For emotionally disturbed persons, relaxation training techniques are useful primarily as an adjunct to psychotherapy or drug therapy and can be helpful in reducing tension and anxiety. They are ways of treating symptoms; they can help you continue to cope with stressful situations. It is another question whether it is in your best interest to continue in a situation that causes you enough stress that relaxation training becomes a needed crutch. Sometimes it is wiser to change an unsatisfactory situation or to attempt to change your attitudes, values, or behavior than it is to learn skills so that you can keep doing the same stressful and perhaps unsatisfying thing day after day. Relaxation training is a coping strategy. By itself, it cannot resolve the fundamental question: whether it is better to learn how to numb yourself to an unhappy situation, to leave it, or to face the possibility that your stress is caused by inner conflicts and unrealistic attitudes rather than external factors.
If you cannot or do not want to leave a stressful environment, techniques of relaxation training may benefit you. If you feel the main problems are within you, then psychotherapy may be the best alternative. And sometimes, throwing in the towel, deciding in favor of a change of career, marriage, place to live, or way of life may be most therapeutic and personally fulfilling.
It can often be hard to know which alternative is best. Counseling may help. Talking with good friends may help. Letting time pass may help. Usually, ignoring discomfort will not help; stress has a way of compounding and wearing you down. Waiting too long, usually out of fear of facing a need for some form of change, is itself a source of internal stress—of worry and anxiety that will not go away until you do something to put a stop to doing nothing.
HYPNOSIS
An approach to therapy that can have
far-reaching beneficial effects for people with
many different kinds of problems, especially
useful for persons who are strongly motivated
to change and can feel a deep sense of
confidence in the humanity and competence
of their therapist.
Hypnosis is very old. Ancient Egyptian records indicate that priests maintained temples of sleep devoted to healing the ill and troubled. The priests are thought to have used hypnotic induction of sleep and to have offered assurance that patients would get well.
Many centuries later, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) developed a method for inducing a hypnotic trance state (he associated it with sleepwalking) and claimed that therapy often was more effective when patients were in a trance. Hypnosis was later used by Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) at the Paris Hospital of Salpêtrière; Charcot was one of Freud's teachers. During World War II, hypnosis was used to treat soldiers with amnesia, paralysis, and pain. Since then, it has been used frequently by clinical psychologists and psychotherapists.
Much is still not understood about the mental and physiological mechanisms involved in hypnosis. They are difficult to define because they seem to assume many different forms in different people, depending on their personalities and their moods at the time.
Hypnosis probably occurs in daydreaming to some extent; it probably is also involved when a mother lulls her child to sleep or when a customer succumbs to suggestions from a salesperson. We all seem to be—vaguely and to some degree—familiar with the phenomenon, yet we remain, paradoxically, ignorant of its existence.
WHAT HYPNOSIS IS LIKE
For most people, the experience of hypnosis is something of a letdown. They anticipate that they will have an extraordinary experience in a trance state, and yet what actually happens is very similar to their probably familiar experience of drifting into a state of relaxed distraction from time to time when daydreaming. Often what happens when we daydream is that our attention is focused on an object, and we gradually relax and begin to drift into a state of partial awareness. The phone may then ring, but for a moment it can be unclear whether we are just imagining this.