Self Hypnosis

Valerie Austin

one

A VICTIM OF ONE’S MIND

It all began with the car accident, the night I almost died—the extraordinary twist of fate that led me to become a hypnotherapist. I would never have believed at the time that there would be a time in the future when I would count the awful calamities and traumas I was to experience as blessings, allowing me to put something back into life in the form of helping people. If I had not had the car crash I would not have had to seek treatment for a serious memory loss and would never have been forced into discovering hypnotherapy as a profession in the first place. The fact that I did, albeit through a bizarre combination of circumstances, is why I am able to share my knowledge with you now. Let me tell you about it…

The car was speeding through the pitch black night, hurtling crazily out of control. I had no way of knowing which direction it was taking. I was very frightened and convinced I was going to die. Moments earlier I had been travelling at high speed on the motorway when suddenly I was forced to swerve violently to avoid a fleeing figure running directly in front of me. It was 1.30 a.m. and there was not even the palest glimmer of moonlight. Why on earth was someone crossing the motorway on foot? Did they intend to kill themselves? How ironic if that were so, as that was precisely what I had been contemplating—a quick end to my life.

As I wrenched the steering wheel to avoid the ghostlike figure, the car skidded and lurched forward into the unknown, deep in the Staffordshire countryside. My headlights no longer picked out the friendly cats’ eyes and I was spinning wildly towards thick undergrowth at the roadside.

I remembered being scared once before when I was a private pilot and wanted to qualify for a licence to fly at night. Unthinkingly I had chosen an extremely busy airport from which to do the two hours’ necessary flying. I was suddenly queueing in line with jumbo jets and getting swirled around in their back-draught. But that experience paled in comparison to my terror now. At least then there had been landing lights, but here, in this horror, there was not even a moon to cast shadows. A jumble of confused thoughts and questions swirled in my mind as I was buffeted from side to side of the car like a limp rag doll. Each jolt sent a dull pain through my body. It was all happening in a few, fleeting moments yet it seemed like an eternity, as if I were watching myself in some ghastly, slow-motion video playback. Not long before I had actually been thinking about killing myself over a broken love affair. Now, in those terrifying moments as the car spun wildly out of control in the darkness, I knew I did not want to die. All I could think of was what would be the result once the car finally came to a halt. Would I be crippled or scarred for life? Would anybody find me so late at night, or would I have to die slowly, badly injured and alone? Had I been selfish? Was this my punishment? Would the nightmare ever end?

Then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. The car shuddered to a halt. Later I learned that it had hit three trees and plunged 30 feet down a ravine. Amazingly, however, I had not hit my head against the windscreen. I can remember sitting there dazed and shaking, yet still being able to think with remarkable clarity. The cassette player was still blasting out disco music, shattering the stillness of the night. Somehow, the windscreen wipers had got switched on during the crash. In my numbed and dazed state I could not remember how to switch them off. I was also alert enough to realize that there might have been a petrol leak and that the car might explode at any moment.

As I slowly and painfully eased myself out of the door, I felt as if I was the star of my very own horror film. The whole thing was so eerie and unreal. I was still trying to work out why my head had not hit the windscreen. I had not been wearing a seatbelt—this was the 1970s and there were still conflicting views about them—and the car had come to a dramatic stop. Later I learned that my head and face were the only parts of my body not to have been injured. It is something I have never been able to figure out to this day. Standing there, staring at my car, the shock of the accident must have distorted my thoughts. To me the car looked undamaged, yet actually it was a write-off. I had no clue as to where I was, I only knew I was somewhere off the M6. I was barefoot. My shoes must have come off in the car. My back felt strange. It was aching, but not too badly. I had heard of people walking after an accident even though they had been seriously injured. I wondered if it were possible to walk with a broken back. I seemed to be at the bottom of a deep hole, surrounded by trees and bushes. Somewhere above me I could hear the whine of the occasional car going by. I began to clamber up the steep embankment, forgetting my shoes in my desperate need to get help. Eventually I found myself on the hard shoulder, more through luck than judgement. I probably looked as if I had been attacked; I was completely dishevelled and distraught. A few cars passed and I prayed that I would not pass out on the hard shoulder and be run over by an unsuspecting driver pulling in for a rest. Then, my knight in shining armour came along at the wheel of a large lorry.

He helped me up into his cab. He said he had seen my headlights down off the roadside. He asked me if I had been drinking—I had not—and offered to take me home, even though I lived a hundred miles away in Blackpool. The pain was now so severe that just before I passed out I asked for an ambulance. I woke up in hospital, to be told by a doctor—to my amazement—that I had no bones broken and that he was discharging me. I was battered and bruised in every part of my body except my head but, apparently, hospital cutbacks meant that there was no bed available for me, even though it was now around 3.30 a.m. The policemen who had been called out to the accident called me Cinderella because they found my shoes in the car. No one knew quite what to do with me, but the nurses felt sorry for me and gave me a bed in a corridor until the morning.

Shock does strange things to the system. The thoughts I had had earlier during that fateful drive—the overwork, the broken romance and other traumas that had led me briefly to contemplate suicide—flitted across my mind but only made me feel glad to be alive. They did not seem so important now. Maybe, I pondered, this accident was an escape of sorts after all. Next morning, still in excruciating pain, I took a train back to Blackpool. The friend who picked me up at the station was shocked by my appearance. I was a sorry sight—hunched over, with bedraggled hair, crumpled clothes and a tear-streaked face. It took me a year to recover, enduring six months of severe pain as my spine slowly healed. I regained my health but my income had gone. Previously I had earned a good living as a top sales representative and had also run my own promotional company. But because I still could not bend sufficiently to ease my way into a car, I was unfit to drive. I had to find other ways to earn a living, so I enrolled in a secretarial course to learn typing, shorthand and advanced French. It was only then that I began to realize that the damage I had suffered in the accident was more sinister than I had imagined and was not confined just to physical problems.

At first I thought I was just being slow at picking things up, though that was unusual for me as I had always been a fast learner. I was already a touch typist but I could not even do that properly without making dozens of mistakes. I found I was not able to understand even the simplest things. Worse still, my friends began to notice that the day after an evening out I would have no memory of the night before—nothing to do with alcohol, either. I could not recall people or places. To my enormous embarrassment I was having to ask lifelong friends who they were. I became what others considered ‘eccentric’, constantly losing things, never ready for a date or appointment on time. I also began to dress oddly. When I confided my symptoms and worries to my doctor he told me my head had been shaken up so much in the accident that it would take some time to ‘settle’. He remarked that I had touched the Pearly Gates and was very lucky still to be alive.

Another 12 months went by and my memory had not improved one jot, so I went back to my doctor. He suggested the problem was probably trauma-based. He suggested I find a doctor who was also a hypnotherapist, but warned me that it would not be easy to find a good one. No one knew the nightmare I was going through because outwardly I looked fine. But I could not perform even the simplest tasks, such as filing. I was a totally disruptive influence to those I worked with. I would start a job and move on to something else, forgetting to finish the first task. I had begun to drive again but I would lose my car keys, go to look for them in my handbag and then forget, when I had found my handbag, what I had wanted it for. I would even forget that I was supposed to be going out at all. I would spend hours looking for things, totally absorbed in the search and unaware of the passage of time. I lost all my money. I could not keep a job because I was unemployable. I tried writing down a list of things to do each day but it was useless—I would simply forget I had made a list!

I suffered two-and-a-half years of this mental fog, during which I got little help or sympathy from anyone except close friends. My father refused even to believe it, thinking I was just being flippant. It was only when my mother suffered a fall and was taken unconscious to hospital that he realized how serious my condition was—because I forgot all about my mother’s accident and went to a party rather than visit her in hospital. My son would be left outside my house on weekend breaks from boarding school while I was off staying with friends, having forgotten I even had a son. My life was a trail of confusion. I will give you an another example of just how bad my impairment was: I took a temporary job as an assistant to a film director. During my brief employment I was given a short memo to be typed and distributed to a dozen people in the film unit, with all their names listed at the top. I spent most of a morning typing and retyping it, trying really hard to get it right. Finally satisfied, I made a dozen copies and distributed them to the relevant people. It was not long before it was brought to my attention that I had left out one thing—the memo itself! I had been so preoccupied with getting the list of names right, I had forgotten about the message!

Very embarrassing.

Indirectly, though, this job was my entrée into the film world. I went to California, initially in search of a cure for my amnesia. I had read a story about a ‘wonder’ drug that was apparently only available in the US. I never found it, but I did find a husband. I fell in love with an American producer and writer and we became engaged. When I returned to Britain, he phoned me every single night just to make sure I still remembered him! This was a bit comical, but actually it also gave me an idea. I was still praying for a cure for my memory loss and badly in need of some money to pay for it, so I sold my story to a newspaper in the hope that someone would see it and be tempted to offer help. The story appeared in papers in both Britain and America—one of them splashed it with the headline: ‘Will Bride Remember Her Husband?’

My ploy worked. A famous American hypnotist called Gil Boyne, a stage hypnotist turned hypnotherapist who has treated many Hollywood stars, happened to be lecturing in the UK and read my story. Boyne tracked me down and said that when I returned to the US he would treat me free if he could use me as a ‘guinea pig’ in front of his students at his training school in Los Angeles.

Boyne was as good as his word. He did precisely what he had promised and cured me of my memory loss before his entire class. To me it seemed the session only lasted a few minutes but later I discovered I was in hypnosis for an hour and a half. One session and I was cured! That was the day before I was due to be married. After a terrible two-and-a-half period of not being able to remember anything, I was now ready to start a new life in the US, with a new husband and a memory that worked!

Ironically, though, my cure did cause a strain in my marriage, almost from the start. The new me was quite a shock for my American husband, who knew me only as a wacky eccentric who was totally dependent on him. He had never met the ‘real’ me, an independent, responsible and quite astute businesswoman.

Gil Boyne recognized the important contacts I had made through my husband, who was a senior editor on one of the top show business newspapers in the US. Boyne was aware of the publicity potential in my cure. He hired me to do promotional work for him and I became his ‘pet amnesia victim’, accompanying him on various television and radio shows. At the time I still had no real serious interest in hypnosis. I was too busy enjoying myself, travelling, building up a good business, interviewing the rich and famous and editing a column in my husband’s newspaper. For two years everything went swimmingly. Then…disaster struck again. On one of my frequent return visits back home to Britain a string of family deaths, accidents and traumas so devastated me that I suffered a relapse into amnesia. Incredibly, the newspaper headline came true and I actually forgot that I had a husband in the US! I never went back to him.

I spent the next four years in another mental fog. My confusion and eccentric behaviour were, if anything, even worse than they had been before. I had a memory retention span of no more than 24 hours at the most, so planning ahead was impossible. I had to live literally for each day alone. One of the things I noticed was how cruel people could be, though mostly unintentionally. I lost count of how many folk joked to me that they would not mind having a memory loss, too!

Throughout the whole sorry saga, I tried work as a journalist, a pop group agent, selling industrial diamonds, selling films and TV pop shows and, holding an Equity card, acting as an extra. Many times I forgot to pick up my salary.

I launched a magazine (it only lasted three issues), while at the same time working in a pub. The customers quickly got used to being charged the wrong money. The magazine failed, mainly due to my inefficiency. I was constantly losing copy and generally causing havoc.

Then I came upon a British hypnotherapist who was an associate of Gil Boyne’s. This man was conducting a training school and was well versed in American hypnotherapy methods. I asked him to help. He did and I regained my memory once more. But this time I took a deeper interest in the whole subject.

I watched the students training and for the first time the thought came into my mind that I might enter the profession myself. My motives initially were selfish. I thought that if I understood more about the whole thing I might at least be able to help myself retain my memory, or be able to call upon professional colleagues who could assist me. The more I learned about hypnotherapy, however, the more I came to see its tremendous value and its potential for helping people.

So that is how I became a hypnotherapist. I trained in Britain and later in the US where, because of my ‘celebrity’ status as Gil Boyne’s star ‘guinea pig’, I was lucky enough to receive some rather special treatment. However, there was a price to pay as well—as they say, there is no such thing as a free lunch! I found to my dismay that video tapes of me being treated in front of Boyne’s class were circulating in the hypnotherapy world for other therapists and their students to see. There were all my most private secrets publicly laid bare on tape and recorded for posterity. Many thousands of clients later, however, I have never regretted embarking on my new life and new career. I went through so many different traumas brought on by my memory loss that I found it easy to sympathize with my clients. I seemed to have had all of their problems myself at one time or another.

With everything I have learned since then, I now know that when I had my memory loss the car accident was only the catalyst. The problems actually stemmed from eight years before, from an even earlier trauma when I had witnessed a terrible crime. New hypnotherapy techniques cut through the more superficial problems of life and go straight to the heart of the real trauma. But it takes a special kind of training to find them and, unfortunately, few therapists are taught these techniques.

A BRIEF LOOK AT HYPNOSIS IN THE PAST TWO CENTURIES

Before we come to the main purpose of this book, it may help your understanding of hypnosis to know just a little of its history and background. Important dates include:

 1775: Franz Mesmer developed healing by ‘animal magnetism’, which was later renamed hypnosis.

 1784: Count Maxime de Puysegut discovered a form of deep trance he called somnambulism.

 1821: First reports of painless surgery in France using magnetism.

 1841: A Scottish doctor, James Braid, changed the name from magnetism to hypnosis. He established it as a psychological phenomenon.

 1845-53: A surgeon, James Esdaile, performed 2,000 operations—even amputations—with the patients under hypno-anaesthesia and feeling no pain.

 1883-1887: Sigmund Freud became interested in hypnosis and began to practise it.

 1894: Freud abandoned hypnosis to concentrate on developing psychoanalysis.

 1947: Hypnosis was being used by dentists in the US.

 1950: Societies and associations for hypnosis started to sprout up.

 1958: The American Medical Association approved the therapeutic use of hypnosis by physicians.

In short, it took nearly two centuries for hypnosis to be recognized as a therapy by the medical associations; after another 30 years-plus it still has not been fully accepted by the medical profession or the public in general.

It is true that there have been many casualties of hypnosis. However, these were not the clients but the practitioners, the brilliant men and women throughout history who have succeeded in hypnotherapy but who failed miserably in marketing the controversial phenomenon of hypnosis. Clouded in mystery, the dangers of the trance state have been propagated by the ignorant. Every time hypnosis obtains a foothold as a form of cure, those using it, whether medical professionals or lay people, are exposed to ridicule.