Today I’d like to consider memory. Because there are a lot of myths that surround hypnosis and memory. The most prevalent is that the brain records everything perfectly, and hypnosis can help us access long forgotten recordings.
And whilst it may be true that hypnosis can help us recall things to some extent, the idea that we’re flawlessly recording all our experiences is, sadly, an exaggeration. Our memories are a hodge-podge, and all memory, whether true or false, is an act of imagination. When you are remembering something, you are, sort of by definition, imagining it (after all it’s an event that isn’t actually happening in the present).
Furthermore, the act of remembering actually helps to degrade the original memory. Each time we recall a memory it becomes distorted; we begin recalling our experience of remembering, as much as the actual event. The best way to preserve a memory may, ironically, be to try not to think about it too much.
As such it becomes very important to treat all ‘recovered’ memories extremely lightly. Most of these things won’t be independently verifiable, and as such we need to be open to the possibility that any recovered memories, no matter how genuine they may feel, could have been summoned and imagined at the point of hypnosis.
There are some interesting experiments that toy with this idea of implanting false memories. One particularly famous study involved embedding a false memory of a ride in a hot air balloon, that resulted in 50% of the participants either remembering, or partially remembering, something that never happened. You can read more about it here.
I believe the same false memory implantations arehappening when we regress and discover past lives, or in utero memories, although that may be a subject for a later post.
This is not to say that hypnosis to find past memories is useless, or even past life regression for that matter (although it’s not something I generally favour). It can be extremely therapeutic to gain closure or understanding if you are comfortable with the notion that your closure and understanding might be based in imagination more than reality. We ask clients to imagine solutions all the time. And sometimes we will knowingly help create an ‘alternative past’ in order to help people move past certain challenges. Maybe in trance with we give people the opportunity to say goodbye to a loved one; or we can allow clients to remonstrate with people who wronged them, even if none of these things ever actually occurred. In trance, it doesn’t necessarily have to make sense in order to be helpful.
Memories should be treasured, but treated lightly and with care, especially if they are recalled through a hypnotic process. I’ll be making a video of my own soon playing with false memory, so keep an eye out for that.
Until next time, and as always, if you would like to explore more, or have an issue that you would like some counselling and hypnosis for, you can contact me here.
