Altered states…a remedy for mind chatter

When medical hypnotherapist and specialist GP Pat McCarthy offered me a complimentary consultation, I was intrigued, apprehensive – and a little sceptical.

I didn’t know much about hypnotism. I was thinking pocket watches, swirling patterns and the catch phrase: “You are starting to feel veeeeery sleepy.”

Dr McCarthy was quick to inform me his practice is unlike anything I may have seen on TV.

It turned out that, thanks to COVID-19 and the rise of telehealth, I could have my hypnotherapy session in my Auckland home while he was in his Wellington clinic.

So I logged into the virtual consultation, turned on my phone recorder, and we were away.

Dr McCarthy said he was going to tell me a story about his childhood.

“So when you’re ready, close your eyes and start by taking a few relaxing breaths…and just listen carefully to the sound of my voice.”

I did exactly that, but switching my brain off was easier said than done. The work I would have to do once the consultation was over, the interview I had scheduled that afternoon, did I need to stop at the supermarket after work? What was I going to cook for dinner?

I struggled to find a sense of internal quiet. Dr McCarthy was now halfway through his story, and I was starting to panic.

I was supposed to be listening and conjuring images to go along with his words – but my mind was so noisy, chattering away to itself, that nothing remotely visual was being produced by it at all.

I wasn’t even sure if I was actually listening to what he was saying. Did this mean the treatment wasn’t going to work? Was there something wrong with me?

I tried to take a couple of deep breaths then, all of a sudden, it was like someone, somewhere, had flicked a switch.

Everything that had been hurtling around inside my head fell away and I just stopped, properly hearing the sound of his soft, lilting voice for the first time, allowing it to conjure colourful pictures.

We then worked together to take every last thought from my mind, concentrating each one in a different part of the body, starting with my right foot, and working all the way up to my eyebrows.

I admit, I typically find it hard to relax – the combination of a desk job and a love of high-intensity sports results in muscles that are always tightly wound.

But in this moment, I experienced a profound feeling of relaxation – so relaxed, in fact, that my head started nodding over the desk.

Some minutes later, Dr McCarthy asked me to describe how I was feeling. Relaxed but heavy, weightless but weighted, I said. I felt warmer, smaller and more compact.

Says Dr McCarthy: “The reason for that is that the cadence and rhythm of my voice, all the way from Wellington, has guided 400 million muscle fibres of your body into a state of floppy relaxation.

“I never told you to feel heavier, warmer or smaller…All I told you was ‘focus, focus, focus’.”

Mind-bogglingly, when Dr McCarthy told me to open my eyes on the count of 10, I obeyed. But first, he said: “If you’re interested, you can notice what happens if you try to open the eyes before the count of eight.”

Never one to pass up a challenge, I was determined I would open my eyes as soon as he started counting. Try as I might, I couldn’t.

Dr McCarthy asked if I had noticed that he didn’t take a patient history, or ask a single question about me.

In just 20 minutes, all he had to do was tell me a story to get me to quieten my noisy brain and feel calmer and more relaxed than I ever have.

I thanked him, saying the consultation had been fascinating.

Dr McCarthy says people feel uneasy about hypnotism, even medical hypnotism, because it still holds connotations such as being placed in a trance, losing control, and being made to act like a chicken.

Far from it. Dr McCarthy says he doesn’t actually hypnotise his patients, instead uses hypnotherapy techniques, as I experienced, as treatments in a variety of conditions or situations, like childbirth, or helping people to quit smoking.

Much like a conductor facilitates an orchestra, or a yoga teacher teaches yoga, he says he teaches access to hypnosis. It’s like a book with no pictures.

“I tell the story, and you supply the scenery, the imagery.”

My story, in fact, was originally to be about the book Dr McCarthy has written, due out early next year and called How to cure anxiety in just five therapy sessions.

Anxiety, he says, is like a box of chocolates – with different coloured wrappers, but the same underlying ingredients: a constantly activated fight-or-flight response and unwanted pessimistic thoughts.

What is common in anxiety is having a mistaken belief and believing it. Treatments are typically aimed at reducing symptoms, but not at getting rid of the symptoms entirely, he points out.

Switching from the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) to the parasympathetic nervous system, also known as “rest and digest”, is key, he says.

“It’s not good for your body to be constantly revving, but in parasympathetic, your blood pressure drops, you calm your mind.”

Then he offered to teach me a way to get rid of these types of thoughts in just a few moments, using what he calls his lie-detector test.

My mind is frequently visited by unwanted thoughts that are loud and persistent, but I doubted they could be dispatched in just a couple of minutes.

He told me to imagine a common thought and describe its tone. I came up with words like “negative”, “self-deprecating”, “critical”, “harsh”.

“Okay, now take that thought and put it on your shoulder. Give it the most ridiculous voice you can think of – like a cartoon character. Do you still believe what it’s saying?”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry – instantly the thought had gone from being sly and mean, to squeaky, silly and almost nonsensical.

This is why he calls the technique the lie-detector test: if the thought was actually true, giving it a funny voice wouldn’t change anything.

More often than not, it’s the tone of voice we broadcast in our own heads that’s the issue, rather than what the voice is saying.

Dr McCarthy qualified in medicine in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1980 and became an RNZCGP Fellow in 1998. New Zealand’s only full-time medical hypnotist, he trained in the discipline starting with weekend training courses in the early 1990s, with a focus on obstetric hypnosis. By 1996 he was taking one day a week, treating patients for a variety of conditions.

He treats about 40 patients a week from his clinic, or virtually throughout the country, across the entire alphabet of conditions, from anorexia, to bulimia to zoophobia.

He hopes the new book will change how people think about anxiety.