The Strange Case of Medical Hypnosis - 1. How the placebo effect implies learning, and learning is hypnotic.

Chronic illness involves forms of mental dysregulation to which we are attached.

“Our client’s problem is that they have lost rapport with their unconscious mind.
Our job is to help restore that relationship.”
— Milton Erickson, psychiatrist & hypnotherapist

The mind-body

Besides thinking, your brain directs your awareness, collects information from your body, and synchronizes basic functions. Hormones produced in association with your brain manage your daily metabolic rhythms, attention, and arousal.

Even though your nervous system extends throughout your body, it’s not clear how involved your brain is with your body’s many functions. Many of your muscles operate autonomically, such as your heart, lungs, and circulatory system. Aspects of your intentional musculature are controlled by your cerebellum, a component of your lower brain, but there remain aspects of movement that are unconsciously linked to hearing, sight, balance, and orientation.

The mind and body affect each other at many levels. There is no single way to describe this structure. Control is a combination of hierarchies, series, and parallel connections. To a large degree, organs of your body perform their own regulation, communicate with your brain, and affect your mind on unconscious levels. Their operations rarely comes to your conscious awareness, and when they do their effects can be both direct, through pain or pleasure, or indirect, through moods and metabolic adjustments. This much we can agree on.

There are aspects of our body’s functions that appear in our consciousness, and there are aspects of our consciousness that affect our somatic function. No one should be surprised that this happens at a superficial level of concern, perception, and intention. We are all concerned about our health and take actions to maintain and protect it.

Just as we have physical or mental dysfunctions, we also have psychosomatic dysfunctions. That is, there are mind-body connections that can improve or degrade. These holistic mind-body connections—our mind’s regulation of bodily function and the body’s ability to direct our minds—lie outside of psychology and somatic medicine. These connections between mind and body are not cognitive or intentional, and they can enhance or impede health and function.

Unconscious behaviors elude your awareness by being rooted in reflex and habit. Some of these behaviors you may have learned, and others may be intrinsic or instinctive, such as needing to sleep or eat. They may be good habits, bad habits, or simply familiar patterns.

Justifying what’s unhealthy

Unhealthy behaviors can be rooted in memories and associations of the subconscious, thought patterns developed under different circumstances that you no longer fully remember and may no longer apply. We are conscious of some of our reflexes, memories, and associations, but most are beyond thought and reach. Dreams reveal the kinds of associations our minds can make when unfettered, but the conscious mind is rarely creative to that degree.

Our conscious mind always justifies itself to itself. Our justifications, which only appear when we question ourselves, help us be accurate and consistent, but we do not require they reflect a high degree of sanity. When we cannot fathom our condition or maintain control, we look to others to provide guidance for us.

Allopathic medicine offers to take over responsibility, redirect our environment, and re-pattern our behavior when we surrender to it. Medicine prescribes new patterns that offer better health, these include changes in our diet, daily rhythms, chemical intake, and behaviors. Prescriptive therapy, following this model, suggests better ways to think and address situations. The idea is to solicit full compliance with healthy patterns of thought, behavior, and function.

But there are those areas below consciousness that not only contribute to your behavior, but determine it, and sometimes these subconscious patterns conflict with your better psycho-somatic judgment. It is these areas that we address with medical hypnosis.