by Nick Duerden
It is run by a former osteopath, Phil Parker, who overcame his own difficulties in life – in his case, a bad cut that nearly severed his hand and that many doctors incorrectly believed would mean an end to his career – with an overwhelmingly positive mindset that simply refused to take on board any sort of negativity. He harnessed his self-belief and went on to achieve his goals, professional and otherwise (for someone with a bad hand injury, he plays a deft guitar). He now works to help others harness their own innate self-belief. I met with Phil Parker, and came away convinced that I have never encountered a more can-do person in my life. His optimism – distinctly not of the loon variety – was catching.
The fact that Parker was, like many of his peers, patient before practitioner is telling, says Susie Orbach. ‘Maybe sometimes, when something works, there is a compulsive need to repeat it in order to reinforce their own experience of it. So by giving to others, they are also giving to themselves.’
Parker told me that the solution to conditions such as mine was to find a way to get our physiology reset, but in a positive way. The course he runs lasts three full days, and the gist of it is to discover how you can use your neurology to influence your health by developing self-coaching conversations with yourself and becoming immersed in empowering memories and expectations.
‘The challenge of this sort of illness is to find a way to say that you are in control here, and as a result, to go about life in a different, more proactive way. The best person to access health for you,’ he told me, ‘is yourself. There is no drug that can do it as well. It is you that has to do the hard work, but the good news is that you are capable of it. We all are. We all have the same physiology, so if one person can do it, why can’t everyone?’
I had heard similar sentiments before, of course, but there was something in the way Parker dispensed it that left me changed after the course. It became a mantra to go along with my other mantras, only this one stayed with me. Perhaps because he was a rarefied communicator, or perhaps I was simply ready, at last, to enforce some kind of lasting change. But while The Lightning Process didn’t go on to cure me as quickly as its name likes to suggest – some of those testimonials claim rapid recovery – something did nevertheless alter within me, an audible clunk almost, the sound of me replacing one mindset with another, negative for affirmative at a stage in the illness where I thought I might never be affirmative again.
I then tell Susie Orbach about my final experiment, with hypnosis. I wasn’t sure what I thought of hypnosis as a form of treatment, largely because hypnosis is mostly marketed, within the media at least, as a circus sideshow, something that makes good television when convincing willing audience members to cluck like chickens. I learned, however, that the world of science has taken hypnosis entirely seriously for some time now. The more we come to understand about the brain’s plasticity and malleability – and the more direct influence we have over it – the more hypnosis comes to the fore. It is now being used as a treatment for all manner of conditions, chronic and otherwise. One definition for it, according to the Oxford English Dictionary online, describes it as ‘an induction of a state of consciousness in which a person apparently loses the power of voluntary action that is highly responsive to suggestion or direction . . . Its use in therapy, typically to recover suppressed memories or to allow modification of behaviour, has been [recently] revived but is still controversial.’
As an alternative treatment, it is no more controversial than anything else I had done over the last few years, and no less. Despite it being used more and more as an adjunct of mainstream medicine, its practitioners still seem to use it primarily as a tool to help people lose weight, stop smoking, conquer their fear of flying, have better sex and better sleep. But in each instance the underlying objective is achieving greater communication between mind and body, developing a heightened persuasion, calming the cortisol and emphasising the power of self-belief.
I spoke to one hypnotist in New York who used it to delve into her patients’ psychological problems. ‘You don’t really know what you’re going to find,’ she told me, which was why she urged me, in seeking a hypnotherapist for myself, to recognise the difference between hypnotism and hypnotherapy, and said that when seeking the latter as treatment, you should obtain it only from a licensed mental health professional.
‘The subconscious mind has years of collective memories and behaviour to tap into, and let me tell you they are not always peaceful places,’ she said. ‘It could bring up all sorts of pain and distress that needs to be dealt with, and dealt with in the right way. We’re talking issues here that may have been repressed, ignored, sometimes for a great many years. So what the hypnotherapist does is try to deal with them and put them back in a positive way.’
Tracking down a hypnotherapist who was also a licensed medical health professional wasn’t as easy as I hoped it would be. Many didn’t want to talk, and plenty didn’t want me to write about them. One who did was unlicensed in this regard but was a Master Practitioner of Neurolinguistic Programming and a licensed hypnotherapy instructor. I’ll call him Dave. His approach to treatment was to focus on a particular point in someone’s life, an episode that might have left them scarred or traumatised, and then attempt to wipe the slate clean by revisiting that period via a timeline. Unlike in talk therapy, he didn’t want the patient to identify the issue out loud, with a view to discussing it thoroughly, he merely wanted them to identify it privately for themselves.
Timelines are commonly used in hypnotherapy to help focus on the here and now, to overcome symptoms and to achieve freedom from blocks in pursuit of fulfilment and growth. Patients travel back through their own personal timelines, and stop off at an event that may be deeply embedded within their psyche. They address this episode and think about how it made them feel, then travel back up to the present day, having hopefully addressed the issue sufficiently to leave it in the past. This makes it all sound rather swift. While talk therapy can go on for months, if not years, Dave the hypnotherapist saw patients on average just three or four times. ‘It works,’ he told me.
Later, I read up on the use of timelines in this fashion and found that it is similar, but not identical, to Gestalt therapy, a form of psychotherapy that focuses on the individual’s experience in the here and now, and that recognises that an individual’s self-awareness can become impeded by negative thought patterns and behaviour. Its aim is to help people overcome the impediment.
A definition of it reads: ‘A physical, biological, psychological or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts.’
I do not even begin to understand this, of course, but what I do manage to glean is that Gestalt is much practised, and appears successful.
The first time Dave hypnotised me, he did so with such an absence of ceremony that I was unaware he had done much of anything. He simply asked me to sit back in my reclining chair, close my eyes, relax and be led by his guiding voice. A moment later, he was talking to my subconscious, and asking it to alight upon an event in my life that was in some way formative, a time of great stress or fear, for example, and establish when precisely this might have occurred. Was it, he asked, offering multiple-choice answers, between the ages of one and seven, during birth itself, or before birth? My first thought was: Before birth? How does that work?
I settled for between one and seven.
He did not want me to tell him what the episode was, but merely asked for words that might sum up my emotions at the time.
‘Fear? Worry, possibly.’
‘Good. And what else?’
I had to think more. ‘Insecurity?’
‘Insecurity. Good. What else?’
My mind was blank. I could not say anxiety because anxiety is merely a synonym for fear and worry, and I did not want to repeat myself. So I simply said, ‘Um…?’ But suddenly something came to me. ‘Anger.’
‘Anger. Good. What e
lse?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘That’ll do.’
Still addressing my subconscious, he asked me what, if I could go back to my seven-year-old self, I would say to him in order to reassure him, to mollify him. I felt self-conscious as I responded, ‘That everything will be okay? That he shouldn’t worry? He’ll survive this. He’ll get stronger.’
Dave pushed, gently, for more words, responding encouragingly to each one I managed to summon up. Now he ushered my subconscious back along the timeline to the present day, bringing with me those affirmations, that positive feeling.
Slowly, he brought me back into the room, whispering that I should open my eyes, but only when I felt good and ready to do so.
I opened them, and reached blindly for my glasses.
‘Have a drink of water,’ he said.
My first thought, while still blinking into the temperature-controlled gloom of the room, was: when is he going to hypnotise me? This was quickly followed by: is that it? There had been no hocus-pocus, no transformative effect. He said that he had spoken to my subconscious, but I felt fairly sure that it was my conscious mind that replied. But then how would I recognise otherwise? All I knew was that I felt entirely present in the room at all times. I had been aware of my bum on the seat, of the collar of my shirt annoyingly close to my chin, my feet flopping on the stool. While my thoughts had strayed carelessly to my bicycle chained up outside, and where I might stop off for lunch, was he really communicating with my seven-year-old self?
Eighteen months previously, Anna from the Optimum Health Clinic had suggested I had difficulty engaging with my emotions. I was too analytical, I asked too many questions, and was keeping my feelings at arm’s length because that is what I had learned to do. Arm’s length was safer.
Is this why I was still stuck?
The second time I saw Dave, I made a concerted effort to let go more, to really travel down that timeline and offer up my subconscious to him on a plate. I wanted to feel the emotions now. No more suppressing.
I am seven years old again, perhaps eight. Nine? We haven’t moved into the house yet, and are still nine floors up in the tower block. It has been a strange night, my mother falling asleep on the sofa in front of the television, something I have never seen her do before. She had been in a foul mood during dinner, and so I am grateful, now, for the quiet, but also unnerved by it. She sleeps right through my bedtime; this is also unusual. I try to make noises to wake her, cough, turn the sound up on the television. She does not rouse. I wander into the kitchen and discover something else unusual: the sink is filled with dirty plates, not washed yet. My mother is fastidiously tidy; she always washes up immediately. The cold tap is trickling. It must have been trickling since dinner, which was hours ago. Now it is overflowing. Water is spilling slowly but steadily onto the floor. There is a blossoming puddle of it. What do I do? Something prevents me from reaching up and turning it off myself, from disrupting all the plates, the saucepans, from stepping into the puddle – perhaps because then I would be complicit. Instead, I must go and wake her and tell her, but I know she will be furious. Though I do not possess the comprehension at this age, I know at some instinctive level that sleep for her is escape from the wretchedness of her life right now. Her husband isn’t here again. They are fighting when he is. Soon he will be gone. There is no money. We are alone. The last thing I want to do, then, is wake her up. I feel scared. I return to the living room and sit back down in front of the TV. I cough again, because if I wake her up by coughing, then this will be an accident, not my fault. I laugh a little too loudly at Benny Hill.
At some point she wakes. She looks confused. The cushion’s pattern is imprinted on her cheek. ‘What time is it?’ she asks. She jumps up, tells me to go to bed, sees the state of the kitchen and shouts. I can hear tears in her voice.
Then, later – and I could be conflating evenings here, or it could be the same one – I am lying wide awake in bed. I can hear my mother in the kitchen, proper tears now. At some point my father comes home. There is an argument, raised voices, slammed doors. He’s gone. Memory is an unreliable thing, but I seem to remember thinking: go, good riddance. We are better off without you. But my mother’s tears I do not like. They make me want to rush to her, to try to comfort her, to tell her it will all be okay, that I am still here. I hope she will be all right, that in the morning things will be better in that undefined way things sometimes are at the start of a new day.
But now I start thinking about her dying. If she does, what then? Losing a parent is one thing; losing both would be careless. I try to imagine what life might be like alone, without her, and how badly I would miss her. It is a horrible thought, but I revel in it. I make myself cry. The pillow is wet, and I feel small and vulnerable, and scared. I cry for a while, but then I get bored of crying, and I think of good things instead: Steve Coppell on right wing, Sammy Mcllroy on the left, the goals of Jimmy Greenhoff. Eventually, I fall asleep.
To the hypnotherapist now, I offered many of the same words I had offered him the first time around: don’t worry, it will be okay, I’m with you, I’ll look after you. All this will make you stronger.
He brought me round again, and we chatted for a while, and then I went. And that was it, no more. Presumably, then, I left Dave with my slate clean, able at last to move on with life. Or at least that was the idea. I found myself hoping it had worked.
But it had all seemed suspiciously easy. I’d been expecting something harder.
When I ask Susie Orbach whether the hypnotherapy might really have worked in some crucial way, her response is deliberately ambivalent. ‘I don’t know,’ she tells me. Her honesty, I confess, intrigues me: in the world of alternative health, I have been used to promises, a great many of them boastful ones. There is a lot of convincing that goes on among alternative therapists, many of them as confident, as bullish, as Kanye West. But in more mainstream health practices, nobody promises anything.
Then she says, ‘Look, perhaps it did help, and if it did, then why not? What I would say, from a psychoanalytical perspective, is that it might have worked in some way because you felt guilty about the relief that your father left, and about feeling pleased that you could co-parent even though you were clearly burdened by it. The hypnosis might have helped you feel better about that. But then this, to me, is just another form of exorcism, and what I would want to know is: to what end? I’m not saying I want people to live endlessly through guilt and horror and conflict, but the question here is: how do we manage to live with these things in our lives rather than sever ourselves from them?’
She asks me if I feel my experiences this past year have worked, and if so, with which therapy, and why. I tell her that I like to think that they have all worked, cumulatively, each in their own way. And even with those that I didn’t get very much from, I still came away with the conviction that more is possible than I might have otherwise realised, that I am more in control of my fate, my health. They have each helped encourage me to take responsibility for myself, to know how to calm myself, to say fuck it, to centre myself, not merely to say yes instead of no but to feel it – to feel yes – in mind and body alike.
And if they have worked for me to some extent, I ask her now, then why have they? How?
‘Maybe you simply got curious about yourself rather than remained merely curious about the people you write about in your work? And maybe because you had such a shock that this happened to you, you have finally learned to have a more compassionate relationship with yourself? Does that sound possible?’
I say that I thought I already had a pretty compassionate relationship with myself.
‘But, you see, we are not brought up to think about ourselves in “self” terms. We are brought up to be productive. You were productive. Your curiosities, as a journalist, were outwardly directed. The arrogance of our Western traditions is that we think we know everything about ourselves, when really we don’t know very much at all. So much of what concerns us is uncons
cious.’ She laughs. ‘All you have to do is try marijuana or acid once to know that we really don’t know so much of what is going on inside our heads, right? There is a conceit that we are full of self-knowledge, but it is only a conceit, I’m afraid.’
More and more of us, she believes, are looking towards alternative practices these days, and the reason for that is rampant capitalism. Because we now have our basic needs covered – food, shelter – this has freed us up to focus on the smaller things in life, things that previously might not have concerned us at all. So we are self-centred more, we seek perfection, acceptance. Our cravings have gone up the wall. We feel increased guilt, envy, that we are in some way insufficient, lacking. And all of this builds stress, and the stress compounds.
‘It’s very hard for people today to be brought up to have massive ambition, and live in a consumer society in which they have to brand themselves constantly. If you are poor, it is completely impossible to belong. I feel that we have moved from a society of contribution to a society of display, and that it is very difficult for people to find their own place within it.’
To the point where it can make people unwell?
‘Yes,’ she says.
Psychoanalysis, she insists, doesn’t offer a magic bullet. ‘But it does offer a methodology, and it offers you the capacity to reflect, to think and feel about yourself. If you had sought out a therapist when you first became ill, you might have been prompted more to listen to yourself, and to discover within you what it is that has been a problem. That’s a very different form of practice to the ones you’ve been going through, but I do believe it could have been a very effective one.
‘I don’t want to be an evangelist for suggesting that mental pain is good for people,’ she continues, ‘but I do think that, when it comes, people can either grow from it or sink under it. There is so much human suffering out there, and so little provision for cultural discourse about it that is of any use whatsoever. There is also not very much help within our existing health service, or in our education system, in terms of offering people a way to understand and cope. So when you do get something like a phobic response, as you did, you often don’t have a chance to use it to understand and grow.’