Many years ago, whilst living abroad with an alcoholic partner a dreadful row
ensued. I told him that I hoped he would crash the car and die. I also added
that I hoped he wouldn’t damage my car. Two days later my partner did crash the
car and died. The car was virtually unharmed.
My mother had an argument with a building contractor and hissed at him ‘I hope
you die of a heart attack’. One week later he died – of a heart attack.
Susan got breast cancer. On the advice of a friend, a kinesiologist, Susan went
to the States and worked with an NLP practitioner. Her breast cancer
disappeared. When she returned to the UK she became pregnant. Her doctor was
horrified. He said
“You stupid woman, how can you get pregnant – you have cancer?”
Shortly after the child was born, the cancer resurfaced, all over her body.
Susan’s friend called me in desperation seeking another NLP therapist for Susan.
Two days after seeing the therapist, Susan had a scan. The cancer had shrunk
considerably.
Were my mother and I unconsciously using the latent power of hexing? Was the
doctor instrumental in the resurgence of Susan’s cancer? Did the work the
therapist did with Susan help her to fight the cancer? The average Joe in the
street would probably dismiss this all as coincidence. I’m not convinced that
coincidence is the only explanation.
After reading Dr Larry Dossey’s book, ‘Be Careful What You Pray For.. You
Just Might Get It’ I began to wonder…..
How powerful is thought and the way we transmit it to others? If, as Dossey
meticulously documents, we can influence others with our words and prayers, what
lesson is here for the healing professions? Dossey is a medical doctor. Most of
his experience is based on carefully researched evidence.
Dossey relates how one patient developed unexpected serious complications after
an abdominal operation. The patient told his nurse that he felt he was going to
die. A consultant psychiatrist was called in and under hypnosis the patient
revealed that, whilst under anaesthetic, he had heard someone say ‘This is the
worst case I’ve ever seen’. A medical student had indeed said those words. The
student had only seen one case and had meant his comment as a joke. The student
was summoned to explain his comment and two days later the patient recovered
completely.
This is just one of many many examples of what I call ‘medical hexing’. Richard
Bandler, the founder of NLP has had some personal experiences of this form of
attack. A few years ago, Richard was die-agnosed as die-abetic. When the doctor
dispensed his medicine, Richard was [as the US law of informed consent requires]
told about the potential side effects. ‘95% of people who take this become
impotent’. To most people this powerful hypnotic suggestion from a doctor would
probably be enough to put a serious damper on their love life! Richard refused
to accept the suggestion and told the doctor. ‘I’m one of the 5% who won’t!’
A couple of years ago, Richard’s wife Paula was stricken by a very rare dis-ease.
The doctors told Paula that she may never walk again. When Richard heard this,
he immediately removed his wife from the hospital and proceeded to use all his
skills to hypnotically re-programme the hexing Paula had received from her
doctors. Today Paula is fully recovered and has resumed her active life. Last
month she spent an entire day walking round Disneyland.
As children we are encouraged to believe in the infallibility doctors and
teachers. We learn that the doctor always knows best. In the same way, across
the ocean in Haiti, people are brought up to believe in the infallible power of
the witch doctor. When the bone spins and points to the ‘victim’, the victim
dies. Beliefs are powerful beyond measure. Doctors hold enormous power. I
believe they can curse or cure someone with their words alone. If the mind can
be led to act out negative suggestions, it stands to reason it can be led in the
opposite direction.
What would happen if doctors and practitioners of medicine, complementary or
otherwise, could learn to harness alternative skills and powerful language that
enhanced the healing process rather than hindered it?
Richard Bandler believes that rather than just using one method, there are many
ways to help people recover. When asked about the usefulness of hypnosis and
alternative/complementary methods in conjunction with medical practice he had
this to say.
“I don’t care what you do for a living if you communicate with other
human beings you are going to be using hypnosis whether you know it or not.
That’s the way in which language works. Its not a different process, it’s just
precision skills because we are not talking about waving a watch back and
forth, we are talking about being able to have the kind of control that most
of the time is only taught to yogis and monks. Most people do not spend a lot
of time making their brain be in the state that would be best.
Doctors, they are under constraints in the US. We have informed consent, so
they have to tell you everything that could go wrong, instead of telling you
about all the things that can go well.
We are always putting ideas into each others heads and
especially when people are scared, frustrated recovery from a lot of things
seems to take a long time. Nurses and doctors could use all the help they can
get”
Bandler has a great suggestion to get round ‘informed consent’. He suggests
that doctors can deliver the message with incongruence. This means that if they
were telling someone that a side effect of the drug they are taking is
impotence, they could ensure their body language did not back up what they are
saying. Common statistics suggest that people will choose to believe the body
signals over the words in cases where the two are not giving the same message.
He also suggests when delivering the message they finish by saying very
congruently “I am sure this won’t be the case with you!”
What if, when faced with what they consider to be terminal cases, doctors were
a) able to talk positively to their clients and give them hope and b) willing to
refer them to alternative practitioners? These professions should not be at
odds, but should work together to create holistic health care. Bandler agrees.
So far they [doctors and nurses] haven’t been able to do
everything, when people come to them, a lot of times its very hard to tell
even with all the tests what to do.
Acupuncture has been around for 20,000 years and people learned to do it well.
It’s an adjunct to other medicine. I really believe that all these people
should start working together. Doctors should send people to herbalists,
really good ones, as an adjunct to the medicine they are taking. If they don’t
talk to each other, then they are not going to know how to put these things
together, people are going to end doing it on their own and taking the wrong
things.
Chiropractors do some things that doctors don’t do and if they learned what
they could do together they would be able to do even more. This competition
over who’s right and who’s wrong, the answer is none of us are right, because
we don’t know everything and how to cure it right away.
I think you should use anything you can get that makes it so that it is
easier. When you throw in a little good hypnosis you can get people to stay
healthful. You can get people to do things like remember to take the right
pills at the right time”
I have assisted on a number of Bandler’s trainings over the years and I have
encountered an ever-increasing number of alternative/complementary practitioners
amongst the participants. I also run a group where I get the opportunity to meet
many of these people after their training. Most of them have discovered that
what they learn in these courses can be blended with their own skills to create
amazing results.
The use of hypnotic suggestions in aiding recovery and creating hope has
enormous potential. During one training I worked with a respected heart surgeon.
He was really excited at the possibilities of how he could use hypnosis with his
patients to allay their fears, increase recovery, create a positive outlook and
give them tools for the future.
Bandler has recently gone back to the roots of deep trance hypnosis. He believes
that this lies at the core of healing work.
“All of these things [Neuro NLP and Design Human
Engineering (DHE)] are grounded and started by the fact that we were doing
hypnosis so I’ve come back to doing deep trance and seeing how to get people
to respond in a new way.
This is about using very deep trance tools to be able to make very pervasive
changes across a wide range of behaviour to try and teach people the most
important thing, which is to spend more time practising feeling good than they
do feeling bad so it becomes a habit.” Richard Bandler July 2000
I believe every one of us has the potential to be a negative hexer or a
positively powerful healer. How many people grow up believing they are ugly,
incompetent, or limited because of some powerful hypnotic suggestion implanted
carelessly in childhood? For many people they only have to hear someone say ‘you
look unwell, peaky, tired’ to begin to feel unwell, tired or peaky! How many
times have you unconsciously acted on post-hypnotic suggestions from people who
don’t even know what they are doing? Even if you think you haven’t, you surely
have. The best hypnotic suggestions are unconsciously absorbed. You might not
even realise it, but people are hexing you all the time.
I recently saw a doctor as a client. He came to me because he felt his poor
communication style was affecting not only his love life but also his work. This
man was a hypnotically powerful communicator. Unfortunately he communicated
negativity, despair and misery. A little reprogramming helped him realise his
potential and change the focus of his hypnotic language!
Doctors are mainly taught to be great technical healers, and until recently,
they received very little training in the art of communication. ‘Bedside manner’
was considered something they either had naturally or they didn’t. Fortunately
this is changing, but not quickly enough, yet. There are people working, even as
I write this, to convince the NHS to embrace NLP and other skills as part of the
official medical training curriculum in the UK.
When we can harness the ability to influence others in a positive way, how much
easier and effective will the healing be?
Bandler has been working on a new set of skills that go beyond NLP to utilise
deep trance to affect yourself and others for the better. He calls this Neuro-Hypnotic
Repatterning. He describes it thus
“Neuro Hypnotic Repatterning is about using the hypnotic process to
restructure people at the level of cortical pathways. Most of the problems and
things that people do and bad feelings that they have work automatically but
they weren’t there when they were a baby.
These are learned behaviours and when you hypnotically re-pattern someone what
you are basically doing is teaching them not to get to what they don’t want to
get. Archival memory systems always have to have up-datable memory where you put
new information in front of old information.
So if you teach somebody a new way to respond it makes it so that it is easier
because they never get to the bad system. Everything human beings learnt will
always be there but sometimes what you need to do is make a left turn on the
cortical pathways and use a new learning”
The potential is there to create a truly holistic healing society, when we pool
resources and when healers with one skill learn from or harness the skills of
others. When we come to realise that many of the not so pleasant things that
happen to people are the direct result of uninformed and unconscious hypnotic
suggestions, we can change this for the better. We can heal the world when we
work in harmony, blending the old and the new. It’s our choice.
