The Hypnotic Language of Couples
by Jane Parsons-Fein, MSW, DAHB
March 24, 1997
Milton H. Erickson, M.D. world-famous medical hypnotist and psychotherapist, was paralyzed by polio from the neck down when he was seventeen. Lying in the bed and strapped into a rocking chair, Erickson taught himself to walk again by focusing his attention on his memories of how to use his muscles as he watched his baby sister learn to walk. Erickson gave the world a new understanding of how hypnosis can be used in everyday life to help people deal with pain, childbirth, and many forms of illness and psychological problems. Common experiences of everyday trance in family life is just one example of this. He said that when people shift into hypnotic trance they open themselves to their unconscious learning that often impacts their bodies. The family is a hypnotic unit in which suggestions can be positive or negative and each family member has a profound effect on the others, sometimes unconsciously.
In an autobiographical play about Katherine Graham called The Heiress she explains that she is asked to tell her father a story she had just told with charm and animation. Faced with her disapproving father, she is paralyzed, and the story becomes pointless and boring...' Later Mrs. Graham, writing about her husband, Philip Graham, described his wit and 'he was frequently using that wit at my expense.' He criticized her clothes. She put on a few pounds and he began to call her Porky. He 'gradually undermined my self confidence almost entirely,' she writes. "I ceased talking much at all." After her husband committed suicide she was elected President of the Washington Post and became one of the most influential people in Washington. The experience she had shifted into is trance like - an example of the one type of common everyday trance described by Erickson. Her reaction to her father was transferred onto her husband and whenever he criticized her she was instantly "paralyzed" like the woman in the play because she was reacting unconsciously to her father's criticisms which had triggered her into this "little girl trance," as we might call it.
This hypnosis often happens with couples. In life after childhood we recreate the emotional life we lived in as children - until we wake up, divorce, leave the company, our partner dies, or a major shift occurs in the family or work structure. We develop skill in putting each other into trance and reinforcing old patterns, sometimes generating co-dependency and automatic behavior without realizing it consciously. The sometimes elusive patterns we create are a variation or recreation of the old family trance themes that each partner brings into the marriage - to be carried on to our children.
Following is an example: Tom and Debby have been married for three years and have a one-year old baby girl. It is their anniversary and they have gone to their favorite restaurant for an elegant dinner. They raise their champagne glasses at the same moment, gazing deeply into each other's eyes, breathing simultaneously, speaking softly to each other in the same voice tone, same rhythm, seeing, hearing, feeling only each other, just as they did when they first fell in love. They are in trance; they are absorbed in each other - two people in a special and intimate relationship. It is as if their hearts are beating as one.
Time passes. Debby suddenly puts down her glass, looks at her watch and says "Oh Tom I'm sorry I have to call the baby sitter. I forgot to tell her what to feed Ginger." Tom scowls, takes a drink of champagne, then another and says coldly: "Why is it every time we have some time alone lately you forget something and have to run to the telephone. It never fails! She'll figure out what to feed Ginger. Ginger will not go hungry!"
Debby's pupils dilate. She flushes. She gets "so angry I can't think straight." Tom's sudden coldness triggers her memory of her super-critical mother. She may not consciously be aware of that memory, but her unconscious remembers and so does her body. His sudden change of voice tone and facial expression shifts her into a long-forgotten experience when she was three years old and her mother screamed at her. She was unprepared and vulnerable; her body was flooded with hormonal secretions called "informational transducers" and she experienced helplessness and fear. Her whole system was imprinted by this experience and when something triggers it, even thirty years later, in that moment she shifts into a three-year-old trance. At age three she had not as yet learned the words and since her mind has moved fully into that moment she cannot think of the words, although she is thirty-three. In that state she has forgotten she is a grown woman. In effect, for that moment, in that three-year old trance, she has amnesia for her adult self. She is flooded by the same feelings she had as a three-year-old when her mother yelled at her and threw her whole system into shock.
She starts to cry, tears falling into the lobster cocktail. He stares at her vacantly and somewhere in the back of his mind is the picture of his mother sobbing as his father bellows at her and he, at age four, stands by helplessly watching. He throws down his napkin, sits back and glares as she rushes off to the ladies room.
Gulping down his champagne he debates whether to call for the check, take her home and forget the whole thing or sit in silence through a very expensive dinner. He fights with himself not to bellow at her as she, eyes still red, returns from the ladies lounge.
This is a not-too-extreme example of what often happens with couples in one form or another. Tom and Debby shifted onto automatic pilot. Neither can understand how they got into this terrible argument, especially on their anniversary. In the intensity of the moment they shifted from a loving connection into a negative trance. Each was triggered into an early learning state of which they are not conscious. Yet they experience it as fully as the moment of falling in love.
Some married couples evoke these patterns in each other year after year until they become set responses so familiar and so repetitive that they automatically go into these trance behaviors and forget that there is another way. They have gone onto automatic.
Jonathan had a cold dominating mother and an abusive father who "exploded" often. Jonathan was the "baby" and had four older sisters. He married a woman whom he had impregnated who was critical and controlling like his mother. The marriage was very civilized and outwardly successful because his wife, like Jonathan, avoided intimacy because of her own background. Several times Jonathan found relationships outside the marriage which were fulfilling to him. When his wife discovered them, she "exploded", Jonathan's helplessness in response to his father's attacks was reactivated and full of guilt and helplessness he dutifully returned to his loveless marriage and an older daughter who gives him some solace, perhaps to the detriment of her own marriage.
Jonathan comes from a culture that is "duty bound" and "cradle to grave" security which adds to his being stuck in a deeply imprinted family pattern which is constantly reinforced by repetition, habit and automatic living. Jonathan has started therapy in an effort to honor his right to his own feelings and his own fulfillment.
In situations like Jonathan's the anxiety that accompanies moving into new patterns of behavior and new options may be too threatening, and it is a question whether he can find within himself the inner strength to generate a whole new realm of experience for himself. There are no guarantees in life and the security of the familiar, even though it is not really fulfilling, may be preferable to the excitement and challenge of change. The hypnotic web that surrounds Jonathan may make it difficult for him to step onto the "bridge of anxiety" from the land of the familiar to the land of the unknown. |
