THE USE OF HYPNOSIS AS AN AUTO-ETHNOGRAPHIC MODALITY IN THE EXPLORATION AND MANAGEMENT OF OVERWEIGHT AND OBESITY - SELECTED CASE STUDIES

Abstract

The increasing incidence of obesity around the world has become a major problem with health and economic implications for most countries, and one which currently available methods of weight management including diet, exercise and lifestyle advice all seem incapable of controlling. The premise of this project was that some instances of adult obesity could be due to adverse, unresolved childhood traumas and experiences the consequences of which were continuing to act subconsciously in those individuals to impede effective and maintained adult weight loss; and that hypnosis was an appropriate exploratory tool for identifying and resolving these problems to facilitate more effectual weight management. For this purpose a group of seven overweight female volunteers were invited to undertake a series of “state”, dissociative hypnosis sessions involving regression back through their childhood and early adulthood. The resulting recalled autobiography from each participant’s series of hypnosis sessions was recorded, transcribed and analysed to constitute a piece of narrative autoethnography of their childhood past. All seven participants in this project were able to utilise hypnosis effectively to enable them to recall barely remembered past events, feelings and connections which, they realised for the first time as adults, had had a major and long-lasting impact on how they felt about food, their body weight or their body image. Hypnotically recalled memories of guilt and anger were associated with dysfunctional family relationships and childhood eating experiences. For most of these participants the strength of the association between these past times and feelings, and their current long-term overweight problem came as a total surprise. Even in advance of any weight loss most participants were inspired by their discoveries and felt that the telling of this hidden story had had a transformative benefit for them in bringing about reconciliation with the past, understanding of the present and planning for their future. These narrative accounts and results suggest that hypnosis might have wider application for use as an ethnological modality in sociology and health studies more generally.