Close Your Eyes, Get Free: Use Self-Hypnosis to
Reduce Stress, Quit Bad Habits, and Achieve Greater Relaxation and Focus. By Grace Smith. Da Capo.
$15.99.
Self-help books are, by definition and to
a greater or lesser extent, paeans of praise to their authors. Like books about
“the one investment secret you need to know,” self-help and other
personal-growth books point to their authors as having knowledge and abilities
that they have discovered through their own remarkable acumen and that they are
now, out of the goodness of their hearts, sharing with the world. The fact that
not a single self-help book (or, for that matter, a single investment book)
actually works for all people is what keeps the field going – and the fact that
many books work for some people to at
least some degree guarantees an
endless supply of eager writers hoping to cash in on their particular
expertise.
So there is nothing particularly
surprising in the extent to which hypnotherapist Grace Smith engages in
social-media self-promotion and refers readers to the audios, videos and other
“bonus content” that she makes available online at a site associated with the
hypnosis practice that she founded. Nor are her chatty style and her clever way
of giving a scientific veneer to her suggestions unusual or likely to be
off-putting to people who have tried many other forms of self-help for their
psychological concerns, have found them wanting, but who still think someone,
somewhere, has the answer.
A lot of the “science” here is
once-over-lightly and not particularly accurate, but it does not have to be: it
creates a framework within which readers who so choose can believe in Smith’s
approach. That is in fact an important component of hypnotism: agreeing to be
hypnotized means you are pre-selecting yourself as someone predisposed to be
hypnotized. Agreeing to learn self-hypnosis to deal with life issues means you
are pre-selecting yourself as someone predisposed to believe that self-hypnosis
can help you solve life’s problems. This is precisely how stage hypnotists
arrange their acts – and it is also how medical hypnotherapists incorporate
hypnosis into psychotherapy.
That is not quite what Smith does,
however. To the extent that Close Your
Eyes, Get Free is science, it is very much popular science, with the
emphasis on “popular.” Smith, for example, offers a three-part brain model
(reptilian, limbic, neocortex) and suggests readers associate each
unsatisfactory area of their lives with one of the three parts and work on
issues based on that association.
In reality, though, a good deal of what
Smith presents is not science at all – it is closer to astrology than
astronomy. Smith, for instance, discusses “past life regressions” and how she
tends “to lean toward the idea that they are real” because she has gone through
many of them with clients. That is about as unscientific a way of declaring
something “real” as it is possible to find, but dedicated readers of Close Your Eyes, Get Free are unlikely
to mind. Instead, they will revel in the sort of encouragement that Smith
provides again and again: “I can only imagine the wonderful benefits you’re
already experiencing from having given your time and energy to learning how to
close your eyes and get free.” Smith certainly does have a vivid, and carefully
directed, imagination.
Imagination and the willingness to go
where it leads you are a must for Smith’s readers, too. Hypnotism is
essentially a guided form of meditation that allows increased focus on specific
matters to the exclusion or diminution of others. Therapists know that the word
“guided” is important and that hypnosis is a method of, in effect, allowing
yourself to take actions that you would like
to take, at some level, but feel you cannot
take, at others. For instance, you would like
to stop smoking, but cannot break
what everyone agrees is a powerfully addictive habit. Hypnosis can help with a
situation like that, but not if you truly enjoy
smoking and have no desire to do what those killjoy scientists and doctors tell
you to do. Hypnosis cannot take you where you are not already predisposed to
go.
As for the “guided” element, Smith
attempts in Close Your Eyes, Get Free
to be the guide that all her readers need, showing them how to take themselves
into a hypnotic state – which, in the context of this book, is essentially a
meditative one in which you tell yourself to accept personal responsibility for
whatever issues you have and then guide yourself to dealing with them. Smith
mixes (or mixes up) matters of hypnosis with various New Age-style
recommendations for life: be kind to everybody; do only what brings you joy;
spend a day loving yourself as much as you love your pet. These life
prescriptions, while well-meaning, are so naïve that they trivialize the
underlying seriousness of a book intended to help readers cope with and
overcome some serious personal issues.
Like many other self-help books, Close Your Eyes, Get Free will be useful
to some readers and useless to others (who will go on to seek out other
self-help books, thus perpetuating the self-help-book cycle). To get what
benefits Smith can provide, it can be helpful to regard self-hypnosis (and
hypnosis in general) as a way to help your mind turn its attention more
strongly toward issues that compromise your quality of life – and thus help
your body (and your mind itself) deal with those matters. On that basis,
Smith’s book is really about harnessing the placebo effect – a very real form
of mind-body connection – and using it to improve everyday existence. That is a
perfectly worthy goal: the placebo effect is the reason that 20% to 30% of the
control group in medical trials generally improves even when not given any sort
of medication or other genuine intervention. But just as the placebo effect
does not work for everybody, even the sort of guided or self-guided placebo
effect that underlies Close Your Eyes,
Get Free will not help all readers. Smith’s ideas are certainly worth a
try, but no one should be disappointed to find them far less useful than she
makes them out to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment