strategic conversational hypnosis
Strategic Conversational Hypnosis is different from more classical types of hypnosis which rely mainly on the hypnotherapist making suggestions to the client. It does not use practitioner suggestion like more traditional type of hypnosis where the patient is basically passive; on the other hand, it uses his imagination or / and memory, by making the patient involved in the hypnosis therapy and active in transforming events linked to traumatic memories through imagination, thereby detaching them from extremely intense emotions.
The patient will therefore desensitise his traumatic memories, frozen in time for sometimes decades, and thus suppress the symptoms of psychological trauma (such as numbness, hypervigilance, anxiety, fear, pain) while reassociating the traumatic events with his autobiographical memory . With the help of the hypnotherapist, the patient has control over his own physical symptoms (which are regulated by the autonomic nervous system) or troubled over images with the associated emotions.
According to Brassine, what makes this work possible is the fact that, at the unconscious level, the brain does not differentiate between reality and the imaginary. The brain is dumb but that’s how it’s smart.
The psychotherapy of re-associative trauma (PTR) created by Brassine is based on the main and fundamental concept of dissociative protections: during traumatic events, hypnotic phenomena spontaneously take place in the subject, in which survival mechanisms, in particular dissociative protections, are triggered, such as depersonalization, dissociative amnesia, surprise or physical anesthesia. Brassine calls these survival ‘defences’ dissociative protections, which, once put in place, are sometimes maintained over time or are suddenly reactivated without real vital necessity, by sometimes trivial triggers, such as a smell, a sound or the sight of an object.
In this case, dissociative protections turn into symptoms or symptom vehicles.
In PTR, psychosomatic conversions are considered as dissociative protections: in fact, the emotional suffering linked to the memory of the traumatic event is such that the person can make the unconscious choice to protect himself by transforming it into a more easily manageable physical pain. even if it is potentially disabling, for example a disease of the digestive tract, eczema or fibromyalgia.
The treatment of symptoms by PTR will consist in using in a hypnotic state the dissociative protections put in place during the traumatic events, which will give control to the patient while he has suffered them until then and will paradoxically make them disappear. Thanks to the patient’s control over the dissociative protections used during therapeutic work, the desensitization of traumatic events will be carried out in complete safety, aiming for “zero pain” during the sessions.
