Death Fear: Why Do We

Dread Being Dead?

A New American Phenomenon

I spent probably the first half of my life in one or the other state of acute fear. Due to a variety of circumstances, one of them asthma, I came to know the fear of imminent death. It was so visceral, so primordial and pre-verbal, it still defies description for me. I can fully understand why someone would do almost anything to make that feeling stop and to live his life as if death were someone else's problem. But over the years, as I've gotten healthier, I've become less and less afraid. I don't believe that was just because of my improved physical state. There were at least a few times that I thought death was possible if not within proximity. On looking back, it seems to me that the process actually worked in reverse. I think I became healthier because I became less afraid. In particular, I became less afraid of death. One reader, Synduatic, commented on one of my recent Huffington Post blogs on suffering. He implied that a good portion of our well-being stems from our ability to meet death. He paraphrased a few great thinkers who concluded that to avoid death was to avoid a free life: A rich philosophical tradition, to which you gave passing reference, surrounds these ideas, too. Plato said that philosophy is a meditation on and a preparation for death; Seneca said that he or she who learns how to die unlearns slavery; and Montaigne said that to philosophize is to learn how to die. I had to agree. He pointed to a deep fracture in the American psyche because there is no culture that shuns death (or suffering) the way ours does. And what we shun, we fear. And what we fear controls us.

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Blessings to all.

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Traditional or fundamental Christians have had issues with hypnosis before. Verbal First Aid is a form of hypnotic communication. Can they be true to their faith and use Verbal First Aid?

I believe Christians can use Verbal First Aid to benefit their own health and the health of their loved ones and stay faithful to scripture and spirit.

One of Christianity’s great fears about hypnosis as they've understood it through television and mass media is that it is used by malevolent people to induce a moral laxity and make the prohibited permissible.

The truth, however, is that clinical hypnosis cannot make anyone do anything that would undermine their moral or ethical resolve.

There's a simple and true story to demonstrate this:

One day Dr. Erickson, the greatest psychiatrist and hypnotherapist of the last century,  went to his secretary and told her he was tired and wanted to rest. If anyone called, he told her, she was to say that he was out of the office. She agreed to do this for him. A few days later he put her in a hypnotic trance and then asked her the same thing: to tell people he was out of the office when he was in fact taking a break. While still in a formally induced trance, she refused outright. “Why?” he wanted to know.

"Because,” she said, “it would be a lie.”

Ironically, in hypnosis she had a stronger moral resolve than in her normal waking state.

Hypnosis is not “brainwashing" even though it's been portrayed that way. Verbal First Aid–as a form of hypnotic communication in acute situations–is similarly not a form of "mind control."

Here is the critical difference between the way Christians have been taught to see hypnotherapy and its clinical reality in the hands of ethical practitioners:
Hypnosis only utilizes a state of consciousness that is already natural and normal. Trance is not something that is artificially induced in a person. It is simply a state of awareness in which we are more focused on an internal process (breathing, thoughts) and most importantly it is something all of us move in and out of all day.

This normal shift of awareness is even more common when we are frightened, hurt, or ill, which is why Verbal First Aid works so well to help stop bleeding, reduce an inflammatory response, and lower blood pressure. We can see it even more dramatically when it is used with children who enter fairly easily and frequently into “trance."

How Verbal First Aid Works in Alliance with Faith and the Faithful

If the definitions of trance as clinicians use it are accurate (and I believe they are) and the dangers are real as Christians see them (and I believe they certainly can be), how can the healing use of imagery work together with the faithful so that as Jesus said in John 10:10, “I am come that they may have life and have it more abundantly.”

In the beginning was the word.

That words are powerful is a familiar concept to those who read the Bible.

Words have a prominent position in the Bible from the third sentence: And GOD SAID LET THERE BE LIGHT. He did not create with His “hands”. He spoke—“By the word of the Lord were the heavens made (Ps. 33).” To speak is to WILL into existence. What we say and how we say it is a co-creative act. What we say hangs somewhere between heaven and earth.

Words matter. The mystics have always known this. Only now is science catching up.

Why? Because they create images in the mind of the person to whom we are speaking. Those images and the thoughts that flow with them generate cascades of chemistry that dictate not only how we feel emotionally, but how fast or slow our hearts beat, how high our blood pressure goes, how profoundly we feel the pain of an injury, even the way our livers function.

We all use words all the time. And they have the power to help or to harm. Isn’t it our obligation to make what we say as healing as possible?

The therapeutic use of words (psychotherapy/hypnosis) is no different than a good conversation, a sermon, a lecture, a television show or a good book. It is the use of words to move us to see things in a different way, to uplift and help us. When used in the right way with a proper intention, those words can help us heal.

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