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Hypnotherapy
| Date: |
25 January 2010 07:00 |
| Producer: |
Sophia Phirippides
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| Presenter: |
Annika Larsen
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| Show: | Carte Blanche Medical |
This is footage taken by a hypnotherapist during a patient's first session. He's a 19-year-old man suffering from uncontrollable rage. At this point he is in deep hypnosis. Although he is hitting a cushion with a soft pipe, in his mind he is striking out at all those who have harmed him.
[Psychologist's file footage 12 September 2009] Dr Ian Opperman (Clinical psychologist): 'It is just in your mind... who do you want to put there?'
[Psychologist's file footage 12 September 2009] Bradley Ball (Patient): 'Every ******* person in my whole ******* family!'
Bradley has been taken back under hypnosis to a time when he was a boy and suffered deeply traumatic experiences. The idea is that by reliving the experiences he can understand and reconcile himself with his fear and anger.
[Psychologist's file footage 12 September 2009] Psychologist: 'Feel those emotions. Get them all out of your system. You've carried them for 19 years. It's too long!'
Dr Ian Opperman is a clinical psychologist who specialises in regressive hypnotherapy. Bradley is his patient and together they are embarking on a journey aimed at helping Bradley gain control of his emotions, which have had an extremely destructive effect on his life.
Bradley: 'And he kept saying, 'What? What? You going to do it? Do it! You are going to play? Do it! I dare you to stab me! Do it...' And I stabbed him. I stabbed him through the mouth here [below jaw] and it came out the top [under tongue]. That's the most horrifying thing for me; my anger is so bad that I can stab my dad.'
Annika Larsen (Carte Blanche Medical presenter): 'Many practitioners believe that hypnotherapy is a powerful tool to access information, emotion and memories that are hidden deep in the subconscious mind, that manifest as depression, anxiety, phobias and uncontrollable rage.'
Dr Opperman: 'With conventional psychotherapy, I refer to it as 'talking heads', because you really talk to the person's conscious part, the head part. And you don't really go deeper to the 'soul' part. The subconscious mind is there to protect us. So if I am three years old and something really bad happens to me it says, 'I will not cope if this comes out into the world so I've got to protect this from ever hurting the core organism: the person.' So it blocks the stuff from coming to consciousness. So at all of these points the child got wounded and pieces of the child broke off... little fragments have broken off. So often today, when we are here at 30, then we have this part that's our 'soul', but there are only one or two slices in this pie because so many of the slices are stuck in time. With hypnosis you can go back in time and pick up these little pieces of fragments that have broken off and reintegrate them.'
According to Dr Opperman this 'fragmented' personality is the result of gaps in critical childhood development, usually from incomplete parenting. If certain life lessons aren't learned at critical times, correct neural pathways are not built and the individual doesn't learn coping skills.
Dr Opperman: 'That's what I'm hoping to do with Bradley, to use hypnosis, to use self-containment skills, to help him build new neural pathways, self-loving skills, because if he hates himself he's going to play out hatred to the world.'
Which is essentially how Bradley operates at this stage in his life: a perceived threat is always met with violence.
Bradley: 'If you do provoke me in a way and you're in my face, you deserve what you're going to get, because I do warn. Before I fight, I warn. Once I get to the stage of anger I can't get out of it.'
Bradley's anger has led him to some of the darkest places. He's been involved in serious physical fights with people ending up in broken bones. In one incident he caused over R800 000 worth of damage to his father's home, smashing it with a metal pipe and dousing his father's car with petrol and setting it alight.
Ian helped Bradley trace the source of his anger with the world: deeply repressed memories of an intensely traumatic early childhood.
Dr Opperman: 'He had a mother who was probably bipolar from the history because she seemed to be very volatile, had rage attacks, was addicted to alcohol and heroin and perhaps other drugs.'
As a result, Bradley grew up in an atmosphere of violence and fear.
Dr Opperman: 'And there's a lot of studies that confirm that, if people have been neglected, abandoned, abused from the womb to the first 18 months, their subconscious blueprint will say, 'No one wants me, I must be bad' and then the decision is: 'I'll show them how bad I can be.''
Bradley was drawn into a negative spiral, moving from school to school, landing up in Boys Town and, most recently, prison.
Annika: 'Why do you think you're so angry?'
Bradley: 'My mother left me, more or less, and she knew exactly what she was doing.'
Dr Opperman: 'Until we heal the subconscious the 'shadow' will keep on hurting our lives because we haven't healed the subconscious stuff that causes us to do these very dysfunctional things.'
Annika: 'There's an old Roman saying that goes something like, 'A healthy body is a healthy mind.' It is a holistic concept that still rings true. Ian says that's because the body and the mind are intrinsically interconnected. But that does raise a question: can a mental problem cause a physical illness?'
Jeanine Schoultz came to Dr Opperman on the recommendation of a fertility clinic. For 10 years she'd been trying to have a baby. Although she would manage to fall pregnant she would inevitably miscarry due to severe endometriosis and other problems.
Jeanine Schoultz (Patient): 'I was in hospital having one laparoscopy after the other; it would continuously come back. I had fibroids, I had cysts, I had cervical infections, and I felt like maybe my husband wanted to leave me... I just 'was' at that stage when honestly I didn't want to live anymore. I used to lie in my bed at night and say, 'Please God just take me, I don't want to be here anymore.' I was just at the lowest point in my life.'
Ian took Jeanine back to her childhood where she discovered the root of some of her emotional issues, which had manifested in her physical illness.
Jeanine: 'I always had this fear of 'life'... not being able to survive and I didn't want that for my child. And I was basically telling myself that I don't want a child because of the things that happened in my past.'
But the most shocking revelation came in a session when Jeanine remembered something that was not a conscious memory in her adult life.
Jeanine: 'I was lucky because a lot of memories were coming to me as a child; me playing in the garden, in the road, and suddenly I had this memory of being abused... It wasn't in my family, it was somewhere else. It's just something I don't really want to talk about and was just something that I basically had to deal with.'
Dr Opperman: 'Often people will come to me for the first time and then go back to very traumatic childhood events that they have forgotten or repressed.'
According to Ian's interpretation, this incident helped to create a blueprint for Jeanine's entire life, starting with poor self-image and culminating in her illness.
Jeanine: 'All the emotions that I suppressed was in my pelvis and I think that's where the endometriosis was.'
Dr Opperman: 'Because of the abuse that happened to her, her biology reacted to that.'
Over several months, they worked through her blueprint. She had to practice creative visualisation techniques and positive affirmations. As the therapy progressed her physical symptoms began to clear up.
Jeanine: 'I did have a laparoscopy during my session with Ian and it looked like I had a brand new pelvis. The pain during ovulation just gradually went away.'
Dr Opperman: 'What we did on a mental, on an emotional, on a spiritual level, manifested in her body.'
For both Jeanine and Bradley early childhood trauma was at the root of their problems. Bradley remembers the defining moment that probably changed his young life forever.
Bradley: 'We were coming back from nursery school - you know after-school type of nursery school where they look after you. It was something like that. I walked into the house, I turned the alarm off, and in front of my dad's room was my mom lying there with one eye open and one eye closed. And the heroin, the needle and the strap around her arm... She was against the wall and [wherever] I was walking it felt like she was looking at me. It still haunts me till today.'
Dr Opperman: 'That is a core traumatisation, but my gut feel is the traumas happened long before then.'
Bradley is visiting Ian for the second time. Ian hopes that he will have some kind of breakthrough with his anger issues today. They agreed to let us sit in on the session. As part of the treatment, Dr Opperman took Bradley to his source of anger again.
[3 December 2009] Dr Opperman: 'Just allow yourself to push yourself on an emotional level to that place Bradley.'
At first he seemed resistant: he didn't want to use the soft pipe and cushion. And suddenly he caught Dr Opperman off guard.
[3 December 2009] Bradley: [whacks chair]
[3 December 2009] Dr Opperman: 'Stop, you'll hurt yourself. Wait, wait, wait wait. Don't hit the chair...'
Dr Opperman: 'In 20 years of doing this work I've never had anyone deliberately be so angry that he needed to break something here. So it is kind of frightening for him. So what I then attempted to do is say, 'What if I taught him or help him bring the anger under control that he knows he can learn to contain his own anger?''
[3 December 2009] Dr Opperman: 'How old are you then when your mom is swearing and hitting your father? How old is that boy?'
[3 December 2009] Bradley: 'About four or five.'
Using a teddy bear as a prop, Dr Opperman asked Bradley to imagine a meeting between his present day self and his frightened five-year-old self [the teddy bear].
[3 December 2009] Dr Opperman: 'Imagine you can go back. Imagine you can say to that little boy he is safe now...'
Dr Opperman: 'When you prompt them to say, 'I love you,' 'You are innocent,' 'You did nothing wrong...''
[3 December 2009] Bradley: 'I don't know how to do it. I just don't know how to do it...'
[3 December 2009] Dr Opperman: 'Well, how about, 'You're a wonderful little boy'?'
[3 December 2009] Bradley: 'I wouldn't believe it.'
[3 December 2009] Dr Opperman: 'Well, how about, 'You're innocent, you did nothing wrong'?'
[3 December 2009] Bradley: 'I wouldn't believe it... I can't look at this [gives teddy bear back].'
Dr Opperman: 'If they can't say that, you know the degree of self-hatred is huge and it is really a long-term therapy that is going to happen with this patient.'
For now, Jeanine is one of Ian's success stories.
Jeanine: 'I was with Ian for a year-and-a-half doing long-term therapy with him. And I fell pregnant and I have my little girl now.'
And Bradley has high hopes for his future.
Bradley: 'I would like to be - not saying that I am crazy or anything - but mentally stable. I want to get out of that type of habit, you know, that I've made for myself where you literally get angry and angry and then you've got to get a little bit angrier... I want to bring it down. I want to be mellow. That's what I want to be like. That's what I want to achieve when I leave here.'
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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