With hypnotic regression, the patient or the patient is taken back to a past life or a supposed past life. In this form of hypnosis, a person re-perceives and relives his or her feelings in that past time. This process is also called age regression.
What is hypnotic regression?
The hypnotherapist will initially leave the truth of his patient’s memories in the room. He will direct the images that have arisen and feelings that have been expressed to individual focal points or assist his client in doing so. It is the therapist’s responsibility to strictly avoid suggestive questions in any case and to carefully check the patient’s statements with regard to their truth content. Premature judgments are completely out of place here. Under certain circumstances, they can make the success of the therapy very difficult and greatly unsettle the hypnotized person. A therapist may be able to use hypnotic regression to awaken memories in the subject that never occurred. This is usually done by the means of suggestion. Here the boundaries between illusion and reality can very easily become blurred and imperceptible to the hypnotized person. Of use is a temporary regression of thoughts to earlier phases of life, if it helps to better cope with psychological stress. In these cases, regression can demonstrate how earlier and traditional behavior patterns have a positive effect on current insecurities. The sufferer recognizes a familiar experiential base that helped him or her psychologically at an earlier time and that he or she now hopes will do so again. This adaptation mechanism can also function outside hypnosis in everyday life without being consciously recognized. Then it serves to find out again from unclear situations and to draw new psychological or also physical strength. Often this automatism is set in motion in the case of health problems or difficult life situations.
Function, effect and goals
The patient is led back to decisive situations with hypnotic regression. The therapist guides the patient in this process. On the one hand, he can concentrate on presenting and examining concrete childhood experiences under hypnotic conditions, but on the other hand, he can also lead to an inner going back of the person concerned in full consciousness and in integrative conversation. In the hypnotic procedure of regression, the subject is brought into a state of medium to deep trance. He then does not possess full consciousness and can perceive his environment with limited clarity, but is not in a fainting state. In this case, the hypnotist can analyze childhood memories that lie outside the subject’s current state of consciousness. This succeeds because the subject unconsciously fends them off for reasons of trauma, for example. However, if they are made conscious, they can be useful for later reappraisal. However, the therapist must recognize that these memories can have very different degrees of truth in the trance state. The hypnotized person is thus able to stage events of his childhood, which he did not really experience, afterwards in a semiconscious way. Following a similar pattern, he can actualize actual childhood experiences, but from an age-specific point of view. Moreover, in these trance states, there may even be an exaggerated memory that does not actually have to correspond to reality. With a successful and responsible hypnotic regression, the subject gains security for himself and trust in his therapist. In the best case, the gained thoughts, feelings, inner images and remembered stories can be put into a coherent context with one’s own life story. In this way, even repressed experiences or impressions from early childhood or upheaval-like periods of life may become conscious again. In this way they can be analyzed and finally stored in order to experience one’s own personality in even greater diversity. A repression can have many different reasons. The cause can be mental or physical overload, violence suffered, perceived neglect or personal isolation.In regressive hypnosis, these experiences can be relived emotionally or taken up from the position of an observer of one’s own actions and feelings. The questioning of the subconscious by the hypnotist thereby provides information about whether the personal hardships and worries from one’s own past can really be recognized and resolved.
Risks, side effects and dangers
The client is in a state of deep relaxation during a hypnotic regression and can only react to certain stimuli of consciousness. The hypnotist takes advantage of this to weaken the critical consciousness and then gradually eliminate it. For this, the suggestion of safety and security as well as often a calming, uniform music are important aids for him. They are repeated several times in a monotonous manner. Subsequently, the unconscious in the subject becomes directly responsive. The suggestions can have a more commanding or a more anti-authoritarian character. The hypnotized person’s trance state is established by directing his attention to a particular point or circumstance. Often this is done with eye fixation, “staring” at an object. The eye muscles tire quickly in this way, reinforcing the trance tendency. Eye fixation can be further challenged by the use of colored complementary cards. Furthermore, acoustic aids are used. For example, the hypnotherapist counts backwards from one hundred, with the subject closing his eyes at even numbers and opening them at odd ones. All methods, however, always require the consent of the subject, because, especially in regressive hypnosis, he places himself in a passive, subordinate role and should fully recognize the authority of the hypnotist.
