Hypnosis Triumph
by Diana M. Raab, R.N., M.F.A.
Ever since I can remember, my middle daughter, Anna, who is now twenty-one, has had a rather serious phobia. Basically, she’s afraid of hospitals, the sight of blood, and white lab coats—anything related to illness. My readings taught me that her type of phobia was rarely inherited, but frequently connected to a learned behavior originating from some negative experience. After much reflection, I was initially unable to peg what that experience might have been.
Anna’s tendency to queasiness in medical situations became a friendly joke around our house. I tried to guard her from the perils of illness and hoped that one day she’d outgrow her phobia.
When Anna was in the ninth grade, she joined a group of friends to a water park in Orlando, where we lived at the time. While standing in a long queue, she stubbed her big toe on a metal barrier. At home that night, I noticed her limping around the house. The next day the pain became increasingly worse and so I decided to take her to the local orthopedic clinic. While sitting in the waiting room we completed all the necessary paperwork and impatiently flipped through the year-old women’s magazines. Anna looked nervous, but maintained her composure.
After half an hour, a young nurse called us into the examination room. The gentle-looking surgeon introduced himself and glanced in Anna’s direction. In return, she gave him a half grin. He asked her to explain what happened to her toe. He touched the toe and she pulled back. He diagnosed her toe as being badly bruised and suggested keeping it supported with tape to the toe beside. We thanked him and walked up the corridor to the cashier’s window.
While standing in line to pay, Anna whispered, “Mom, I feel faint.” She was not a huge fan of breakfast, so I suspected she was hungry. I pulled out a candy from my purse. While handing it to her, I noticed the color had completely vanished from her face. All of a sudden, her knees gave out, and she slid down onto the industrial-carpeted floor. My nursing instinct told me to cup my hand behind her head for protection. In the process, I lost the balance off my platform shoes, and my body flung directly on top of hers. Although I managed to successfully support her head before it hit the floor, within seconds we were surrounded by a slew of medical personnel. Doctors muttered something about the possibility of Anna suffering a seizure and suggested her being seen in the emergency room.
In the end, Anna and I both ended up in the ambulance together, as a result of her fear and my attempt to protect her.
While in the emergency room, they did an array of tests on Anna, and although I knew that her fainting spell was due to her fear of doctors, I was pleased that they chose to rule out other possible neurological issues. On the other side of the room, a team of doctors were examining me and ordering ankle X-rays. Three hours later, we were both discharged home. On leaving the emergency room, Anna seemed perfectly fine, but I limped out the sliding glass doors with the help of crutches! I chalk the experience up to one of the risks of motherhood!
Two weeks later, I brought Anna to a neurologist for a follow-up appointment. He asked her what she remembered of her recent fainting episode.
“I just recall having a bitter taste in my mouth; feeling spaced out and very tired.”
He gave her a thorough exam and by the end of the appointment, he said she had vasovagal syncope, a type of fainting associated with strong emotion, fear, pain, or injury. The vessels in her head become dilated and her heart rate slows down. He suggested that if Anna ever felt like that again, (lightheaded and dizzy), she should either lie down on her back or put her head down between her knees. For a couple of years, things were quiet in the fainting arena.
*****
The summer Anna turned nineteen, she asked to travel with her boyfriend across Europe. I told her that my major concern was how she’d respond in the event of an emergency. What if she became ill in Europe? What if her boyfriend, Dan, got sick and needed her? What would she do?
Anna looked up at me with her big blue eyes and flaxen blonde hair and shrugged her shoulders. “Probably just what I’d do at home.” I wasn’t satisfied with her answer. She’d be traveling in foreign lands where she might not understand a word. I’d done some reading about vasovagal response and learned that the recommended treatments were either hypnosis or mild sedatives. I did not believe that in her case, sedation was a good idea.
The following day I told Anna that her father and I had spoken and didn’t think she should go to Europe unless she had some hypnosis sessions for her fainting phobia. I thought back to my own experience with hypnosis in the 1970s. I had misplaced my engagement ring and Simon offered to practice his newly-acquired hypnosis technique on me.
He told me to lie on my stomach across the bed with my head at its edge. He kneeled on the floor in front of me and held a crystal attached to a string. As he swung the crystal back and forth before my eyes, he instructed me to listen to his words. Soon my eyes felt heavy. I don’t remember much after that except dashing into my closet and into my jeans’ pocket to get my ring. From that moment on, I was a true believer in hypnosis.
Anna agreed to meet Dr. Ron Devasto, a clinical hypnotist in private practice in Winter Park, Florida. He held his doctorate in Clinical Hypnotherapy and had traveled the nation and the world lecturing and leading workshops on hypnosis. I had a positive experience with him the year before, when learning the technique to lose the ten pounds I’d gained between the
ages of thirty and fifty.
During Anna’s first appointment, Dr. De Vasto interviewed her to see if she was a good candidate for hypnosis. According to an article in the September 2004 issue of Newsweek magazine on hypnosis, “It’s well known that some people are more responsive to hypnosis than others. Hypnotizability, experts say, is a trait, like eye color. As a rule, the more ‘absorbed’ a person is able to get in things—movies, sunsets, daydreams—the more hypnotizable he is.”
Dr. David Spiegel, professor and associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and an expert on hypnosis, says that those who describe themselves as more trusting of others tend to be better candidates for hypnosis, while those who are very logical and never take anything at face value tend to be less hypnotizable.
Dr. De Vasto was personable and seemingly non-judgmental and held a very positive attitude about life, making him easy to talk to. He asked Anna to describe her phobic episodes. He then swiveled his chair in my direction.
“Mom, can you recall any incidents in Anna’s childhood that particularly stand out concerning hospitals or doctors?”
After a moment an image flooded into my head. My mind spun back to my father’s hospital room where, thirteen years earlier, my father had spent the last hours of his life. Anna was six years old, and we’d gone to visit him. Anna and my father were extremely close.
We entered his room. He lay with his head slightly elevated on pillows, the bed’s side rails were raised, and oxygen prongs were jammed into his nostrils. He’d been coughing up globs of sputum into tissues which he placed in a paper bag taped to the side rails—all an aftermath of thirty-five years of cigarette smoking.
I vividly remember Anna’s face when seeing his. As we gathered around my father, Anna, in her pink dress and matching hair bow, scurried to the corner of the room. With her hands covering her eyes, she partially looked at my father and partially looked at us. I now realize how little attention we paid to Anna; all our focus rested on my dying father. At that moment in Dr. De Vasto’s office, I was struck by the deep impact that one incident, so many years ago, must have had on my Anna.
After finishing my story, he turned to Anna.
“Do you remember your grandfather?
She nodded.
“What do you remember about him?”
“I loved him a lot,” she said, trying to fend off tears, but ended up cupping her face in her hands. She burst out crying. Anna was a girl who’d kept her emotions pent up inside. It had never been easy for her to share her deepest sentiments. She swallowed much of her pain. This crying spell was a huge leap for Anna.
“Anna, do you remember anything else about that scene in the hospital?” he asked.
“I don’t remember a thing.”
After a few moments, Dr. De Vasto asked me to step out of the room so they could begin the hypnosis session.
I waited in the car, wondering and hoping that everything was going well inside. Was I doing the right thing? What if the session made everything worse? I became tormented by my thoughts.
After an hour, Anna pulled open the passenger door as I desperately tried to read her facial expression. I badly wanted the session to be a positive experience, because it would encourage her to return for the next appointment. Although there was a sense of relief in Anna’s eyes, she said, “You know, Mom, I’m doing this just for you.”
“It’s for both of us,” I said.
“Whatever,” she said, reaching for the radio button.
The following day, while slicing tomatoes, I cut myself with a sharp knife. Normally, the scene would have made Anna pale and faint. Instead of removing herself from the scene, she stood there beside me, with this new glazed, distant and detached look in her eyes. Instead of putting herself in my shoes and being worried, she’d become a removed entity. This was the defense that hypnosis had taught her.
Prior to her European trip, Anna willingly returned for about five more hypnosis sessions. At one point, Dr. De Vasto wanted to assess the success of the sessions and asked Anna to visit the local emergency department by herself. After some procrastination, she successfully completed the assignment.
“So how was your visit to the emergency room?” I asked.
“I went and nothing was going on, so I felt fine.” A smile emerged from my lips and I realized that I’d done the right thing. The hypnosis method still seemed so much safer and more sensible than the tranquilizer route.
Dr. De Vasto taught both Anna and me the technique of self-hypnosis to be practiced daily. This reinforces all the good information processed during the sessions. “I’m glad that I didn’t have to use the technique, but it was a good thing to carry around in my back pocket, just in case,” said Anna.
About two months after returning from Europe, Anna transferred to a university in Boston to study journalism. Her sister visited with her peek-a-poo. During that visit they decided to go shopping together and while descending the escalator in a department store, the dog got her foot caught on the bottom on the escalator.
“It’s the yelp I’ll never forget,” Anna shared. “It was awful.”
Later, her sister Rachel told me that blood poured out everywhere. Rachel said that Anna actually stood there and watched with a detached expression on her face. When I asked Anna how she felt at the time, she said, “I felt fine, just a bit nauseous, but I didn’t faint.”
That was the last fainting episode which Anna reported to me. I continue to wonder how Anna’s future episodes will evolve and hope that hypnosis will continue to help her in the long-term. In the meantime, the learning process has been a good one. Shedding some light on the source of her fear and helping her cope with that, has turned a negative into a positive, and at this point, we can’t expect for more than that!
Diana M. Raab, M.F.A., essayist, memoirist and poet has been teaching personal writing since 2001. She currently teaches journaling, essay and memoir at The University of California Santa Barbara. As a writer she has been crafting her own life experiences into memoir from an early age, and continues to serve as a mentor to many apprentices in the genre of personal history writing. She writes a column called, “Your Muse” for InkByte.com, an online magazine for writers.
Diana Raab received her M.F.A. in writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Her personal essays and articles have appeared in the The Louisville Review, Frostproof Review, Palo Alto Review, Writers Notes, Survivor Stories and Ophelia Speaks. Her personal narrative poems have appeared in Rosebud, The Aardvark, A Treasury of American Poetry III, Talking River, Genie, The Binnacle, The Angry Poet and Writers’ Journal.
In 1992 her book, Getting Pregnant and Staying Pregnant: A Guide to Infertility and High Risk Pregnancy, won the Benjamin Franklin Book Award for Best Health and Wellness Book. It is now in its fourth edition and has been translated into French and Spanish.
Current works-in-progress include a biography, Regina’s Closet: The Discovery of a Grandmother’s Secret Journal and Me: My Teen Life, an inspirational book which she is collaborating on with her daughter, Rachel, a digital artist. She also has a novel-in-progress.
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