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."

Bookmark to:

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.

Bookmark to: