Constructing a Hypnoanalysis Treatment Plan - Case Study Example

Hypnoanalysis treatment Hypnoanalysis is a combination of the principles and practice of psychoanalysis with the principles and practice of hypnotherapy. It includes the analysis of resistance and transferernce, focusing on the dynamic unconscious. We can say that it is an extension of the traditional psychoanalysis. It is used in many psychiatric problems, mainly in neuroses. This can help investigate personality aspects and the symptoms can be explored and understood. One needs to understand the conscious and unconscious needs of the patients. The conscious needs can be their desire for treatment based on the feedbacks received by them. Unconscious needs could be dependencies longings and desires for omnipotence associated with hypnotic relationships. Hypnoananlysis reduces the treatment time but some claims can be exaggerated also. A request for hypnoanalysis may be deceptive also and it could be a case of ambivalence by establishing psychiatric contact. This should be evaluated for a successful treatment. Introduction Miss M has come to see me as a patient. She is a thirty year old woman, single parent of a multi race child whose father lives abroad. She says she is having serious relationship problems and has been going from one relationship to the other and finding all of them abusive either mentally or physically. She has confessed that she has been sexually promiscuous. She is suffering from severe stomach disorders also. I think it must be stress-related. She has been under stress since her childhood. She was mentally abused by her father who used to call her fat and ugly. Background Miss M is working as a teacher. She is a 30 year old single mother. She has had a traumatic childhood. She was mentally tortured by her father who would always call her fat and ugly and would drag her in front of the mirror and make her stand there in her underwear and point out how fat and ugly she was looking. He instilled in her that no body would ever want her. As an adult this complex has grown with her and she finds all relations abusive. Her stomach problems also indicate high level of stress. This a manifestation of her childhood trauma. She is under continuous strain of the feeling that she is ugly and fat and unattractive so she will not be able to attract any relationship or maintain it even if she finds someone. She is always scared that the other person will cause mental and physical torture to her just like what her father did to her. She has tried to develop relationships many times but her own trauma has caused her to feel the same way every time. These experiences have shaken her even more and her internal stress is manifesting itself as the stomach disorders. What is Trauma? Trauma is a damage caused to the psyche pf a person normally due to some traumatic event. This can lead to Post-traumatic Stress-disorders also. This can cause damage to to the brain and to the brain chemistry also. This affects the person’s capability to cope up with stress. Trauma could result from one single event or it may also be series of events or may be repetitive events. These events overwhelm the ability of the person to cope up with the emotions attached to that experience. The person may take a long time to be overwhelmed and may struggle with the sense of immediate danger. Although trauma can be caused by various events but usually there are some common aspects to it., like feeling totally helpless and experience a threat to life or to the lives of the loved ones or to one’s body or mental sanity. When there is a continuous attack on a person’s mental state and his ideas, he is pushed to a state of extreme confusion and feels totally insecure. This sense of insecurity is mostly seen when their trust is broken by someone very close to them. Physical trauma can be a part of psychological trauma. It can also exist without it. The main causes of psychological trauma are either threat or witnessing of sexual abuse or violence, most probably in childhood. Sometimes it can be caused by some catastrophic event like Tsunami or earthquake or a war or mass violence. Verbal abuse can also be a cause of trauma, sometimes as strong as in a single event. It can also be caused by someone’s own actions like committing rape that he later feels traumatic as his failure to control his conduct. Long-term exposure to poverty can also leave a traumatic impact. But the fact is that the same event can be traumatic to some people and not to someone else. A person who is the victim of a trauma, tends to avoid any reminder of the trauma as it is mentally and sometimes physically painful to them. They may become drug addicts or alcoholic as an escape from it. The person may not be aware of the cause of his behaviour or what triggers his traumatic disorders. Probable causes for this case As explained above, Miss M is a victim of childhood trauma. Her father’s continuous telling her about her ugly body has shaken her belief in herself and at he same time shaken her faith fro the close relationships like that of a parent and a child. She has an urge for a loving relationship and that is what leads her to get involved in so many different relationships. But her own fear and lack of trust gets her to experience similar mental and physical torture in all her relationships as an adult. Apart from affecting her mentally and emotionally, this has affected her physically also as stomach problems. With the help of hypnoanalysis we hope to help her get over this trauma. My aim as a therapist My aim as a therapist is to find more about her underlying fears and remove them. Then I want to move her forward with the help of the treatment plan to get out of that mental state and have a normal, peaceful and stress-free life. In my treatment I may use varios techniques like Hypnoanalysis, Suggestion therapy, Neuro-Linguistic Programming Gestalt Therapy, personality profiling and Balancing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. At later stages of treament I may use Deep relaxation therapy and Self-hypnosis Training. The Client’s goal of therapy Miss M has told me that she wants to get rid of her stomach ailments. She is finding her life as a single parent very stressful and her repeated failures at other relationships is making her feel even worse. She wants to have a steady and loving relationship. Treatment plan Session1- This may be a two-hour session. During the initial interview I will try to establish her background- about her family when she was a child, what were their circumstances. I will get information about her parents, her relationship with her parents and the parent’s mutual relationship. I will need to know about other family members like brothers and sisters and their relationship with each other. She has told me that her father used to torture her. I will have to find out what made him do so. What kind of a person he was? What was his problem? How was his relationship with her mother? How did the mother treat her? Since this has been a root cause, I hope to find some clues here. I will need to know how she herself feels about her. Does she feel that she is ugly and fat? At this point I will induce hypnosis and use her own words about herself to up ad heighten them. Then I will use these strong feelings to take her back to the first time she felt so. This will help me know exactly what happened that time. Then I will set up a gestalt session with her father where she will tell him how she really felt and ask him to explain why he was doing so? I hope I would get some reply there. After doing some integration, I will terminate the trance. After she becomes normal, I will ask her about the event. My expectation is that she will not have any conscious memory of the same but this therapy would reveal old memories. I would encourage her to talk to her parents without confronting them. I will tell her that this will help her get some information. It is very important session as this will determine the course of treatment and my success. The Initial Consultation Form is a useful tool for me and I also have to take extensive notes. I will have to use this session to build trust, rapport and belief with her to gain her confidence and most importantly to make her like me. My motive here is to identify her personality type and also her personality disorders. I need to see what are her major conflicts. Another important thing to remember in the first session is to undo any previous treatment. I need to find out if she has any resistance towards the therapy. Her acceptance of the treatment and her faith on me are the most important factors here. Session 2 I am hopeful that our first session will help Miss M to get some vital information about her childhood trauma. I will have a discussion with her about how she is feeling after the first session. Then I will induce hypnosis once again to revoke some more memories of her childhood. I am sure we will find more information and it will help her to understand her present problem. Then I will set up a gestalt session with her parents or may be with just her father so that she can vent her feelings towards him. After his session we will do an integration of the new info and this will I will induce hypnosis to help her to realize how her childhood trauma has affected her. The pre-hypnosis and post hypnosis sessions are very important to prepare the patient for the therapy and also to integrate the findings later to help the patient understand the roots of his/her problem and get out of it. Some patients may find the sessions traumatic but at the end of it they feel relaxed as they vent out their feelings. Session 3 By the time the third session starts, most of the patients start feeling much better. I hope Miss M will also be quite relaxed by now. She should have got over her stress quite a lot. But since the old memories have been revived, she may have a confrontation with her parents, specially her father, whom she holds responsible for misbehaviour and ill treatment that led to her traumatic life. As a therapist, I will have to explore if any such thing has happened and then explain to her that she need not be upset with her father. Now that she is an adult and can understand people much better, she needs to understand the reasons behind her father’s wrong behaviour. Most of the times parents take out their own frustration of personal failures or professional failure on their children as children are the easiest targets and do not have the capacity to retaliate and inflict any harm back to them. I am hopeful that I would have discovered something on these lines in my earlier sessions and will be able to link it to Miss M’s 3rd session. This session will have a gestalt session with either both the parents or her father. We may need two separate gestalts also depending on the earlier discoveries and discussions. I would want her to regress back to her childhood and get more information. For this I will induce hypnosis. Then I can integrate it with her current problem and connect the two. She may still have doubts about her confidence in new relationships but at the termination of this session she should feel quite relieved. Session 4 I hope by this time when Miss M comes for the session,she would be feeling much better and hopefully she would have reconciled with her father and hold him responsible for all her trauma. In this session I intend to use suggestion therapy on her body and her relationships to become better. I may need to use the hypnosis session also in this session if needed because there may be some more recent happenings that have left a scar on her psyche. By discovering those events and doing some gestalt work , I ca help her get over those experiences. I can use that information for integrating and explaining to her. Session 5 By now she should have improved in her relationship with her father and should have developed a better self image. In this session I would work on her self-image and help her to see herself in a better way as an attractive young woman. Session 6(final session) I expect a significant improvement in Miss M by now. She should have developed a positive self image and her behaviour should be more confident. She should have recovered from her stomach problems also as the cause has been identified and removed.i hope to see some excitement in her. I would concentrate on enhancing her self image even more. I would anchor her name to the word –Beautiful, so that every time anybody calls this name, she would see a picture of a beautiful woman I am sure this will bring out a totally stress-free and happy woman in Miss M. to let her feel the change and try the self suggestion techniques herself, I would give a break in the session and ask her to come after a month. Post Treatment Conclusion After the Hypnoanalysis treatment is over, I hope to see her completely cured both mentally and physically. I will not be surprised if I find her coming to meet me with a friend, this time with full confidence. I would like to This will give me an opportunity to find out about how she is feeling now and hope not to find any gaps.If I get the opportunity, I will do a lot of timeline work and give her further suggestion on relationship related stress. I would teach her Self-hypnosis so that she can continue filling in her enhanced self image that has been depleted for long. Although she should have recovered fully, I would want her to contact me once again after 2 weeks. I would like to know her progress. I hope after the Hypnoanalysis Treatment, Miss M should come up as a total normal person and her new found relationship must be going on well. I would enquire about that and make sure everything is fine with her. As it happens with most of the Hypnoanalysis patients, I am sure Miss M will also be able to get over her trauma completely and not be haunted by it consciously or unconsciously. Reference: Jeroem M. Schneck, Clinical Aspects of Hypnoanalysis, http://www.psychiatryonline.org/ Retrieved on June 4, 2007 Alan Crisp, Hypnotherapy and how it works, Wesland Institute Blog, retrieved on June 4, 2007 Australian journal of Disaster and trauma studies, Massey University, New Zealand, Hypnoanalysis; http://wwwavonhypnotheraly.co.uk/ Hypnoanalysis; Read More