While the Hill Alien Abduction case is an “American” case involving hypnotic regression uncovering an alien abduction, there have recently been a number of media cases here in Taiwan where someone has been doing similar work involving “spirit possession” and the like. The principles of good hypnotic session control should be in place at all times, regardless of the process we use.

Partial cross-posting from . . . Hypnosis Technique Exchange . . .

Betty Hill, often called the “grandmother of UFOlogy”, passed away of cancer.

The Hill case will live on for quite some time, even though Betty has now passed on . . . we may never know for certain what happened to the Hills that fateful night, but their impact will be known and felt for years to come.

The Hill material is interesting . . . however, there is a lot of alien abduction regression going on that is obviously more out of expectation than out of experience. If you go to a specialist in alien abductions to find your answers, what sort of answers do you think you’ll find? Take a look at Carl Jung’s treatise on UFO phenomena . . . written much earlier than the Hill experience. There are certain anxieties that can be expressed or projected as otherworldly. This doesn’t mean that aliens don’t exist or that they aren’t among us . . . they may very well be . . . but . . . I would strongly suggest that we take such “evidence” with a bucket of salt. The thing about hypnotic testimony or any type, it really needs to be as clean an experience as possible to get to the truth but even then it’s still a subjective truth, there is no such thing as pure objective memory . . . so it also needs to be verified via other external evidence, evidence that the hypnotic testimony may lead us to, but which stands up to strong scrutiny on its own.

It’s a whole lot of IMPORTANT that when folks are doing ANY sort of regression work – standard regression-to-cause therapy, child abuse recovery, satanic ritualistic abuse, past life regression, alien abduction regression, faerie kidnapping experience recovery, or the new vogue of time traveller abductions – or even ANY sort of trancework with or without the trance – the old trend towards discovering MPD or DID in every third person is an example of this and the current trend towards SRT and DFE work is filled with this sort of problematic approach to therapy – that folks remember and keep always aware of the need to GUIDE the experience and not LEAD. Any communication can taint meaning and belief, so if you want to have evidence, it has to come from elsewhere. Heck, when we were young and foolish, my elder brother used to get a kick out of altering folks’ perceptions of reality, an example of which was convincing a rather significant number of people that Jimmy Carter could neither read or write or that Richard Nixon was a woman . . . just because he could do it . . . no, he wasn’t a hypnotist or even an NLPer, he was just a rather gifted liar. Many times folks would come to the conclusion on their own and were absolutely certain they had done so based upon real hard evidence when really it was just a simple manipulation of a series of questions that would lead one to the conclusion. In hypnosis, with suggestibility levels higher and imaginative involvement way up, it’s even easier.

If you go into an experience LOOKING for answers that fit the puzzle you’re playing with, the pieces will often fit rather well. However, you may end up with a solved puzzle that has NOTHING to do with the actual experience. If you’re looking for aliens, that’s what you’ll find. If you’re looking for DFEs, that’s what you’ll find. If you’re looking for multiple personalities, that’s what you’ll find. So . . . stop looking for anything and just let the experience unfold. Don’t ask leading questions and make damned certain that your “non-leading” questions are clean of suggested response patterns.

There are some very very good descriptions of this and guidance on how to avoid it in Rapid Cognitive Therapy by Geroges Philips and Terence Watts. The example case of the girl playing with her father’s “stick” is very well described and really drives the idea home.

One reason the Hills never changed their testimony . . . even in hypnosis . . . was because the hypnosis was reinforcing the belief in the testimony. Sure, maybe they really were kidnapped by aliens . . . there really is a possibility that this happens. However, the hypnosis sessions were not clean of suggestion.

Dr. Herbert Spiegel did sessions with the woman who was the “real” person behind the character of “Sybil” famous for multiple personality disorder when her regular therapist was out of town. He had some very clear criticism of the implication of what he found in her protocol.

I’ve seen a number of videos of sessions conducted by “respected experts” in forensic or regression hypnosis that were setup as ideal example approaches but when you watch the realtionship with the subject and listen to the language used, you can very clearly see that there is more leading in the experience than guiding. Heck, sometimes the situation itself, the formal occassion of a session – the circumstance of who and what and how things are being investigated and what has been said just in the hallway leading up to the session room – can color results to a degree that makes them all but useless. One of my favorites . . . spoken right before the “formal induction” to a rather nervous young woman who had been experiencing headaches . . . “Don’t worry. We won’t be looking for any specific evil entities that have been causing you’re headaches, we’ll just deal with them when they pop up. Some folks only have a few attached entities, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens in your case.” !!!??!! Gee, I’ll bet you can’t guess what the session revealed was causing her headaches? Hmmmm. Doh!

Keep it simple, keep it clean, keep it straightforward . . . GUIDE by keeping your mouth shut as much as possible and don’t LEAD. If you can’t verify it with real external evidence, then be wary of treating it as anything but perception or metaphor.

In my opinion.

All the best,
Brian