Exactly what I needed at the time. Desperate circumstances require desperate measures. With the help of the Simontons, I now deluded myself into thinking it was not only radiation that was killing any remaining cancer cells; it was also my mental imagery.
The imagery? My medical colleague has asked me to draw an image of my immune system cells as well as an image of the cancer cells. Hardly an artist, I took out some colored pencils at home and came up with an image of a vivid Venus flytrap-like plant with enormous magenta flowers plucking tiny black and yellow bugs from the air. Plucking insects and destroying them—a primitive set of Pac-Men as killer T-cells trapping and swallowing any now-fragile and vulnerable irradiated cancer cells. Hardly the most aggressive image, I saw these plants as a lean, mean fighting machine swallowing up those all-too-deadly cancer cells.
I convinced myself: My mind and body were working in a fully synchronized way with the cancer treatments. I was not a passive victim and observer. Instead I was an active participant in the eradication of cancer cells.
How nutty but necessary.
Cancer patients in 1984 had to run the gauntlet of psychological theories about cancer. The most prominent theory was that cancer patients were not able to express anger and other emotions effectively. A blocked-up psyche, they claimed. Let’s add insult to injury. But I had no trouble with blocked-up anger and repressed emotions. These theories simply made me furious. Energized, I was ready to take on cancer and the theorists.
Susan Sontag was on my side in recognizing the over-psychologizing of illness. Historically, as Susan Sontag pointed out in Illness as Metaphor, the amount of psychological theorizing about a particular illness is directly proportional to the mysteriousness of the disease, to how little is known of its cause. Up until the late nineteenth century, virtually nothing was known about the causes of tuberculosis. Koch’s postulates, recognizing the significance of microorganisms as causative agents for diseases like tuberculosis, had not been put forth yet. So, psychological theories about the causes of tuberculosis abounded.
These theories died a welcome death as soon as the tubercle bacillus was discovered. With cancer, these psychological theories have only recently begun to recede as we learn more about viruses and toxic chemicals and radiation and cell aging and immune system deficiencies as causes for the disease.
Yet, when our lives are out of our control, when we find ourselves in a grim situation for no clear-cut reason, we will go to extraordinary lengths to find some cockamamie approach to re-establish some semblance of control. Then, when we find the root of our predicament, we assume we can find an antidote, a solution. If we do not find it, we have only ourselves to blame—for causing the illness and not being able to cure it. What Joshua Cody calls “the guilt of the ill.”
The Simontons, however, allowed me to feel that I could actively do something, anything, to augment the effects of the actual medical treatments. And, more importantly, the Simontons inadvertently reintroduced me to the work of Ivan Pavlov.
Pavlov was the progenitor of the notion of the anchoring stimulus, a ubiquitous phenomenon that we are only beginning to understand and appreciate. In his simple but exquisitely elegant experiments, Pavlov put powdered meat in front of hungry dogs and watched as their entire digestive physiology changed. These dogs began to salivate, and the chemistry of their stomachs and intestines began to change as well. If Pavlov rang a bell at the same time that he put powdered meat in front of these starving dogs, the bell then became an anchoring stimulus. And if Pavlov repeated this protocol for five successive days—ringing a bell at the same time meat was offered—the bell alone, even without food, became the only stimulus needed to create the physiological changes in the dogs’ guts. Salivation and chemical changes in the gut, just with the ringing of a bell.
Pavlov used other stimuli besides a bell, including whistles, tuning forks, and metronomes, as well as visual stimuli, all of which are now considered anchoring stimuli in the psychological world of conditioned responses.
Anchoring stimuli and conditioned responses are everywhere. They create the reflex reaction in post-traumatic stress. If we are in a war zone and hear explosions repeatedly, all it takes is a loud noise to change our entire physiology, to trigger the startle response, a huge adrenaline rush, and an all-consuming fear.
Mild traumas occur virtually every day of our lives. Conditioned responses get triggered virtually every day of our lives. Physiological reactions—in our central nervous system and in our gut—get triggered virtually every day of our lives.
Is there some way to bottle these reactions in a benign way? Again, I wanted redemption and salvation, not salivation. I wanted to harness my immune system, change its physiology, and bolster its responses to a threat from within.
I followed up with a hypnotherapist whom my medical colleague referred me to. He urged me to take the images to another level—to wear clothes that were pink or purple or magenta—because he believed they were visual anchoring stimuli that could possibly change my physiology and power my immune system.
I ended up making these colors ubiquitous—pants, shirts, sweaters, socks, underwear, watches, caps, jackets, you name it. Even cordovan loafers. I also began to meditate for five minutes every hour (thank the gods for the forty-five to fifty-minute hour in psychiatric practice). I was constantly focused on my recovery, consciously when meditating and unconsciously when inadvertently looking at my watch or socks. Those killer Venus flytrap T-cells were in my head for every waking hour.
With my knowledge of Pavlovian reflexes, I recognized how much I wanted some kind of immediate automatic reminder, conscious and unconscious, of my cancer and my killer T-cells; and I knew that I was going to need pink and magenta, coincidentally my two daughters’ favorite colors, to become an everyday part of my life. Every upcoming day of my life, I realized, I would be wearing pink and purple shirts and socks, that despite the lack of proof of its value I would somehow keep the faith in these hues and would give up earth colors, every brown and every yellow and every green, forever.
My purple phase: Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” and Prince’s “Purple Rain” and Tommy James’s “Crimson and Clover” became my anthems. I made sure Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was prominently displayed on my bookshelf.
Given my daughters’ favorite colors, I asked for their assistance in making over my wardrobe.
Then I came across a book by Bernie Siegel, a cancer surgeon in Connecticut. In Love, Medicine, and Miracles he expresses his belief that images of immune cells conceived in a purplish spectrum—as opposed to a black or yellow hue—will give them greater power and strength. Who was I to argue?
I took my effort at salvation to an even higher level. Just before I started radiation therapy to my prostate bed in January 1985, three months after prostate surgery, I went up to New York City by myself to listen to a young man in his mid-twenties convince a group of two hundred people to walk across twenty feet of burning, steaming charcoals within the following two hours after he had trained us how to do so.
He and his assistants set up two rows of gray and red burning charcoals—charcoals on which any of us could cook steaks and hamburgers—to test our flesh and our willingness to challenge conventional wisdom, to defy assumptions about what is doable and not doable. The coals were sitting on a small messy grass lawn outside a crumbling hotel overlooking thirty-fourth Street and Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. Again, early 1985: The city itself was a shell of its former grandeur, with weed-filled grassy areas waiting for office towers to be built. But it was a perfect and desolate place for a barbecue pit for human flesh, human soles.
In 1985 it was uncertain whether New York City would make a comeback, and even more uncertain whether I would make a comeback. My pelvis was facing the same kind of desolation as Manhattan.
Tony Robbins was our guide for this evening. An unknown at the time, he later turned his fire walking and inspirational exhortations into a television career and
occasional film appearances. His events later attracted up to six thousand people at a time; and these fire-walking experiences were featured and skewered in films like Down and Out in Beverly Hills. I was merely one of the early initiates.
I had a specific agenda, though—a quite concrete and literal agenda—to survive the burning of my pelvis. If I could walk across blazing hot coals and not develop first or second or third degree burns, I told myself, then I may be able to survive the enormous heat from radiation to the pelvis. For me this was no spiritual walk with symbolic significances. I was not looking at larger existential questions. No efforts to figure out the boundaries of human capabilities—no nonsense about the triumph of the human spirit. This was just pure firefighting. “Save my soles,” not “Save my soul.”
I was fighting fire . . . with not exactly fire. And Mesmer and Pavlov, all embodied in Tony Robbins’s expertise, were my comrades fighting the upcoming pelvic fire.
A magnetic and mesmerizing, yet approachable, figure, Robbins got the crowd into a highly relaxed and focused and suggestible state. He repeatedly reminded us that he had led these hot coal walks hundreds of times with nary an injury. “Calm confidence” was a mantra he instilled in us—a confidence in ourselves and a confidence we began to have in him.
Not surprisingly, he used a specific anchoring stimulus. “As you begin to feel calmer and safer and more confident, raise your left arm as high as you can and then bring your right hand up to meet the left hand. As this feeling of calmness and confidence takes hold, make a fist with your right hand.”
Adolph Hitler had nothing on us. In the midst of this surreal scene in midtown Manhattan, I could see the remarkable power of a Hitler, someone who, as unschooled as he might have been, harnessed the power of an anchoring stimulus. He was able to get his audience into a super aroused state and then anchor that state by associating it with the heil-Hitler Nazi salute, a salute so elegant in its simplicity. He was able to put an entire country into an almost irresistible trance, a trance he then used to instill an exaggerated view of the German Aryan people as a people and as warriors—views that were not at all at odds with how they wished to view themselves.
Robbins used some simple suggestions to allow us to walk calmly and confidently across the molten coals. “Walk purposefully and assuredly, and not too quickly, across the coals. Do not run.” Apparently tripping on hot coals is not a good idea.
He invoked an image of “cool moss.” We were to repeatedly utter “cool moss” out loud as we walked over the coals, as this was another anchoring stimulus to go along with the tightened right fist—an effort to have us believe something that was diametrically opposite to the image emanating from the molten coals themselves. And indeed, as I recited “cool moss,” my physiology changed dramatically. I began to look forward to the walk, to the cool moss under my feet, instead of dreading it.
Mind over matter. There is something to it, I thought. I will make it across these coals safely. And after radiation I will go forth purposefully and assuredly, not in a hasty and desperate way. Cool moss in the pelvis as well.
I made it across the coals without incident. A few blisters popped up on the bottom of my feet but were gone within twenty-four hours. Less complications than after exposure to the midday Mediterranean summer sun.
We all are at our maximal hypnotizable state, or level of suggestibility, by age nine. This hypnotizability increases gradually from birth until it peaks at nine, then begins to slowly tail off until we lose most of our suggestibility by age nineteen or twenty. From an evolutionary standpoint, this trajectory makes perfect sense: We come into this world as a blank slate, needing older and wiser authority figures, usually our parents, our teachers, our older siblings, to show us the ropes. Our heightened suggestibility allows us to be open to these mentors and advisors, even if they might lead us astray or even brainwash us.
By the age of twenty, we no longer need this suggestibility. We can think on our own, we can even develop a bit of skepticism and cynicism, a worldliness that allows us to make our own decisions about the paths we may follow.
In facing a death sentence, and at the very least the death of my pelvis, I was counting on returning to a childlike state of suggestibility that would allow me to be more open to any authority figures who might have some answers and antidotes. I could only hope to find the right masters who would not lead me astray.
I came to realize that the power of hypnosis was not with the hypnotic trance itself but with the suggestions connected with the trance. The trance is simply a heightened state of relaxation, concentration, and focus. The trance is simply the vehicle or substrate through which we can fully absorb an idea or suggestion. The suggestion is the thing.
“Cool moss,” “Walk purposefully and assuredly, and not too quickly,” were crucial suggestions for making it across twenty feet of steaming coals without major burns. What kind of hypnotic suggestion could I turn to in making it through the ravages of surgery and radiation as well as the prostate cancer itself?
One of the best hypnotherapists at coming up with the most optimal suggestions was Milton Erikson. Practicing in the shadows of Las Vegas, he was able to intervene effectively and quickly with gambling problems, sexual dysfunctions, and tobacco addictions, all the problems endemic to Las Vegas. Single session treatments—one and done. His childhood affliction with polio—and his extended, though not permanent, paralysis at a tender age—forced him to be an observer, less a participant, in his early life. He was able to recognize the nuances of facial expressions and body postures, offhanded comments, and subtle resistances as family members and neighbors interacted with each other—nuances that the rest of us do not pick up on in our more active childhoods. His astuteness allowed him to take the measure of the people whom he was treating and to come up with the shrewdest of suggestions for use during the hypnotic trance, suggestions that were clever and perfectly designed.
With the astuteness and wisdom of a Milton Erikson, my hypnotherapist came up with what turned out to be a life-altering hypnotic suggestion. As I entered a deepening state of relaxation, with guided imagery conveying me to ladders and stairs that brought me deeper and deeper into the rich root system of a tree and on into a wondrous tapestry of vivid colors and sounds and smells and tastes, he suggested that I focus on the following thought:
I will do everything I can, everything humanly possible, not only to survive the prostate cancer but also to bring my sexual life back to full health. I will go to the ends of the earth if necessary to find medical interventions that can allow me to have a full return of sexual capacities and to preserve my life.
This hypnotic suggestion became my mantra, my vow. No actions to be taken now, but there might be plenty of action to take after the dust from radiation and surgery settled.
So, for five to ten minutes every hour, I focused on relaxing and putting myself into a trance, guiding myself into a state in which I could engrain the thought, “I will do everything I can to save my life and bring my pelvis back to life.”
Yes, I was in a trance for five minutes every hour. I was focusing on images of Venus flytrap-like plants swallowing up any random cancer cells for five minutes every hour. I was wearing purple and pink clothes that kept me vigilant about cancer for every waking minute. But this trance did not seem to be impeding my work, my family life, or my social life. If anything, these vows and mantras and trances allowed me to function pretty damn well.
Every one of us is in some kind of trance every day. We only recognize this when we find ourselves, say, at EXIT 8 of the New Jersey Turnpike after seemingly just having passed EXIT 2. Driving for us has become effortless, automatic. But nothing we learn is initially automatic. It is effortful, requiring the slow and deliberate thinking that Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist and Nobel prizewinner in economics, has described. So it is with hypnosis and the trance and the suggestions and vows and mantras. Effortful, and gradually becoming effortless—the fast thinking and automatic thin
king that come with doing something over and over and over again.
We have work trances—especially when we have been in a job for months and years. We have personal life trances—especially when our personal lives have developed a certain routine. We have family gathering trances—especially when we have dealt with our families repeatedly over the years. We put ourselves into a slightly different mode depending on the venue and audience, and we integrate all of these different modes and trances and effortless capabilities into one genuine whole.
I am simply adding an additional mode, or channel, to my television box, a new channel that is turned on twenty-four hours each day, providing background noise most of the time and then coming into the foreground for five to ten minutes every hour. This channel—and these trances—is no longer random and inadvertent. Instead, they are a highly purposeful part of my life. The trance allows me to relax, to remove myself from the stress of day-to-day life. The vow allows me to face the future, not give up, have some sense of control, and gain confidence that my life can take a turn for the better.
Cool moss in the face of hot coals, the ends of the earth for interventions in the face of prostate cancer and the ravages of its treatment.
As a psychiatrist I often see the impact of powerful vows taken in childhood—vows taken between, say, the ages of eight and ten that have both positive and negative consequences in adulthood. Examples: A sensitive child who has grown up with a violent and abusive parent, vowing that he will be the antithesis of that parent in his behavior as an adult. A child who is a witness to a hateful and vicious marriage of her parents, vowing, if not a life of chastity, at least an avoidance of permanent relationships. Likewise a child who has watched an older sibling destroy his parents and family with rebellion and drug problems, vowing total compliance, unmitigated obedience—never wanting to rock the boat as an adult, never wishing to take risks that might lead to distress in friends and partners, and thus forsaking a fuller and richer life.
A Salamander's Tale Page 4