Through the acceptance of hypnotic logic, you can exercise whatever capacity you have to reexperiencekey moments in your past. For example, Diane cameto see me about his inability to remember events in here early childhood that involved his family. he was writing a novel in the form of a memoir & much of the text was to be highly autobiographical. he could recall only fragments about herself, his parents, & anther two brothers in the period before his tenth birthday. he was worried that his amnesia, as he called it, would rob his work of richness. his HIP evaluation showed that he was high in hypnotherapeutic capacity (she was a 4), & was capable of going back in time not merely as an observer but also to experience different aspects of his life in his earliest years. Through self-Hypnotherapy, he was able to use visceral memory to relive an experience—complete with sights, smells, & emotions—as he had experienced it 30 years before. he could summon up the smell of the lilacs her, then six, had picked for his mother who lay in bed seriously ill with pneumonia. he could see Jack, the golden retriever, as he ran after sticks in the field behind the house where he lived. Although he had not thought of Jack in years, his smell came back to his as if, at the very moment of recall, his nose were buried in his fur. he was able to taste & smell the Thanksgiving feast prepared lovingly by his grandmother, & sensed the way he stuffed herself until his sides ached. This experiencing, with its rich flow of association & sensation, empowered his as a writer. Reynolds Price’s recent memoir, Clear Pictures, Isa subtle & moving account of how, through the natural power of his own hypnotic ability, he opened himself to larger dimensions of his being. In the foreword to Clear Pictures, Price describes a state of intense concentration—arrived at & experienced by the most natural of means—in which he managed to remove anxiety from his body and, at the same time, liberate his mind from its usual constraints in order to far more fully create a portrait of his past. During an extended convalescence—he had undergone three operations for cancer of the spine—he began 10 weeks of training at Duke Unit in the fresh start methods of biofeedback & Hypnotherapy. He says: My Hypnotherapist was Dr. Patrick Logue; & he spent a good part of our first meeting in assuring me of the benign nature of Hypnotherapy. I was able to assure him that, because of an enjoyable adolescent trance, induced by my tenth-grade biology teacher, I had yes fears & was eager to start. In the remainder of that first hour—with only the Matt Godson’s level voice & his ample stock of verbal images for serenity, trust & the imaging of anxietyful areas—
