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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For those interested in how faith can be allied with Verbal First Aid and hypnotherapy.

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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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He seemed confused.

I said, "Let's talk about brainwashing. Do you think you haven't been brainwashed up to this point?" I looked at the group and called upon them to consider the pharmaceutical companies, the tobacco industry, Madison Avenue, and the hold that beer has on the American economy and then to talk to me about brainwashing.

They sat quietly for a while and then the fellow who had complained shrugged amiably and said, "I never thought about that. I guess you have a point."

The point is one that is missed by most of us every time we walk into Wal-Mart or choose a product because of the advertising image with which its been endowed by virtue of millions of dollars and selectively researched media placement. We are constantly being sold. Usually we are being sold by fear–the fear of not being good enough, thin enough, smart enough, sexy enough, big enough, tough enough, rich enough, or hip enough. Sometimes it is by the fear of loss. Sometimes by the fear of exclusion. Often by the simple threat of death. And I know few people who are not a little afraid of that. Of course, the insurance companies have the answer to that. But, still no one feels secure.

We are sold shirts, bras, Viagra, and cars, TV's we don't need, pills they tell us we do (even though they may cause lymphoma). We are sold insurance and reverse mortgages and stuff to fill our garages till our cars don't fit.

And we buy. Because we are afraid. And people like the one in my group think that the cure is the disease. Recovery–from addiction, alcoholism or viral fear–is a detox of the mind, a de-trancing, an awakening from a video-induced sloth and media-induced greed that has made us the softest, fattest country on the planet. And so few are happy. We get more and more stuff, but less and less joy.

What we long for is simple. We long for love and purpose, a spiritual meaning in life. In all my years I've never met a bra, a pill, a diet plan or a bottle that ever made good on that promise.

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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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