Part 1: Deane’s Story: Trauma, Chronic Pain, and Losing Control

[00:00:01] Hey y'all, this is part one of a two-part episode.

[00:00:36] Join us as we break the stigma and build a community of understanding and compassion. Tune in and let's start talking about the shit that goes on in our heads. Three, two, one. Welcome back to another episode of Sh!t That Goes On In Our Heads. I'm here with the awesome Dirty Skittles and today we have an incredible guest, Dean. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome. Thank you. I'm very glad to be here.

[00:01:04] Yay! And I'm so excited to learn about you, Dean. Like, where do we begin? Who is Dean today? Today I'm somebody very different than I was 20 years ago. I can tell you that much. Well, I guess the first thing to know about me is that I'm a hypnotherapist. I live in Washington State. I see people all over the place through the internet and also here in person in my offices. My journey with hypnosis started over 25 years ago.

[00:01:33] I was in a pretty serious car accident and I was left with chronic neck pain. You know, back then, the plan for chronic pain was opioids. I did that for a couple years. It was pretty disastrous for my life. When I moved away from that model, I was left with severe chronic pain. I describe it like a pain, like a high-pitched sound at the base of my skull all the time.

[00:02:00] And I would sometimes go numb from the neck down and my hands wouldn't work. I'd fall down, get sick. And it was really terrifying because prior to that, I had been a professional artist for 35 years. Just before that accident, I was in a Swiss watchmaking school learning to become a certified watchmaker because I needed to make more money for my family. And it was like, had that accident and everything was gone.

[00:02:27] And I was so just angry, upset, disappointed. And when I moved away from the opioid model, I really didn't see a point in continuing with my life. I did not see any way forward for me. I couldn't really work with my hands like I had. I was very depressed and I just, I had life insurance.

[00:02:55] I kept this voice in my head was always saying, you know, you're worth more dead than alive. And that was all part of the story from way before I had the accident. And so I really struggled and then in an effort to find something to do for my neck, I was looking on the early internet and I happened to read an article about them doing neck surgeries on people using only hypnosis and no other kind of anesthetic.

[00:03:22] And I thought, holy shit, that sounds like a glimmer of hope. And that was all I needed. At the time I lived in Seattle and I called around to the hypnotists in my area. And I kept hearing the same thing. You've got to pay for like five or six sessions up front. It's a few thousand dollars. I couldn't afford to do that. And I had learned enough to know that all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis.

[00:03:49] It's not something that somebody does to you or puts on you. It's internal. It's about allowing yourself to be guided to that state. But because of that, I ended up going to the library and getting both books they had about hypnosis and giving it a try myself. And it took me about four months of really reading and practicing every day to start to see a reduction in the pain itself.

[00:04:18] So that's where the journey began. What I learned though was pain management with hypnosis is actually, it's pretty straightforward. But there was all this emotional stuff and patterns from the past and ways that I saw myself and saw the world. And all of that shit that goes on in our heads is part of the subconscious mind.

[00:04:43] And the way that the mind works, consciously, you can't just reach into the subconscious mind and change shit. It doesn't work that way. So, but when you're in these hypnotic states, you're able to access both the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. And I could go into the technical parts of that more if you want. It is super fascinating. I'm a little biased.

[00:05:10] But in any case, I started to focus on, you know, if I noticed that if I got angry or upset, which I did a lot back then, then that's when I had the most pain. That's when I had the tension and the tightness that caused the more severe symptoms of numbness, vomiting and all that kind of stuff. So, but how do you stop being angry all the time when you feel like the world sucks? We get to do this today. We do.

[00:05:39] We get to do this and we're fortunate. I love your story and I love your journey and like how you went from like all that hell to where you are now. It is a beautiful journey.

[00:06:05] You know, I feel when I look back on my life and this sounds crazy to say, but I'm glad I had that accident because my life up to that point was just one big ball of anger and frustration. I blew up relationships time and time again. And I was desperately unhappy with myself, but I was very good at masking that.

[00:06:32] So everybody who knew me seemed to like me, but I didn't know that. I was always beating myself up and trying to find ways to just stay away from people, which is really funny because if I work now, every day I sit with many people, one after the other.

[00:06:53] And we have these really intense, beautiful conversations about the patterns that they have and why those patterns might be there and what can we do about it? Hmm. Can I ask you more about the hypnotherapy for your pain? Sure. How does it work? Like when you went to it originally, did you like, is it something you have to work on every single day?

[00:07:21] That's a great question. So every morning when I wake up, I'm aware that there's pain. I close my eyes, I take a deep breath and I create what I call a pain patch. Really, I wouldn't recommend for any of my clients you call it that because we try to avoid words like pain and anxiety because they're open at the wrong end. Once you feel anxious, what's your fear? I'm going to become more anxious. Once you have pain, your fear is I'll have more pain.

[00:07:49] So I prefer for them, I say, use the word discomfort or uncomfortable because comfort is right there in the word. But I've been doing this before I knew that. So I still call it a pain patch, but I create this patch. It's like kind of a beautiful, cool blue green color. And it goes right there at the base of my neck. I know that it's going to be comfortable and I expect that it's just going to be comfortable for the rest of the day.

[00:08:17] It took a long time for me to figure out how to do that. But that's what I teach my clients. And what's really amazing is I've had people come in with an eight out of 10 on the pain scale, physical pain, chronic pain. It's got to be chronic and diagnosed for me to work with it. But eight or so out of 10, sometimes more. And in one session, that person can bring it down to like a .25.

[00:08:47] Then they need to practice with the recording that we make for them in that session. Every day, practice with it. It's about an hour. And they retrain the brain using the hypnosis. And I think maybe this is the time for me to jump in and talk about what hypnosis is and isn't because there's a lot of misinformation. In fact, part of my mission with Summit, my practice here is I have very long consultations with people, long sessions.

[00:09:17] And I'm always looking for opportunities to talk about hypnosis because I see it as potentially a game changing modality. But people need to understand what it really is, how it really works, why it works, and be demystified. You know, most people who come to see me, they saw something at the fair or they saw like Get Out or some movie where people are using hypnosis. And it's always a little bit nefarious, right?

[00:09:46] The truth is, I can't make anybody do anything that they don't want to do. Most of the clients I see are referrals from doctors and therapists, people like that. So they're very motivated and invested in getting the kind of outcomes that they want. So that makes it easier for me.

[00:10:07] But the subconscious mind is all of the patterns, beliefs, behaviors, ways of thinking and being and doing that make you the you that you seem to be today. The conscious mind, for my purposes, our purposes here, is really just the lens that tells the subconscious mind, this is what's happening. What do we got? What do we go to? How do we handle when this kind of a thing happens? Kind of in between the conscious and the subconscious.

[00:10:36] That's the way I describe it because it's very easy to think about it this way. There's another part of the mind that's really important to understand for hypnosis. It's called the critical faculty of the mind. The critical faculty of the mind is like a guard between the conscious and the subconscious. And it's there to keep you from changing your patterns. It's there to keep other people from easily changing your patterns because as far as your subconscious mind knows, you've got some fantastic patterns here. That's based on the fact that you're still alive.

[00:11:06] So it's an extremely low bar. It doesn't account for quality of life or, you know, feeling great all the time or anything like that. It's, am I alive? Can I do the things that on the hierarchy of needs that we do when we're alive? Okay, that's good. Most of these patterns though, begin in childhood. We are not born with this critical faculty of the mind in place.

[00:11:32] It arrives somewhere around seven to ten as we grow up. At around seven to ten years of age, you've been around long enough. You've been in your tribe, your group long enough that you've got some basic understanding enough that we can start closing this off now so that you don't change some of those early things. In fact, most of these base patterns are already in place by the time you're around seven years old.

[00:12:00] And now this guardian part of the mind is in the way and it only lets information through that agrees with what you already think, feel, and believe. So if you're a person like me who grew up with a lot of abuse, physical, sexual, emotional abuse, I grew up feeling unsafe all the time. If you feel unsafe all the time, the correct response is be anxious, be on edge. That's what you do when you're not safe.

[00:12:31] I work with trauma, early childhood trauma and PTSD primarily. And when you have those kinds of experiences where you're not safe or you're not secure, I call it like shifting sands, there's nowhere I can ever put my feet that feels solid, you're going to be anxious. Because that's the right response.

[00:12:52] But if that's your everyday life from a very early stage, then you learn that life is not safe. And I might never be safe, so what do I do? I just keep my guard up all the time. That's exhausting. We're not designed to be that way. And it causes all kinds of downstream problems. Hypnotic states are natural states. We go through hypnotic states every single day.

[00:13:22] We just don't call them hypnotic states when we encounter them in our day-to-day life. Daydreaming. That's a really profound hypnotic state where, you know, you go into a daydream and you feel at the end of it. You don't notice when you shift in, but you notice when it's over, you kind of come back to the room and you think, oh, wow, I hope I'm not drooling. I hope nobody was looking at me.

[00:13:43] But what's happening in that moment is the conscious mind is downloading data, information into the subconscious mind. It can't do that with that guard in the way, not very effectively. And so you go into this state, that guard goes offline. At the very simplest way to describe hypnosis, as I do it here, therapeutic hypnosis, it's having therapeutic conversations when that guardian part of the mind is out of the way.

[00:14:13] What's unique and beautiful about that is we have access to all of that stuff that you know consciously. My preference is to work with people who have done at least some therapy. I'm usually part of a team of a therapist and a counselor or somebody like that. They do that for a while. With trauma in particular, most people who have had a lot of trauma in their lives, they know that talking about it is helpful, but the symptoms remain.

[00:14:41] The anxiety, those kind of responses of, you know, maybe emotional eating or drinking or, you know, all those kinds of things that we found to cope are still there. That's because the root of it is in the subconscious mind and you can't really get to it because it's on the other side of this wall, the critical faculty of the mind. So when you're in hypnosis and that wall is out of the way I practice is, I'm a teacher, I'm a guide and I'm a coach.

[00:15:10] I want to teach you about your hypnosis, how you go into it, what it feels like. I want to, once you've done that, guide you through some therapeutic exercises in my office. And then I want to coach you on how you can use your hypnosis in your day-to-day life to shift or change in the moment how you're feeling.

[00:15:34] And I'd be happy to go into all of how that really works because it's, that's the part that I've been working on and developing here in my practice because of the way I got into it. I don't want, I don't like the, you know, sometimes there can be a little bit of the gatekeeping with hypnosis because it feels cool to be the hypnotist, right? People look at you and they think you have some kind of power or something. It is cool.

[00:16:03] I was loathe to say, but that's the problem. I don't, I can't be that cool guy anyway. So let's just blow it all up. And from the very first time I meet people, I want them to know that I'm not doing anything to you. It's a agreed upon relationship. It's mutual. As I said, I worked as an artist for 35 years by myself. What I love about hypnosis is it's very creative, but we're co-creating. But what are we co-creating?

[00:16:32] We're co-creating a version of you that is less reactive because you've changed some things about those patterns. The patterns are a problem for most people because they've changed monumental pieces of their life. They've created a life of safety and security and peace, but their body doesn't catch up with it.

[00:16:58] Your body can't catch up with it because the subconscious mind is also the autonomic nervous system. It's the emotional center of the mind. So your emotions, if they can't be resolved in your subconscious mind, the way it communicates is it gives you a feeling in the body. And that feeling is your subconscious mind's way of saying, hey, there's something going on. I want you to pay attention to it. Subconscious mind doesn't speak plain English. It speaks in symbols and metaphors and things like that.

[00:17:27] That is the creative, expansive part of our mind. So the autonomic nervous system, though, that's where pain, which I know was your original question. This is a long, circuitous route to get to the end. It's okay. The subconscious mind is where those responses are. And so we also can't just decide to not feel pain or not be anxious. If we could, we'd all be probably a lot happier.

[00:17:57] So other times when you have hypnosis in your day-to-day life are driving the car. That's a very unique situation because that's an induced state of hypnosis. Induced meaning you're doing something that very readily brings you into hypnotic states. When you're driving the car, there's too much information for your brain to process. Oh, there's a telephone pole. There's a stoplight. There's a pedestrian, a car, a red car, a green car, a blue car.

[00:18:24] So you shift into this kind of neutral state where you're taking it all in. And if there's something that's really important, like a ball rolling in front of the car, I'm going to focus in on that right away. Your body is doing something it knows how to do. It's driving the car. If you've been driving long enough, you don't have to think five degrees this way, eight degrees that way, 32 degrees on the pedal. It's muscle memory.

[00:18:50] Those two things working together very readily bring you into a hypnotic state, a light hypnotic state. Light hypnotic states are called hypnoidal states. But when you're in a light hypnotic state, you're more suggestible than at other times. And one of the suggestions that I like to give people when they're in those light hypnotic states is you can understand how to go deeper. Deeper is a great word in that situation because what the heck does that mean?

[00:19:17] When we're hearing it consciously, we're thinking, oh, that's a kind of a weird thing to say. But subconsciously, the response is it's like a furthering of everything I'm currently experiencing. It's really cool. So before you fall asleep, you pass through the hypnagogic state. When you wake up, you're in the hypnopropic state. So all of that is just so we're all on the same page that I don't do hypnosis to people.

[00:19:42] When people come to see me, usually, like I say, their doctor or therapist or somebody has sent them in, and they think, I've got to go get some of that guy's hypnosis because my doctor said he's really good or whatever. And then when they come in, I have to tell them, well, it's not my hypnosis. It's your hypnosis. Everybody, though, wants the same thing. They want a quiet mind in the moments when they know they wouldn't have had a quiet mind. Hypnosis is an amazing tool. Depend on me for that.

[00:20:09] The way I work is I want to teach you and coach you how you can go in and use these hypnotic states to change things in the moment. And I want to really empower people with the hypnosis, which is the thing that changed my life. And every day I get to do that with people now. And I just, I love it. I love it so much.

[00:20:35] Okay, so now I have a question for you. Okay. So I've had a couple of different hypnosis sessions. And in both cases, they didn't really work for me. And it wasn't, and believe me, I would listen to the recordings like every day.

[00:21:03] You know, when the certain times they told me to do it. But I also think that it was like the delivery method, maybe, or the voice that didn't resonate with me. I mean, because I'm willing to try. You know, I'm always looking for different ways to help me with my arthritis. Oh. And just stress and things like that. And I was wondering, have you had other patients that have run into that where, I mean, they really want it?

[00:21:32] Well, I would say it's kind of situational for me. Okay. So I certainly, I don't see very many smokers in my work. Because that's not really what I'm known for. But all hypnotists tend to be something of a generalist. So I have had big smokers who it just didn't work for them for whatever reason. Whenever I work with anybody on the first session, I make a recording. And if it doesn't work, try it again in a month. You know, try it again a month after that.

[00:22:01] But it's probably just a timing thing for something like that. With the other things, I really don't see people have no results. I want to know what 100% success would look like. We want together, we want to have that idea of G-Rex in our mind before we start as the guiding star for everything that we do.

[00:22:27] That way, if we got 75%, that would still be a remarkable change in your life. Hell, if we got 25%, that would be something that you could then build on. And so I'm always sort of, I'm very excited. I mean, I know this could be totally life-changing for people. But I also don't want to oversell it out of the gate.

[00:22:50] One of the things about hypnosis is, especially pain management, you have to start with what the person believes is possible. So the first thing that I'll do with people when they come in for a consultation, on my consultations I always do, just, I say the words, it's called the induction, but I like to think of it as an invitation. Induction, induction's kind of the old-fashioned word, but this invitation to hypnosis with me.

[00:23:17] And I'll say these words, my only tool are my words and my voice and my clients' imaginations. If they have imagination, I have some people who have aphantasia and can't really visualize, but that's part of what we're doing in the first session is, let's understand what this experience is for you so that I know how to work with you and you know what to expect from me.

[00:23:39] But for many people, just going into that first trance allows them some relief. When they leave the office, it might not be 100% relief. In fact, I'm surprised in the few times when it is 100% relief, and that might last for a couple of hours or a day, maybe two days, I've heard that. That's undirected, but that person now has a baseline.

[00:24:07] When they come back for the full session, I'll say, well, how long did it last time you came in? If it lasted two hours, okay. So we could both agree that you, with just the power of your mind, can be comfortable for about two hours. That's where we start. When I'm working with that person, I leave the door open that if you could be comfortable for two hours and 15 minutes.

[00:24:37] And if you can be comfortable for two hours and 15 minutes, maybe in a week or so, it's going to be three hours. I'm not telling them what's going to happen. My approach is a very, it's called permissive approach. So the old-fashioned hypnotist says, G-Rex, you will not feel any pain for the next, you know, four hours. You will be comfortable. You will be calm. You will not have anxiety. Nobody likes that shit anymore.

[00:25:06] We're in a very different way. And so the permissive approach, though, says your subconscious mind will find its own way to make you uniquely comfortable. Once it's found its way to make you comfortable, now it's possible that comfort can last longer and longer with practice. Because as we all know, repetition is the mother of learning. The more you practice, the more readily it becomes the reality.

[00:25:35] That's kind of how I would structure that if I were talking to someone like you in a hypnotic state. I see lots of people who have been to other hypnotists and not had the success. There's nothing, you know, there's nothing special about me, I don't think. It's just, I guess some of it is this journey of how I got into it, you know.

[00:25:59] I know what it feels like to be absolutely desperate for any little shred of hope and help. And, you know, maybe being kicked down into the gutter and stomped on by life a little bit, it's made the way I work with my people a little bit different, maybe, than others, perhaps. But, yeah, I've really come to expect that every person who comes in is going to get some positive benefit from the session.

[00:26:29] I don't make people pay for packages of sessions. I expect that we'll see results every time we sit together. If that's true and you see even a 25% improvement, the likelihood is you're going to come back and see me because you see it works. And that door is open to better and better things. The way I like to work with people is we do our session,

[00:26:54] and then somewhere three to five days or so after that first session, I'm going to shoot you a text. I'm going to ask you what you're noticing. I give people a lot of tools, you know, to manage anxiety, because anxiety is by far the biggest issue that I work with. Some of the downstream responses, physical responses to anxiety like IBS, I've worked with that quite a bit.

[00:27:20] But those responses, there are ways that you can shift those in the moment. And I'm happy to talk about that because that gets right into really the beating heart of what I do and how I do it and how I train my students here to do it out in the world. Because I feel like one of the things that I think is really empowering

[00:27:46] about the way that we work here is I don't do regressions with people into trauma. Never. There's a whole variety of reasons why that I would be happy to go into. But the long and short of it is there's no, I have found that there isn't really the therapeutic value in taking a person into the moment of severe trauma and having them relive it in the chair. And then when it's over, say, you're okay.

[00:28:16] You survived that. Good for you. I start from this response that you still have today. I would call that the symptom. You've got the symptom. Many people come in and they say, well, I didn't really have any trauma. Maybe my dad was an alcoholic and sometimes he would get really mad and scream and yell, but he never actually hit me or anything. Well, yeah, but that's still pretty traumatic, right?

[00:28:45] You're going to have a response to that as a child because children have no autonomy, no power. They're completely dependent on these people around them. And if they see the people around them, you know, freaking out, throwing things, you know, hurting people or whatever, it's scary. And this idea is in your mind that even when it's calm, things can flip on a dime.

[00:29:13] In my career as an artist, you know, in my past life, the thing that I was always really good at was sculpting faces that had a lot of expression. And I was so proud of that. And then I realized that, well, I only have that ability because recognizing tiny, minute facial change was how I saved myself and my little sister countless times. I learned that, you know, when my grandfather's eyelid would twitch,

[00:29:42] you better get the fuck out of there because things are going to go apeshit any minute now. Mm-hmm. So, and having that ability when you're working with clay is pretty handy. But it's still, I recognize now, part of that trauma. It just, that's how it surfaces. Not every trauma response is something that makes us uncomfortable in the moment. And I think it's sort of strange when I look at it now

[00:30:10] and I think, what a weird way for that to pop up. You know, if I didn't work with clay and sculpt, I might not ever have noticed that, but there it is, frozen in time. So, back to working with pain and hypnosis, I guess. So, when somebody is doing hypnosis or having a hypnotic experience, that pain receptor part of the mind,

[00:30:36] we've all had this experience of finding a big bruise on our leg and you think, well, how did that get there? Cut on your arm and it's bleeding. What the heck? Certainly, that triggered the pain receptors of your body, but you didn't notice it because you were focused on something else. When we have chronic pain, there's a whole host of other emotional elements that are woven into the experience of pain for us.

[00:31:05] One of the things that we want to do is think about what you'd rather focus on. Where would you rather be? What would you rather be doing with your mind? All of that being said, you know, with my situation with my neck, I can't go lift a bunch of heavy weights and stuff because that's going to cause me pain. That's going to hurt. So, it's not like the pain is gone and you're never going to feel it again. You have to take care of yourself.

[00:31:34] And, you know, several weeks ago, I've got an over 20-year-old son and I had a giant piece of one-inch thick 4x8 plywood that I had asked him to help me move like 20 times and he didn't do it. And so, one day, I just got, fuck it, I'm going to just do it because I used to do that all the time before my accident. So, I just picked it up. I harked it around. I moved it where I wanted it to be. And as soon as I set it down, I said, oh, fuck. That was really stupid.

[00:32:04] Why did I do that? Now, I'm in pain for the next like three days and I'm using my hypnosis just to be comfortable while I'm in pain. So, it's important to know. It's not like it's something where the pain is going to completely vanish and it doesn't work that way. But you can be more comfortable doing the kinds of things that don't aggravate it or make it worse. Got it. I have maybe a silly question and this is coming from somebody

[00:32:33] who doesn't know much about hypnotherapy. So, apologies ahead of time. But what is the difference between hypnotherapy and meditation? Oh, that's a fantastic question. So, both are theta brain states. With meditation, oftentimes meditation itself is the goal. With hypnosis or hypnotherapy, there's always sort of this overarching goal. We want to get from here

[00:33:02] all the way to this other place and every session is a step along the way and we've got things that we want to accomplish in session that are designed to get you there. I work with a lot of people who are pretty serious meditators and the first thing I ask them to do is don't think about this like meditation. Because, you know, if you say we're going to do some hypnosis, they're already closed their eyes and they're in position. Don't think about it like that.

[00:33:31] Let it be its own thing because it is. I use self-hypnosis the way other people might use meditation. You know, I do it. I practice it. I've been doing it for, like I say, more than 25 years. But I have clients who take to their hypnosis practice just the same way other people meditate. What I hear is it's easier to go into the hypnosis because the words that I say

[00:34:00] are, they sound maybe like a guided meditation at first. But the place that they're guiding you towards is a hypnotic trance state. Which is related to, but not exactly the same as a meditative state. Meditative states tend to be kind of lighter, whereas hypnotic states can be infinitely deeper, all the way to the point where you can do surgery and things like that without having any other kind of anesthesia.

[00:34:28] You've got to work towards that, obviously. It doesn't happen like that. Did I answer your question? Yeah, no, you did. And I'm happy you even said guided meditation because just in hearing you talk about it, that was what I was relating it to, right? It was like, what is familiar to me for something that's not very familiar? And I was thinking meditation. So that makes sense. Hi, all. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I'm G-Rex. And I'm Dirty Skittles.

[00:34:57] Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. We'd love to listen to your feedback. We can't do this without you guys. It's okay to be not okay. Just make sure you're talking to someone. Bye. Bye.