Gordon has been hearing voices in his head for many weeks – voices which tell him – ‘you are going to die’.
Gordon answers this voice in his head – he says ‘No I am not – I am perfectly alright’. But the voice isn’t reassured – it keeps repeating itself and Gordon is increasingly frustrated and frightened.
He phoned me to make an appointment for hypnosis; he told me that two deaths had recently occurred in his family, he himself had just recovered from his second heart attack; his wife had recently had a stroke and was now suffering from dementia. Gordon said that he had received no help from his GP or from the Social Services and does not know where to turn.
Sometime we are presented with challenging cases, but – as most Hypnotherapists must feel – you just want to help people. Sometimes in severe cases such as these, miracles do seem to happen – when they don’t we might justify it by not charging for the session or giving a discount (we have our time to account for).
It would be nice to be able to say that I had an affinity with Gordon when he walked through the door – which often happens – but I found him difficult to communicate with.
My first hurdle (and this has been more than one in the past which overcome with subsequent sessions) was to gain eye contact.
The next was to have a two way conversation with him. To be fair Gordon was so wrapped up in his own thoughts and feelings that he probably found it extremely difficult to relate to another human being. He was an old man – only 78 in physical age but more like 98 in his mental age.
This isn’t a success story. I want new Hypnotherapists to realize that with the best intentions in the world you cannot succeed with everyone. Yes the failures are disheartening – but the positive results that we so often see can elevate us to much greater heights.
My session with Gordon seemed to be going quite well in the beginning – until he opened his eyes and started shaking his head – clearly negative thoughts and doubts were running through his mind.
I attempted to redress this – explaining his reaction – which he appeared to accept for a while – until we had no choice but to abandon the session.
So – Gordon had decided that this path wasn’t going to take him anywhere – I had no choice but to go with him – but I could sense the resistance and figured that I had in some way lost his confidence but in my last attempt to win him over I gave him a CD (for free) and asked him to listen to it for a few days.
A lot more went into the session than I have already mentioned but, feeling quite disheartened because I had failed to help my client, I eventually went to bed – only to awaken at about 7 a.m. the next morning by a telephone call from Gordon telling me that for the first time in several weeks he had not a single thought about dying.
For the next 5 days I received identical calls – no thoughts of dying in his head – to which I said – good – you no longer have these thoughts – isn’t this what you wanted to achieve?
But Gordon was so overwhelmed by the responsibility of looking after his wife that he felt unable to cope with his life.
Hypnotherapy did seem to have helped him with the morbid thoughts, however what he really needed was ongoing support from external sources and this was just not available for him.
Well, we can’t win them all. The message behind this post is that when (as you invariably will) fail to help someone then it does not imply that you are a failure – it could be that you are too early (or too late) the timing wasn’t right or it wasn’t meant to be.
I hope that by admitting to my failures will help other Hypnotherapists to accept that this is absolutely normal –if we could only manage to succeed every time then there would be no need whatsoever for other approaches.