by Celeste Hackett
(Names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of my client. You may find reading Part 1 and Part 2 first, to be helpful in learning more about this case.)
I’ve never been any good at crossword puzzles, I don’t see the point of Sudoku and Rubik’s cubes just frustrate the hell out of me, but give me a person with a puzzling problem, and I just have to figure them out.
So it was that I became filled with a delicious curiosity upon learning about a little girl named Ashley whose Mother said, “no one could help.” This included a pediatric neurologist, who said he had never seen anything like her case, in his years of practice.
This little girl, aged 13, had an issue that was just baffling. The problem being, that she would sleep, literally, for days at a time without waking.
During her sleeping episodes she would however, appear awake for short periods, to cry and thrash around in, what appeared to be, emotional distress. At these times she would keep her eyes closed and would, for the most part, be unresponsive except to nod her head “yes”, or shake her head “no”, when questioned. After about an hour of this, this young girl would go back to sleep for hours again.
This problem was causing her to miss school and to lose weight, because she wouldn’t eat during these times. In addition, her parents were beside themselves with worry.
In part 2 of this article, I described my first visit with Ashley and her family. I actually did a house call, something I had never done before, since the opening of my practice, ‘Family First Hypnosis’, here in Dallas, TX.
During the home visit, I used a method to help her release her feelings, because I thought she may be unconsciously sleeping to avoid emotion. The releasing method caused her to wake and be temporarily functional, but I knew, at the time that I still hadn’t found the cause of the issue, and if I didn’t find and resolve it, the problem would likely come back. For this reason I set up several appointments at my office to finish the work, with the goal of helping her achieve permanent change.
A week after the house call the little sleeping beauty was dropped off at my office by her Mother at the appointed time. Once in my hypnosis chair she let me know she had been doing pretty well since my recent house call with her, and reported no new episodes to date.
I used a hand drop instant induction and a couple of deepening techniques to help her achieve somnambulism. After testing her, to make sure she was deep enough to do what I asked of her, I attempted to uncover the cause of her problem.
Since she had been so emotional, during the crying and thrashing I had witnessed, during the recent house call visit, I assumed, she would have no problem finding and amplifying the feeling that had everything to do with her problem.
I had her lift a finger to let me know when she felt the associated feeling. Next, I instructed her to let the feeling become as strong and as powerful as it had ever been. Once she indicated she was aware of the feeling, I had her follow the feeling back to an earlier time when she felt that way.
In the midst of a lot of “I don’t knows,” and, from time to time, utter silence, plus articulating that she didn’t know what she felt, I did finally get to some scenes from her past.
The first stop on the way back to the beginning, she described a scene, at age 8, where she was sad because her sister had taken her cookie. I chuckled to myself silently. Wouldn’t it be amusing, if a simple cookie was the cause of this seemingly insurmountable problem?
I then followed the sad feeling about the cookie back, in an effort to get to the start of the whole problem. Following it back she wound up at another time in her life with her sister and a cookie. This time her sister had eaten the last cookie in the box. She was aged 5 and feeling rather sad about that.
Who am I to question the wisdom of the subconscious? So, I had her focus on that sad feeling again, still working towards the beginning of the problem, which by all the criteria that a good 5PATH® hypnotist uses to establish such beginnings, appeared to involve her sister again. This time her 6 year old sister was blocking her path through a doorway she wanted to go through. My client was aged 2 and felt, once again, very sad about that.
I squirmed in my chair. I wasn’t feeling it. My spidey senses were pressuring me to bail out and do something else. Abort! Abort! Visions of red blinking lights flashed on the console of my mind alarming me. I narrowed my eyes, put on my crash helmet and defiantly ignored the deafening signals. Hadn’t my spidey senses been wrong before?
I decided to give one hundred percent respect to the cookies and the doorway. After all, I recalled that once upon a time, I had cried inconsolably when my brother took all of my green M&M’s. To a child, stubbing your toe can be the end of the world, especially, if you need a nap.
Through techniques such as Informed Child, where the grown up aspect of the client, along with the hypnotist provides the inner child with insight, my client’s little inner child began to show signs of contentedness. The grown up part of my client (well, more grown up than the younger aspect of herself anyway) told her inner child that “There would always be more cookies”. And from all appearances, that seemed to suffice. I hushed my spidey senses though they continued to grumble.
Next, I suggested that now that she was no longer sad she wouldn’t have to escape from the sadness by sleeping so much. She could now adhere to a normal sleep schedule, eat normally again, feel more confident, and be more at ease and happier. I also asked her to move forward in time (in her imagination) to see how she perceived things would work out. The purpose of this was to give her some “practice” at having a normal sleep cycle while living her day to day life. This technique is a way of checking out how the client perceives things will be in the future. If my client could not sleep normally in her imagined future, then this would indicate more work would most likely need to be done. For moving the client forward in time we used what some call “Future Progression”, what others call “Future Pacing” and which Cal Banyan refers to as “Previvification”.
Once everything checked out, and by that I mean, she said she was sleeping and waking normally in her hallucinated future, I gave her more positive suggestions for her issue and emerged her from hypnosis. She smiled and looked happy enough, she also promised to continue to resolve her feelings, like I taught her earlier at our original visit.
I still felt that we hadn’t really hit the nail on the head for making the needed core change. The next day, before her appointment, I called her Mother to see what the progress had been. Her Mother said she had undergone another episode of non-stop sleeping, although it hadn’t lasted as long as before.
So, it was just as I’d thought! The work done wasn’t the big turning point that every hypnotist hopes for. Luckily, I almost always book 5 sessions, just so I have the time to do thorough work. Now the question was how to proceed?
My little client arrived with her long raven hair pulled back into a pony tail and wearing a pink sweats and thong sandals. Her large brown eyes smiled shyly at me. She said she had been feeling better, but confirmed her Mother’s report about another sleep episode that had lasted almost an entire day and night.
After talking for a few minutes, I asked her if she was ready to do hypnosis with me and she nodded. I proceeded with a hand drop instant induction. In what seemed like no time at all she was in a hypnotic state which was quite deep.
Since I had not felt certain about the regression which we did before, I decided to do something a bit ‘off ‘ my usual hypnosis path. Once my client was in hypnosis, I explained that our deep inner self is very wise and that it always has the answers we need. I also explained that by working together we can access this wisdom while in hypnosis.
Continuing, I asked her to use the unique ability of the subconscious mind to help her out, by taking a moment and asking herself what has been causing these episodes of sleeping and crying. I said, “Simply ask yourself, What has been the cause of your problem? Then allow your inner mind to answer. If there is no answer, ask again and wait again. Continue doing this until you have an answer. When you know, say ‘I know’, so I don’t interrupt you.”
I waited, determined not to interrupt no matter how long it took.
After about 5 minutes she stirred. Then, she cleared her throat and said ever so softly, “Umm, I think I’m lonely.”
In the earlier session we had regressed on sadness, but loneliness and sadness can feel the same to someone unused to naming her feelings. I would have followed the lonely feeling back as soon as I heard this, but previously, she went to a lot of “I don’t knows” in the last regression, and often she couldn’t articulate what she was feeling, so I decided to do a time/date regression, to being a new born baby in an effort to see if she felt “not lonely” (sometimes clients have called the opposite of lonely, “connected”, “included”, “complete” or “whole”) there.
I asked her to be the newborn and I asked her if she felt connected, secure, and/or the opposite of lonely. She looked very serious and a bit surprised, as she said, quietly, “No, I don’t”.
I sensed we were really on to something meaningful. I guess, like a detective, I get that sixth sense awareness when doing this type of work. I thought that if I could get her to the stage before she felt lonely, and get her feeling “connected” or “Whole” (whatever NOT being lonely felt like to her) and bring that better feeling forward into her present day, (along with helping her gain new insights to neutralize the loneliness), she may just have the changes we were looking for. Since, at the age of newborn she wasn’t feeling good yet, this meant only one thing, we’d have to regress her to back to inside the womb.
When I said, “At the count of 1 you will be 8 months along inside your Mom. Here we go, 3….2….1…..and you are eight months old inside your Mom before birth now” For a moment she looked incredulous, a ripple of thought expressed itself over her face, a thought, like, “Yeah, right,” and along with it she gave a snort of a laugh, but just as suddenly she became silent and serious, indicating she was totally there in the womb.
Her eyes moved around under her eyelids in an effort to absorb more of the womb’s environment. A wave of goose bumps moved across my arm as I realized this was a trip to a place she’d likely never go to again. I asked her if she felt better here, “Complete or connected, the opposite of lonely” and she said, “This is so weird, but no, I don’t.”
Just like before, this meant we needed to go back to an even earlier time. We had to get “before” this lonely feeling so she could know, could feel, the truth about herself, which is the same truth for all of us. The truth being that we are whole, and complete in and unto ourselves.
At our core we all know that we are whole, and we are not in the least bit lonely. Everything else is a sort of grafted idea accompanied by an uncomfortable feeling, the feeling of separateness, loneliness, lacking, or needing what you perceive you don’t have: namely love and connection. The other erroneous idea, which causes countless problems, is that you have to get that missing love and connection from a source, outside of yourself.
Regressing her again, I took her to being 3 months along before birth inside her Mom and she said the same thing, that she still felt that familiar lonely feeling and it seemed she felt it as intensely as ever.
Watching her expression, though, her color, her body language and listening to her tone of voice, I was delighted at the messages from my own inner compass that this regression would be far more impactful than the one before. Excitement, that I did my best to keep in check, began to bubble inside me. Just like a dog sniffing out a bone, in my hypnosis work the closer my client gets to the source of their problem, the more my heart begins to leap in anticipation of the prize.
Finally, I took her to an age that would mean the very beginning of life. I had her become just one second old. “And now you are just conceived, a little spark of life. Be there fully as that little one who is just barely here inside your mother.”
I watched intently at what I can only describe as pure bliss rose, like the sun, over her entire countenance, and along with it a most genuine and beautiful smile. From the corner of her right eye a tear appeared and caught the light from the window before sliding down her tender cheek. I asked her, “Now how do you feel?” and she responded using the vocabulary of a 13 year old with, “Really good”.
After a moment or two I encouraged her with, “Enjoy it”. After a few more moments, I suggested to her, “This is the real you,” and I felt my own eyes become a bit wet at having the privilege to share this moment with her.
“Now tell me, now that you are feeling really good, what are you no longer feeling?”
“Lonely, and sad,” she answered.
“Isn’t that nice? What do you feel if not lonely and sad then?”
“Peaceful, warm.” She paused, “I’m happy.”
“Good. How would you like to continue feeling this way?”
“I would.”
Since my client believed in God, I talked to the Little One a bit about the Creator loving her, and I asked her to become aware of that love and if she could feel it. She said she could. I told her when she wanted to feel loved all she had to do was tune into it like she was doing right now. In addition, I told her she was made whole and complete, complete with God’s love and that she could always feel this way even when Mom and Dad were busy, even when her friends are unkind, or even when people seemed detached or distant. I let her know, she would always have the company of this love.
I also told her she had ‘herself’ to support her too, and I had that self, the Grown up aspect of her, talk to this younger aspect of her (the Little One) telling her she loved her and would always be there for her and that she would never be alone.
When I asked her how that made her feel she replied, “Wonderful.” I then had her take these good feelings into scenes in her life, after birth, but before the present day, times when others had seemed uncaring, unkind or indifferent, and I asked her to notice how good she felt when going through them again with this new knowledge of being whole and complete. I had her tell me about what was happening at those times and then to tell me how she felt with her new wisdom and insight.
Before having her go through the scenes, I also had the grown up part of her inform her of anything the Little One might benefit from knowing before she went through the scenes, when others were distant or unkind. I had Grown Up tell her these things before the Little One went through each scene, such as her friend having had a bad day and that the way they were acting was not personal, or that her parents were just busy and would be available at a later time. The insight that Grown Up gave her helped her keep her good feelings throughout each scene.
Not so surprisingly, none of the scenes she went to were about cookies. One event she went to was a time when her parents had ignored her. As she went through it this time around she reported that she felt happy and more understanding. I had her pass that feeling on to the grown up part of her and had her tell her, “Grown Up, as I change you change, because I am you. And because of this you’re going to feel better and you’ll never have to sleep to escape from loneliness or sadness again because those old feelings are now gone.”
I asked the grown up part of her, “How does that make you feel?”
She smiled and said, “Much better.”
After I gave her a few more positive suggestions regarding how this session would positively affect her life, filling her with confidence, happiness and self love, I emerged my little client, who now seemed to have a soft radiant glow about her. In fact, observing her, it appeared she had gone from “sleeping beauty” to a more beautiful “waking beauty”.
Before she walked out of my office door, she spontaneously turned and threw her arms around me, hugging me, then turning she ran out to her Mother, who was waiting in the car outside.
When I saw my client over the next two sessions she reported having no more sleep episodes. In these last two sessions we worked on forgiveness of others and forgiveness of herself. Doing this also helped undo any potential self sabotage that might happen. For the sake of time I’ll just say that these sessions also went very well.
A month after the last session I called to check on her and she had not had any more sleeping problems and her mother happily reported she appeared normal. A year later, I called again and her mother said her daughter was still sleeping and eating normally and was making excellent grades. She did mention that the girl had been moody one day and when she checked on her, she was reading the little booklet I gave her on feelings. Later, she checked on her again and found her to be much happier as she worked on a school art project.
