During the sessions, I often can’t help wonder, how if she was right and I was wrong. How if the field of psychiatry was wrong to label that as a symptom of psychosis, calling it “delusion”, while in fact our patients were right? How if they could really read minds and it’s not coincident? How if somebody else could really read her mind but the psychiatric consultants were too quick to discard and then label that?
It turned out that I’m not the only person wondering about it and hoping to carry out some experiments with the patients in the psychiatric clinic.
About 44 years ago, Dr Bruce Greyson thought the same. And as agreed by his colleagues in the psychiatric ward, they did this experiment, investigating whether the patients who claimed that they had telepathy ability could really read minds. The senders (those minds being read by the patients) were his psychiatric trainees who volunteered to have their minds read, as they focused on an image during the experiment. After that, the patients were shown the image along with four other pictures, and the experimenter asked if the patient knew which image the sender was looking at earlier.
Unsurprisingly, none of the patient performed above chance expectations. But what was intriguing to me, is what happened later. Before the experiments, they were concerned about the consequences of such experiments, whether they would reinforce or worsen their symptoms and made the delusion worse. But, all the patients were happy to have been given this opportunity to participate, and what’s more:
They could trust the hospital staff more because the latter have taken their thoughts and feelings seriously.
As they failed to read minds in this experiment, they started to doubt their other irrational thoughts too!
They learnt to separate fantasy from reality after that!
Patients actually got better.
Obviously as a clinician, if I was too quick to disregard their delusions and beliefs, I would definitely fail to build a good therapeutic rapport, which is one of the most important predictions of therapy outcome. So often it’s a balance between building a mutual trust and strong therapeutic alliance, and challenging some of these so that they get better.
Here I’d like to share this method of experimentation, especially to many family members out there who live with someone suffering from psychosis, to be open and curious, and not too quick to disregard their beliefs, but invite them to try out their beliefs and see what happens!
I came across this book by Hope Jahren in Bedok library and couldn’t stop myself reading it.
The Story of MORE: How we got to Climate Change and Where to go from here, by Hope Jahren
As much as I want to know more, reading it is actually depressing at the same time. How the world has changed during the past century, how agriculture has changed, how the ocean has changed, how the growing and processing of food have changed, how the air we are breathing in has changed, how the energy we are consuming has increased etc… It’s not easy to learn about the shocking statistics and facts, and to continue to live ignorantly. This is especially so while I’m now here in Singapore, where the Covid-19 pandemic is quite under control, and it’s a developed country with sufficient clean water for all, nicely lit up city at night, plastic bags are everywhere and don’t (but might soon) cost 20 cents, there are always endless queues outside the stores when Apple launches some new products etc.
We can continue to live this way, and raise the next generation to be like ourselves, but soon there won’t be more generations to come as the earth will no longer be suitable for any lives.
I know people get eco-anxiety – a fear of ecological damages or environmental disaster, and this fear is no good when we aren’t collectively, or the countries around the world aren’t working together to do something about it. But still, the fear is needed, and the fear can be reduced when we play our parts, and then start to influence those around us, hopefully.
As a hypnotherapist (to be exact, cognitive behavioural hypnotherapist, or Hypno-CBT therapist), I get clients with this sort of goal every now and then. Usually they want to forget a specific someone, a relationship, totally get rid of a piece of memory (again usually to do with a specific person).
Naturally our rational mind would tell us this is actually not possible, based on science and what we already know about human mind, right? Yet when it comes to hypnosis and hypnotherapy, people generally “lost their senses”, everything that seems impossible elsewhere, seems possible when it comes to hypnosis.
This is right and wrong at the same time. Indeed we can achieve great things with hypnosis, we live more confidently, we become more assertive, we are happier, we confront our greatest fear, we live more according to value, we quit smoking and bad habits, we enjoy life better, we reach our fullest potential, we handle crisis and stress better, we can manage pain that we couldn’t bear before, we … forget someone?
I often explain to them, we can achieve a lot of things with hypnosis when we believe we can. Indeed the power of the mind is great. But this goal being the only exception. Unfortunately our mind and memories don’t work the way we want it to be. They are not like folders on your shelves that are stored individually, and can be accessed and discarded separately without affecting each other (just like what you saw in the animation Inside Out!).
In “Inside Out”, memories are stored individually as if documents on the shelves.
Our mind, body, emotions, feelings, behavour and thoughts are all interconnected, and so are our memories. Each time you take out the memory of “first day in school”, you changed some part of it (depending on the mood and condition you are in when you think about it etc), and you strengthen some related links connected to it and weaken some other.
Imagine if you want to forget this boyfriend or an affair or a lost child, and I’m able to take it away just like that, what about other memories and people and events connected to it? What is going to fill up the emptiness of these years? Perhaps I can make up something there…?
Yes, hypnosis is a great tool in terms of creating false memories. There have been plenty of research showing that. You might “recall” something during hypnosis which feel more real than what’s real, but it just isn’t real… You can watch more about it here in this clip: Why your memories can’t be trusted-
So right, we can’t remove the memories, and it’s unethical for us to create false memories to replace them (after all hypnotherapists are not god, who are we to decide your life stories and simply change it? But undeniably there are some hypnotherapy approach that do that, and we shall discuss this perhaps next time).
Yet it doesn’t mean we can’t help. I practice evidence-based hypnotherapy, I can use hypnosis to help you learn to accept this person or memory or relationship as part of your history, let it affect you less, learn to live with it and move on without having it interfering your life. I can also use hypnosis to facilitate proper closure and goodbye for the relationship and memory too. So, is it still a problem for you if it no longer has so much an impact in your life?
Recently a friend has had a second child born. Now he has a 2 year old son and a week old daughter. A lovely family. But he told me he is worried, because he had so much love for his son before, now a daughter, which he wants to love even more if he could. But he is worried that he can’t split his love and give them both enough love. He wondered how he could give both of them more and equal love.
I asked him to imagine holding his son first, and “can you feel how much love you have for him?”
“Yes of course! I do this (hold him) every day.”
Now imagine letting go of his son, and carrying the newborn, “can you feel how much love you have for her?”
The answer is for sure.
Next I asked him, “now imagine you are carrying and cuddling both of them. Do you feel the love you have for each of them reduce sharply? Or do you feel way more love than before?”
“More! It’s more than double!”
Exactly. We often imagine that we can only have this much love, we quantify love, and think that there is a definite amount of love we can give and receive. So if you have 1 child, you gave him/her 100%, two children? About 50% each. Four children? Approximately 25% each ……
But no, love is indefinite. As long as you want to do so, there is indefinite love we can give and receive. So please don’t worry about “splitting your love” among your wife/husband, parents, children, siblings etc. There is always more!
BUT. Definitely there is one thing that isn’t indefinite, which is your time. You do need to manage your time well when you have more children and commitments. But with love and motivation, you will manage that fine.
I borrowed this book from the library, the author is a Nephrologist (renal/kidney specialist), Dr Jason Fung.
The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery. I was in Jewel the day I finished reading this book, there was this couple posing for their pre-wedding shooting. Hope they wouldn’t mind featuring blurry here in my blogpost.
It is a fairly new book, the hardcover was published in December 2020, very up-to-date. I would say it’s for anyone who wants to learn more about cancer, as it’s very accessible, not too medical and technical. Dr Fung would take you through the history of cancer, what researchers already found and knew (e.g. what’s likely to cause cancer, is the problem with the seed (the genes and cancer cells) or the soil (environment we are in), what treatments are available, what works for what types of cancer, how cancer evolves over time and why certain treatment that don’t evolve would fail over time etc).
I also like that he summarises from time to time. There is also this Chapter 20 that summarises most of the things (but you wouldn’t want to just read that chapter, because you would miss the opportunity to be in awe of this single cell organism who lives in multicellularity and striving so hard to survive (i.e. cancer) and also evolution. (The fact that I’m using “who” tells you how I feel about it after reading and learning about it).
You’d learn so much from the book and want to share with people around you. You probably might change some little or big things in your lifestyle. I’m now also listening to his audiobook, “Life in the fasting lane”. There are also “The Diabetes Code” and “The Obesity Code” by the same author.
