May 14
6
Integration of the Mind – Part Twenty-Two
What about Hypnosis, Relaxation and “Danger?”
Is putting this in someone's hand dangerous?
For background, let’s have a little straight talk about religious beliefs: Last time out I mentioned Jim Jones of the Guyana, grape Kool-aid, suicide incident of 1978. Were those 900 plus people who drank that cyanide potion and died under some sort of hypnotic spell or was it part of their religion, or what else is possible?
Circa mid 1960s …Ukiah, California some 10 to 15 years earlier – my friend, business and non-profit-organization partner, psychiatrist-mentor, whom I mention often and from whom came my first introduction to hypnosis and I were walking down a residential area street, near the church we both attended and of which we were both fellow officers.
He was in the last year of his psychiatric residency at the nearby State mental hospital and I was managing a trucking company. We went by the home of, the no less and very same, above mentioned Jim Jones.
Some houses should be avoided, can you tell which ones?
“Remind me to tell you later about the guy that lives there, a very scary individual,” he told me, barely above a whisper.
This is the very first time and some fifty-two years later, that I have ever mentioned this – as my psych-buddy had sworn me to secrecy about all the things he shared with me about any and all of his patients.
Jim Jones had made a big splash in the news a year or two earlier, I had read about it in the San Francisco Examiner, related to moving his People’s Temple from Indianapolis to Ukiah, because he was convinced that the end of the world was coming soon and that it would begin with a nuclear blast near his home and the former location of his church in Indiana.
Jones sought out this particular psychiatrist because one of his followers, a woman, had recommended him to Jones because he was a “Christian” psychiatrist. I offer that tidbit for one purpose: The woman thought of People’s Temple as “Christian” and Jim Jones as a “Christian” pastor. It is a matter of record that Jones received his ordination from the Disciples of Christ denomination, considered by many to be a “mainstream” Christian organization.
What is a Christian Pastor?
The comment my friend made to me is that he wouldn’t be shocked if Jim Jones received a gunshot wound to the head and recovered from it; making, of course, reference to a passage in The Revelation (the last book in the Christian Bible) about the Anti-Christ.
As you’ve noticed I put quotations around the term “Christian” in some of the above references – I refuse to be called a “Christian” simply because the term means too many things to too many different people; I don’t want to get off on that discussion here, except as a means to point out something related to Islam and so-called “Islamic terrorism.”
Here’s a quote that is every bit as troubling as the reference to Jim Jones as representing Christianity:
A spokesman for God or just another angry man?
“We have every right to kill four million Americans – two million of them children – and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands of others.” –Suleiman Abu Ghaith, son-in-law of, and ostensibly speaking for, Osama bin Lama in a video in 2002.
Do the voices of Bin Laden and Abu Ghaith represent Islam? Do the actions of Jim Jones represent Christianity? The answer to those questions depends upon perspective …I want to say “yes,” qualified by the following add-on: that is, Christianity and Islam according to Jones and Abu Ghaith.
Based on my study and personal interpretation of the words written by Muhammad, the purported founder of Islam and the words quoted by close followers of Jesus, the purported founder of Christianity, it is my point of view (which doesn’t make it true) that neither Jesus nor Muhammad had anything to do with the religion expressed by the above quote of Suleiman Abu Ghaith or the mass suicide/murder (call it what you will) brought on by Jim Jones.
Further, neither did Jesus nor Muhammad, in the historic or present tenses, have anything to do with the Christian crusades vs. the Muslim jihad, beginning in the 11th century – continuing in the forms of Terrorism in the name of an Islam duty and resistant war on terrorism under the guise of Christian duty, presently …as someone might say, “give me a break!”
When I had first met my friend, the psychiatrist, he was on the medical staff of about a dozen M.D.s who were completing a two year residency requirement and responsible for the medical treatment of the 3,000 in-patient population at the hospital, as well as had the responsibility for psychiatric out-patient programs serving the entire populations of Mendocino and Lake Counties in Northern California.
He was the only professed Christian among the staff and he said the others all joked that he was, “in denial,” because of it.
Does this doctor use hypnosis too?
How does all of this relate to hypnosis? Part of my psychiatrist friend’s ongoing training at the hospital was in hypnotherapy …the use of hypnosis in treating patients. He also had a few private patients that attended the so-called mother church of the Peoples’ Temple in Redwood Valley, just a few miles out of Ukiah.
Jim Jones made an appointment to see him ostensibly for the purpose of being able to refer troubled church members for counseling, he stated that that Jones said he didn’t want any of the “heathen witchdoctors meddling with his people” …my friend told me that he was convinced that the visit was at least partly a thinly guised pretext to get help for his own (Jones’) unstable mental condition.
None of the other staff members had met Jones, but they all agreed that Jones’ church members were in a hypnotic trance induced by their pastor. My friend had told me during that referenced walk that Jones made him extremely nervous, “he gives me the heebie-jeebies” were his exact words and that there was an evil presence about him.
He later based his discontinuance of hypnosis in his practice because he trusted very few people to use hypnosis on patients with psychiatric conditions because they were prone to following suggestions that simply were not healthy for them and hypnosis makes a person highly susceptible to suggestion.
“I don’t even trust myself in that regard …only God knows what is best for any individual and it is just too easy for a therapist to transfer some of his own emotional needs and values onto a highly susceptible person. Too many therapists play God without even being aware of it. Hypnosis is far too powerful in the wrong hands. Some people …and Jim Jones is a prime example, are naturally gifted hypnotists.”
You have an uncanny way of looking after someone else's needs.
“It is why,” he continued, “that I trust you …you have an uncanny way of thinking only about the needs of the person and divorcing your own emotional needs in the process, that is why I’ve watched you bring so many of my patients to a point of healing.”
I have a somewhat self-demeaning reaction to his otherwise, self-confidence building remark …the reason I am effective in the healing process is simply because I don’t know squat. The Healer lives in the patient and the Healer lives in me – all together we get in touch with whatever is best for that person.
It is the reason I don’t “hide behind” any specialized training or certificates thereof. I have no licenses, degrees or anything that indicate that I am qualified to help somebody improve. Do I use hypnosis? Not in the sense that most people think of the term …that is, cause and effect.
I show people when they want to do it how to practice self-hypnosis, the formal training I have had is based on the premise of getting into a deep state of relaxation and learning how to employ one’s own imagination to get a variety of their own desired results.
Follow any road you choose.
I do business and personal coaching with a selected few clients on one basis alone: What is it they want to accomplish in their business and personal lives? If I determine, for me, in an initial session, that they are highly motivated to get that result, then I will accept them as a client (period).
Many years ago, I told my friend, who dabbled in many different therapeutic systems, that there was no such a thing as a “good” therapy or a “good” therapist, but and ONLY a patient who was strongly motivated to get beyond dependency upon a therapy and a therapist. That patient, I told him, will get well no matter what system is employed or even how inept the therapist.
One last thought about the “danger” in hypnosis; my personal recommendation is never use hypnosis in an attempt to cover over symptoms, go to the root cause or don’t go at all. We’ll come back to this in #23.