reading Ernest L. Rossi’s classic book The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing: New concepts of therapeutic hypnosis at the moment. I’ll probably do several posts on it. This one is on an insight he gives which relates to the “switchboard” technique I wrote about in Pain management part 2: Imagination techniques. I already knew that it works, but Rossi gives a suggested explanation of why it works.

To review briefly, in the Switchboard you imagine that whatever it is you want to have conscious control of – whether it’s pain, emotions, Parkinson’s tremors or whatever – is connected to a control panel with a knob or slider, like in a sound engineer’s booth. The control goes from 1 to 10. You start by giving a number which represents the current level of whatever-it-is, and then you turn the control first up and then down.

photo credit: surroundsound5000

I hadn’t understood until now the full significance of turning the control up. What you’re doing is making a connection between your left brain, which understands numbers, words and so on, and your right brain, which understands spatial and symbolic things, and furthermore to the deeper parts of your brain which experience and modify pain, emotion and physical reactions.

Because what you’re trying to modify is something you perceive negatively, you’ve been trying to keep separate from it, to not engage with it. The net result is to inhibit connections and prevent integration. When you engage with it by turning the “volume” up, what you’re doing is encouraging those connections to form and also demonstrating to yourself that you have agency in the situation. You’re not at the mercy of this alien force; it’s actually something inside you that you can control, and the first demonstration is that you can turn it up (probably by disinhibiting the experience you have of it and allowing yourself to feel it at full power). Once you know you can turn it up, it then follows that you can also turn it down.

Integration is the key word here. Rossi tends to see integration as a key goal of hypnotherapy – facilitating internal communication between the parts of the brain. I’ve been moving towards this insight in my practice in any case, so it’s good to see it so well and clearly laid out, with a neurological explanation of why it works so well.

Technorati Tags: hypnosis, hypnotherapy, psychobiology, mind-body, healing, integration, neurology

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