(Spoiler
Alert: This blog contains details about the story arc of a recent
episode
of The Blacklist. Do not continue reading this article if you have
Ah, the
practice of age-regression has reared its controversial head once again.
When she was a
little girl, FBI Agent Elizabeth Keen’s parents supposedly died in a tragic
house-fire. Fast-forward twenty-five years or so where a scene in NBC’s hit television series The Blacklist, titled Luther
Braxton: Conclusion, has Keen being held hostage while a physician conducts
an age-regression to reveal the location of a mysterious object. Her kidnapper,
Braxton, and even protagonist Raymond “Red” Reddington believes that the woman
knows what happened the night Keen’s home burned down and where the object is
located. However, neither the hypnosis nor the drug cocktail of
muscle-relaxants and truth serums seem to have any effect on her even when she insists that she also
wants to know the truth about what happened that night.
As I explained
in a previous blog titled Age
Regression…And Why I Don’t Use This Technique to Uncover Traumatic Memories,
age regression is a very dangerous procedure in that it can cause unnecessary
psychological trauma for the client. When the subconscious mind “buries” a
memory or “forgets” what happened during a traumatic incident, this is the
SCM’s way of protecting the individual from further distress from thinking
about or even reliving what happened. Repressed memories are common among
people who have experienced psychological/physical/sexual abuse or other
significant traumas such as the one that Agent Keen has experienced.
During the 1970s
and 1980s, age-regression hypnosis was used as a crime-solving technique,
especially to reveal previous sexual abuse which experts at that time believed was
the cause of all psychological problems. Some people theorized that hypnosis
would be a useful technique to rewind a person’s memory of a traumatic incident
to discover what had happened. They held that once such information was
revealed, hypnosis could help the victim to vent out repressed memories to
resolve any feelings about and reactions to the trauma. Eventually, however,
experts realized that this technique did not help either the client (alleged
abuse victim) or lawyers to prosecute their cases because memories are filled
with distortion and amnesia. In addition, when a person is under hypnosis he or
she becomes highly suggestible and very eager to please the hypnotist. A highly
emotional-suggestible client will infer that the hypnotist wants to hear
certain information, and will duly provide those details.
However, I do not use age regression to discover (or
help my client discover) information or memories that the person is not ready
to address. When a terrible trauma has occurred, a person knows how to breathe,
sleep, eat and eliminate. If a memory is too traumatic, the mind creates a
“scab” over that memory to protect the individual from further trauma or
stress. Just like you wouldn’t pull a scab off of an abrasion, I do not use
hypnosis to rip a similar scab off your mind. Again, since there is no way to
prove the veracity of any memories that a person regains while under hypnosis, this
information would not be allowed in a court of law.
By the way,
Agent Keen was unable to recover most of her lost memories in last week’s
episode of The Blacklist. This
outcome did not surprise me, however, since a person will not and cannot be
made to say or do anything in hypnosis that he or she would not say or do while
in an alert and aware state. Her subconscious mind kept fighting to protect her
from painful memories of a past trauma despite every attempt—including Keen’s
stated intent to remember—to bring them up. (There was a brief allusion to the
possibility that she had previously been hypnotized to forget those painful
memories in the first place, but that’s a topic for a different day.)
In conclusion, I
would like to remind you that my first responsibility to my clients is to do no harm. As a certified
hypnotherapist, my role is to help you achieve your vocational or avocational
self-improvement goal. If you should spontaneously remember a traumatic
incident, I will use hypnosis to help your present reality be more powerful
than the past, and refer you to a licensed psychologist or other medical
professional for additional professional support in areas that are outside my
scope of expertise in hypnotherapy.
Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified hypnotherapist based in
Southern California. She graduated with honors from the
Hypnosis Motivation Institute in 2005. For more information about
Calminsense Hypnotherapy® and to set up an appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.
© 2015
