Mindfulness and Hypnosis: The Power of Suggestion to Transform Experience by Michael D. Yapko

Author:Michael D. Yapko [Yapko, Michael D.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780393707700
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

Is Compartmentalization a Good Thing?

It is important to appreciate the role of context in determining the value of dissociative experiences. Dissociation may allow us to distill experiences to their essence, but is that a good thing? The answer, it seems, depends on whether the dissociation serves to enhance experience or diminish it.

Both mindfulness and hypnosis have paid substantial attention to ways of assisting with pain management. Hypnosis in particular has a very broad and deep literature on pain management (Barber, 1996; Patterson, 2010) that lends substantial empirical support to the merits of hypnosis in reducing or even eliminating the subjective experience of pain across many types of conditions. The way that hypnosis uses dissociation to manage pain overlaps the way mindfulness uses dissociation to reduce suffering, but differs in its methods for actively transforming subjective perceptions of the body and the pain sensation itself. Yet both employ dissociation as a principal means of promoting comfort.

When deliberately applied, dissociation in the service of pain management is a wonderful means of helping. But the same mechanism of dissociation for pain reduction can be misapplied. Consider an individual who self-mutilates. This person can literally take a knife and slice into his or her own flesh with no apparent pain or suffering. If you ask directly, “Doesn’t that hurt?,” the person typically replies, “No. It feels good. It’s how I get my feelings out. It’s the only thing that makes me feel alive.” This is a clear example of how compartmentalization, the sense of detachment from part of one’s body, can play a central role in disordered thoughts and self-mutilating behavior.

The fact that various hypnotic phenomena can be used to generate symptoms as well as solutions requires a better than global consideration of their role in effective applications of mindfulness and hypnosis. Without specificity, meaning a clear goal and specific guidelines for delineating and following the steps to achieve that goal, an intervention runs the risk of simply becoming another global perspective that may or may not be helpful across different contexts. To offer a concrete example, it may be valuable to teach someone self-hypnosis or a meditation promoting a “radical acceptance” that can provide detachment from pain, but no therapist would want a client so educated to use this strategy for self-mutilation.

Specific guidelines regarding when to employ such strategies constructively must be considered a necessary ingredient in treatment. But not all clinicians care to—or can—provide such guidelines. Many promote certain pop psychology clichés, which grab hold of the public, who do not think critically about their merits or limitations. Instead, the public accepts them noncritically and adopts them as a philosophy of life. Promoting global beliefs such as, “You are responsible for everything that happens in your life” actually discourages making meaningful discriminations between what you are and are not responsible for. Without the ability to go beyond the global statement, people too easily unfairly blame themselves for situations or events for which they are not to blame, such as being laid off when a factory closes or their car being stolen.

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