Actually, I just re-read this book, which I first read in 2005 for job-related purposes. Re-reading it for practical, daily purposes enriched it for me. I love this book.

I have this childhood story that I carry around about my sister getting her finger caught in the blender. Out of 3 family members watching, one started screaming, one started running up and down the stairs and my other sister unplugged the machine. Yes, we were all young, but our initial responses to an event say a lot about our reactions to situations and carry forward in life. Have you felt you heart rate go up, or flushed in the face, or that you are holding your breath in reaction to someone's verbal aggressiveness? All of these reactions are embodied and affect our health on all levels. That is the basic premise of this book. While it systematically addresses situations of first aid, caregiving and even dying and how our choice of words directly influences the situation, it is excellent for use in our daily lives. So, the next time I am panicking about a situation, I'm going to recite to myself that the worst is already over.

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People think that hypnotherapists only put people INTO trance. But a vastly significant percentage of the work a good hypnotherapist does is help people OUT of the unhealthy trances they’re in. Take a look around and see if it isn’t so! Who doesn’t have an IPOD attached to their head or a phone on their ear? Who isn’t spending hours staring at a TV or hooked into the internet. Our culture is now almost entirely media driven—we’re surrounded (all the time!) by advertising, media, and even music that tells us what we need, who to love, and what drugs to take to make us happy.

We don’t know who we are or what we’re doing here, but we are convinced that Viagra or a breast implant will somehow make it all better.

There are more pervasive cultural delusions that I can go through in one post but this is a brief list. We'll go through each one of them in a series.

1. Viral Fear

2. Moritis

3. The Eruption of Ugly

4.The I'm-1-N-1 Virus

5. Flushing's Disease

All of these are pandemic in proportion and are driving American culture headlong into the critical care unit. Is there a fix for them? I think so.  Stay tuned.

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Her daughter had been expelled from school and she was in danger of losing custody to her ex-husband. Her anxiety was bulging out from her sides. She was terrified.

Having both suffered from asthma (years ago) and worked with asthmatic patients for quite some time, it has been my clinical observation that it is a "poetic" pathology, often expressing a grief, a panic, or a worry that has not been expressed in other, more productive ways. Even in cases where there is a clear physical etiology (smoke inhalation, chemical burns, and the like), it may be ameliorated by understanding the way the human organism works and the power of both imagery and emotions.

The research has shown that Verbal First Aid. techniques are being used successfully with children who suffer from asthma.  In one pediatric study measuring the effects of guided imagery and hypnosis the results were dramatic: 80% of the children had improvement that was measurable, none of the children’s symptoms worsened, and, best of all, some patient’s symptoms resolved after one hypnosis session (Anbar, 2002). 

In an article entitled “Applying hypnosis in a preschool family asthma education program: uses of storytelling, imagery and relaxation,” author D.P. Kohen found that combining those modalities helped the children both physically (they needed fewer office visits) and emotionally (with greater self-confidence as marked by both the parents and the children).

Helping an asthma patient was the experience that changed one paramedic's way of thinking after I taught Verbal First Aid to his team in NY. He used the techniques of pacing and leading, utilizing both imagery and the rhythm of his own breath to calm the patient. "By the time she was at the hospital," he recalled later, "she was fine. It was amazing."

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The other night I watched an episode of The Mentalist in which practitioners of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming, an offshoot of Ericksonian Hypnosis ) were suspects in a murder.

Besides the triteness of the script, my objection to the episode was not the notion that a therapist might be charged or guilty or capable of murder. Such things have happened. People who present themselves as healers are not beyond suspicion. Nor should they be. What particularly galled me was the notion that anyone could possibly be capable of putting a perfect stranger into a full-Monty trance with just a touch on the shoulder. As if that weren’t enough, the real killer/hypnotherapist managed to induce a complete amnesia and generate an utter complicity in a police officer so that he would passively do her bidding.

It is unfortunately the stuff of snake oil salesmen and charlatans and it makes the work of genuine practitioners doubly difficult—not only do we hope to be up to the task of genuine healing utilizing the tools of hypnosis, but we have to battle the false perceptions cultivated by a media scrambling to beef up their ratings.

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