Hypnosis is the Greek word for sleep


Hypnosis is the Greek word for sleep; I don’t put people to sleep, so it’s not the best word to describe what I do, but never mind. My name is Dorothea Downey Read (Class of 1977) and I’m a clinical hypnotherapist.


The link between physical health and looking after oneself physically has been accepted as a wise strategy for quite a while now, and the concept of looking after one’s mental health with mental wellness strategies has taken root too. We have lots of modalities to choose from in this regard, including yoga, mindfulness and the field I work in, hypnotherapy. I have always been interested in health. When I left Mayfield I trained as a nurse. There is definitely an interaction between what we think and what we feel. The arrival of some high tech brain imaging has allowed research into hypnosis, and been able to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of superstition verses efficacy.


DorotheaDowneyRead


Mayfield was a happy place for me. I arrived fairly traumatised from my first boarding school (least said soonest mended), and Mayfield allowed me the space and support to unwind and rethink my belief that I had no academic ability. I didn’t shine at Mayfield, but the foundations were laid there for me to shine in my nursing career and to gain a first in English Literature and Philosophy. Miss de Vekey, my English teacher, will always be a hero of to me.


I am a complementary therapist, working with other professionals in the field of mental health, doctors, nurses and physiotherapists for example. Many problems that we might see a doctor for have a psychological component: for instance, chronic pain makes us anxious and/or sad, and we know that irritable bowel syndrome becomes worse when sufferers are stressed. We understand how powerful the placebo response is (and its opposite, nocebo). There is no doubt that what we think affects how we feel.


Hypnosis is natural, and we do it all the time. Have you ever driven a familiar route, for example from home to work, and when you arrived, realised you have no memory of the journey? Have you ever been really absorbed by a task and lost track of time? These are trance states, and that is all hypnosis is. Trance feels a lot like the daydream state, but actually the brain is busy. It is a state of focused attention and intense learning. It’s when we consolidate learning and when we change our mind.


In terms of evolution, it was more important to our survival to focus on the negative. It’s a far better survival strategy to assume that the rustling in the bushes as you walk past is a venomous snake and not a fluffy bunny. Our fight and flight response is very fast and because of this we are also good at negative trance. We are able to lose ourselves in a negative daydream, we can look back over an event that didn’t go so well and make ourselves sad, and we can negatively forecast how the meeting at work will go next week and make ourselves anxious. My skill is in helping people to trance and to know how to make the trance positive and useful.


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MY ENGLISH TEACHER, MISS DE VEKEY WILL ALWAYS BE A HERO OF MINE


Helping people reach a trance state is quite straightforward. I can’t trance someone against their will; I help my client relax by a series of suggestions called progressive muscle relaxation. This taps into our ability to learn vicariously. If you spot someone dressed for the beach on a wet November day you’ll shiver as you say, ‘aren’t they cold’. We can learn from the experience of others, we don’t need to have direct experience to empathise and learn from it. You may remember wincing when watching someone have an injection. Humans are tribal, and vicarious learning is a useful skill for us. Progressive muscle relaxation involves the


hypnotherapist describing what being physically relaxed feels like, and then the therapist moves on to guided imagery. Hypnosis feels a little like listening to a story on the radio, and getting absorbed by the narrative. When we do this we create our own mental images to match the story. Focusing your attention on what the therapist is saying essentially replicates the daydream state.


Hypnotherapy just means using hypnosis in therapy. The first part of the session is about helping the client identify their skills and strengths, and, with careful use of language, allowing the client to start to use their imagination as a force for good. Imagining things going well, positive mental rehearsal, allows the client to begin to see their issue in terms of solutions rather than focusing on the problem. The talking technique I use is called Solution Focused Therapy.


How is hypnosis different from other trance-like tools like mindfulness, yoga, zone states or indeed prayer? Meditation is the tool we use to be more mindful. It differs in a tiny way: hypnosis is usually a dissociative state (asking the client to imagine they’re not in my therapy room, they are somewhere else) and mindfulness asks us to be in the moment, to be fully present in the room, to be aware of everything. It’s a small distinction. Breathing exercises in yoga are often meditative and prayer can be dissociative or fully present. They have more in common than divides them.


What is clinical hypnotherapy for? My working week is divided into two parts; one half of the week is seeing clients with issues that are on the fear spectrum. People may be anxious about a specific event, perhaps something like having to give a speech, or they may be finding life generally stressful and finding anxiety is colouring their day.


Sometimes people feel the weight of the world is on their shoulders, and they don’t know which way to turn to reduce their stress. Other people may have more frank fear worries: phobias are an irrational fear, and people can develop a fear of pretty much anything. Phobias about flying, spiders and needles are probably the most common. I also see people who feel very sad. They feel their enjoyment of life is on hold and they’re not sure how to find their way out of that feeling. Many of my clients have health issues such as irritable bowel disease (Hypnotherapy is in the NICE guidelines for IBS [1]).


The second part of my week is spent being a hospital hypnotherapist. I am in charge of a team of five experienced hypnotherapists working in the Haematology Department of the University of Wales Hospital in Cardiff. We help clients who are having chemotherapy for various blood cancers. The most common issues we help with are anticipatory nausea and vomiting and secondary needle phobias.


The Old Cornelian SUMMER 2017


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