Crossposting from the Hypnosis Technique Exchange . . . responding to a post on Marknosis (see that group for the original post) about a trance client who experienced itchiness all over her muscles and developed visible tremors followed by marked smoothness. The client told the hypnotist, Hugh Cole, that it felt like he was untying knots in her skin and that the blood made her itchy. Hugh reports that it really did look as if small knots were being let go on her face where he could see.
In my understanding, this isn’t really all that uncommon. For some it indicates something deeper going on but for many like your client it is simply a lifetime of stress and tension being stored in the body and muscles and now that tension is finally being released as the person is being guided into the unfamiliar realm of true deep relaxation – at least I would assume that’s what was going on.
long ago when I saw my very first "professional" hypnosis client, he had come to me for business stress as he had a great deal of difficulty "relaxing" where it took some time explaining the difference between really relaxing and thinking you’re relaxing (the hand over finger compliance test and the arm catalepsy demonstration of having the person relax and you hold their arm and note whether it is heavy or not (his was very light) and then have ’em take your arm and you show them the difference between their supposed level of deeply relaxed with some muscle tension still supporting it and then really relaxing where you let go and surrender and trust the other person enough to let them guide you into relaxing so the arm is heavy like a wet rag doll such thing.
Once that got through, I ran an Elman with a deep relaxation patter (similar to the one I use with the free online Deep Relaxation Trigger Response Conditioning (DRTRC) MP3 sets some of you are familiar with, but quite a bit shorter) and while I was running the relaxation patter there we these strange "pops" coming from his body, like small explosions. After the session, he got up from the chair and walked around and the popping just went wild. He said it was like cords snapping in his back but for the first time he could remember in his adult life – at least fifteen years – he did NOT feel pressure and pain in his lower back. He had come to me for relaxation and general stress relief but ended up with a chronic lower back pain released that he had had for years and years which doctors could not bring relief to and for which he’d spent a small fortune with chiropractors with no benefit. Yep, he was the type of fellow who stores stress and tension in the muscles and had been "wound so tight" by his life and work in an extremely competitive business area (upper level management in a large multinational firm). The deep relaxation experience alone was enough to allow him to release that stress by relaxing the tension in the muscles which had been so wound tight for years that there was a physical popping sound when the tension was released and it felt like small explosions in his body as the muscles continued to release. He reported that the session made him feel more deeply relaxed than he had ever felt in his life and that he had not expected the stress relief patter (at the time, I was using something similar to the "garbage can" imagery some folks know from the exchange and my old mp3 thingie (in the free MP3 guided imagery section of my website) – a simple imagine a garbage can, now put all your stress and worry in it, now put the lid on, now imagine a bigass "purple" balloon lifting it away and notice how goooooood you feel as that stress floats away and you are now free to come up with creative solutions for any challenges you may face type thing.
From the sounds of it, the twitchy itchy lady may very well have been of the same general sort of mold. If she found the process helpful, then go with it. IMO, if the twitchy and itchy doesn’t interfere with the session proper, there isn’t really any need to emerge and interview about it before continuing . . . just as in trance "how do you feel right now" or "you feel that? is that goooood?" or have ’em describe the sensations as they go through them as then you won’t just get the twitchy that you observed but you will get the affective description which tells you if it is bothering the client and interfering with the session which needs either interruption or patter to handle the discomfort without interfering with the benefits ("and notice as you go even deeper how your body just lets go and relaxes further while you feel even better and the better you feel the more you relax and the more you relax the better you feel" and such).
All the best,
Brian
STAGE, PERFORMANCE, ENTERTAINMENT HYPNOSIS – June 5-9, 2006
See "training" at http://www.briandavidphillips.com for details!
Brian David Phillips, PhD, CH [phillips@nccu.edu.tw]Certified Hypnotherapist
President, Society of Experiential Trance
Associate Professor, NCCU, Taipei, Taiwan
http://www.briandavidphillips.com
