Dieting and Hypnosis
Dieters Turning to Hypnosis to Shed Extra Pounds
AOL News - 2005 September 4
by Candice Choi, AP
 

Imagine a world where chocolate cake holds no temptation, where celery is an indulgence and food cravings float away in a balloon. Now open your eyes to the trancelike world of Americans who are turning to hypnosis to drop extra poundage.

In a nation where two thirds of the population is overweight or obese, some dieters are hoping hypnosis will finally break food's spell over them.
It's working for Cynthia Lewis, a San Diego resident who is no longer tempted to polish off a plate of cookies when she smells them baking.

"Now just smelling (the cookies) is enough," she said.

Despite its hokey, magic-show aura, hypnosis is used as an alternative treatment in medical institutions to manage everything from pain to smoking to weight loss.

And as waistlines continue to bulge, hypnotherapists say they're seeing more patients desperate for a way to control their eating.

"The country is getting fatter and fatter, so different weight-loss methods are getting more attention," said Jean Fain, a psychologist who uses hypnosis at Harvard Medical School's Cambridge Hospital.

In the past five years, Fain said, the number of patients she treats for weight loss has doubled. For many of those patients, hypnosis is a last resort.

That was the case for Lewis, who grew tired of dropping and gaining the same 30 pounds on various liquid diets.

Three months ago, she began seeing Brian Alman, who teaches self-hypnosis for Kaiser Permanente, the Oakland, Calif.-based health insurer. So far, Lewis said the therapy has helped her change her lifestyle.

Generally, the hypnotic state is defined as a state of focused concentration - a condition akin to being so absorbed in a good book that the outside world seems to fade away, said Guy Montgomery, president of the Society of Psychological Hypnosis, a division of American Psychological Association.

It's during this state that patients become more open to suggestion.

For a stress eater, Montgomery might tell patients to picture themselves in a relaxing place whenever they feel the impulse to overeat.

Whether hypnosis will bring results varies form person to person as in any other treatment Montgomery said. "We don't view (hypnosis) as a stand-alone therapy, but as an additional technique," he said.

Kevin Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, said it's probably the range of therapies that aids weight loss, not the hypnosis alone.

"The prevailing thought is that there's really not much to hypnosis for weight loss on its own" Brownell said. But people become so frustrated trying to lose weight that they give anything a try - especially something that seems as simple as hypnosis, he said.

But for those who dreamed hypnosis might be the long-awaited magic weight-loss bullet, practitioners and patients alike caution that it's not that easy.

Patients often come to Fain hoping she'll snap her fingers and nock out their impulse to overeat. In fact, she said it can take months - sometimes years - to help patients get a handle on underlying causes of their overeating.

For Lee Hubbard of Orange County, Calif., who learned how to go into a hypnotic state through Alman's tapes, hypnosis came easily.

Now whenever she feels like overeating, she takes a deep breath instead of reaching for the bowl of Hershey's Kisses. She closes her eyes for a moment and pictures herself walking toward the candy bowl. As she is about to grab a fistful, she instead pictures herself walking right past the bowl.

Hubbard remains fully awake - she is simply calmer, focused and more relaxed.

"It's like a movie screen where you observe yourself in the situation. It lets you control the arena of your thought," she said.

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The High Cost of Smoking
MSN Money - Insure Your Health - 2005 November
by Hilary Smith


These days, smoking can even cost you your job, not to mention the expense of cigarettes, dry cleaning and insurance. But a 40 year old pack a day smoker who quits and puts the savings into a 401(k) earning 9% a year will have $250,000.00 by age 70.

If the threat of cancer can't convince you to quit smoking, maybe the prospect of poverty will.

The financial consequences of lighting up stretch far beyond the cost of a pack of cigarettes. Smokers pay more for insurance and lose money on the resale value of their cars and homes. They spend extra on dry cleaning and teeth cleaning. Long term, they earn less and receive less in pension and Social Security benefits. And now, being a smoker can not only mean you don't get hired - you can get fired, too: Weyco Inc., a medical benefits administrator in Okemos, Mich., after announcing it would no longer employ smokers, fired four employees who refused to submit to a breath test.

The American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) National Workrights Institute estimates that more than 6,000 companies refuse to hire smokers. A few examples:

HypnoBirthing classes use awake hypnosis to help relax moms,
companions and babies for delivery.
The Albuquerque Tribune - 2005 September 23
by Carrie Seidman, Tribune Reporter


Everything was going beautifully.

The expectant mother lay in a relaxed and hypnotic state, breathing deeply with each contraction but never tensing in pain. Then, as the woman approached her final stage of labor, she gripped the edge of the table she was lying on, turned to midwife Jenny West and said:

"This is really hard."

Knowing the last phase of labor was the most challenging, West responded with sympathy and encouragement.

Soon thereafter, as the pacific mother contentedly nursed her newborn, West reminded the woman of her words.

"Oh, no," the woman said, shaking her head. "I meant the table."

West likes to tell that story because it shows having a baby doesn't have to be all about insurmountable agony and gut-wrenching fear.

At least, not if it's a HypnoBirth.

This decade's answer to the Lamaze classes of a quarter-century ago, HypnoBirth is designed to help a woman achieve a natural birth by maintaining a conscious but hypnotic state during labor and delivery.

The result is a birthing that "flies in the face of everything women tell each other in the Wal-Mart," says West, one of four women who teach HypnoBirthing classes in the Albuquerque area.

"There's no trauma drama," she explains. "One of the things that's profoundly different about it is that there is no purple pushing stage, where the woman is shooting her eyeballs across the room."

First practiced in the early '90s and still mostly the domain of midwives and home births, HypnoBirthing accounts for only a small fraction of natural births, and statistical data on its effectiveness is still being gathered.

But while the practice "can't guarantee you a pain-free birth," West admits, firsthand accounts say it reduces labor duration, complications and stress on both the mother and baby.

In fact, a HypnoBirth is often so serene it can change one's whole concept of childbirth, advocates say. The first time she delivered a "Hypno-baby," West says she "felt a little like I didn't know how to be a midwife anymore" because everything went so effortlessly. At the same time, because the hypnosis seemed to help so much, she was also elated.

"I felt like I'd invented having babies," she says.

West admits to having been skeptical herself when she first watched a "Dateline" TV episode on hypnosis and childbirth in 1999.

"I watched the whole thing standing up with my arms crossed," says West, 46. "I thought, `I don't buy it.' But at the same time, I'd always wondered why it had to be such an ordeal all the time."

Now, after presiding over more than 200 HypnoBirths, West is the one doing the convincing.

"It's been marketed in this country that birth has to hurt and it has to be long," she says. "This is about shedding all that fear-based information and putting the woman in the driver's seat."

Mothers who have experienced HypnoBirth after traditional deliveries say it provides the newborn with a more gentle entry into the world. They say their babies are calmer, sleep better and even have more easygoing, amenable personalities.

Yet, West says, we all sometimes forget that most important person in the whole birthing process.

She does remember, though, one HypnoBirth when that wasn't the case. When the baby was placed on the mother's chest, the woman looked deeply into the eyes of her tiny newborn and quietly said:

"I hope I did OK. I tried to be as gentle as I could."

Couples who attend classes in a large, but still somehow cozy, room of West's Four Hills home are treated to a nonstop, rapid-fire comedy routine.

West has never married or had a child of her own ("It takes a real man to live with a midwife because every couple's life is more important than your own"), but she is completely comfortable rolling on the floor, grabbing her own breast or waddling around the room like a woman in labor to make a point.

Wearing a T-shirt that reads, "Taking the Birthing World by Calm," she reaches over and digs her hand into a prospective father's abdomen, showing him how to feel his "uterus." She regularly refers to the fathers as "you gorillas," likening their role to that of the male silver-backed gorilla, who protects the environment of his birthing female.

West clarifies that no swinging pendulum or "you are getting very sleepy" is involved. Mothers simply close their eyes and listen to a prepared tape or the sound of their partners reading a script. Within moments they are deeply relaxed - yet still able to resurface with a simple command.

Among the other misconceptions West dismantles:

Hypnosis means a complete loss of conscious control.

"Like most people," West says, "when I thought of hypnosis it was: `They're going to take all my money out of my bank account! They're going to make me cluck like a chicken!' In fact, you're completely conscious, just deeply relaxed."

The use of hypnosis means the woman will not be "awake" for the birth.

"After my first HypnoBirth, I asked the woman, 'Where were you?' " West recalls. "And she rattled off everything that had happened in detail and in perfect order, including hearing her husband eating nuts in the kitchen and thinking she was going to have to clean up his mess."

A certain degree of skepticism about hypnosis or an overactive mind means this method won't work for you.

"It challenges your belief systems," West says. "But if you're willing to believe birth can be a positive experience - if there is a tiny kernel of desire, a little grain of hope - your subconscious will say yes."

After seeing that "Dateline" show in 1999, Albuquerque hypnotherapist Jean Stouffer decided to become certified to teach the method.

Her motivation was based, in part, on her own traumatic memories of labor.

The president of the Southwest Hypnotherapists Examining Board, Stouffer lost her first child five days after his birth in 1968. The baby's problematic positioning resulted in the administration of pitocin (a drug that forces contractions), an epidural (spinal block) and an eventual Caesarean section.

"I don't want anyone to have to go through what I went through," says Stouffer, 64, who believes the death was because of stress on the baby. "The whole idea of being able to birth this way is something I never got to experience. It's just magical."

Yet in the United States - where one of every fourth births is a Caesarean and hospital deliveries are the norm - gaining converts can be a challenge, Stouffer says.

Doctors fear being sued if something goes wrong without their having intervened, she says. Women want the "convenience" of a definite delivery date or the surety of guaranteed pain anesthesia, she says.

And there often can be a blind faith in Western medicine. (To date, neither the American Medical Association nor the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has taken an official stance on HypnoBirthing.)

"Women in this country are programmed to go, `Whatever you say,' to their doctors," Stouffer says. "There's this idea that doctors will heal something that's wrong. But birth is not wrong; it's natural."

The whole idea, she says, is to teach women and their birthing companions to work together so they won't need outside help.

"It's not about physiology or anatomy," she says. "It's about teaching moms that having a baby is the natural thing to do. Bodies know how to have babies. Minds don't."

Even after couples practice and watch videos of women birthing under hypnosis, they sometimes need more reassurance. So recently West had couples with newborns visit her class of expectant parents to describe their own experiences.

"It was more about keeping your focus than about anything that was going on inside," says Ilana Vogenthaler, who delivered her first child at home using the methods she and her husband, Aran, learned in West's classes.

Cradling her 8-day-old son, Koen, in her arms, Ilana says she became her own cheerleader during the birth, feeling with every surge, "My body works!" (HypnoBirthing has its own positive-reinforcement language, substituting words like "surge" for "contraction," "effort" for "push.")

Although she stops short of claiming the process didn't hurt, she describes it as an "extremely powerful but very peaceful" experience.

Sean Bergen, a Rio Rancho firefighter whose wife, Audrey, is due with their first child next month initially thought the idea of using hypnosis "was a bunch of hocus-pocus, really."

"Being a firefighter and a paramedic, I fall more into the medical model," he says. "I went because it was what Audrey wanted. I kept thinking, `How is this going to help anything?' "

But after attending a month of classes, practicing at home and experiencing a state of hypnosis himself, he's willing to admit he might have been too quick to judge.

Audrey, 35, has had a difficult pregnancy, including near-constant nausea and a cracked rib from vomiting. Her husband says hypnosis has come in handy - even before the birth.

"I've seen how it's helped her to sleep at night when she's had a rough day," Sean says. "And even though I still feel silly sometimes doing it, basically it's just getting her used to my voice, putting a picture in her head."

Unlike with her husband, hypnosis made sense to Audrey right from the start. As a pediatric occupational therapist, it seemed more logical to her than the fast-paced Lamaze panting of the past.

"That always seemed counterintuitive to me," she says. "It makes much more sense that you need your muscles to relax, not tense."

During the classes, Audrey, an admitted "control freak," regularly jotted down questions. Because "to me, knowledge is power," she says learning as much as possible has helped her face her due date with confident calm rather than terror.

"I'm realizing birth is one of those experiences where I'm just going to have to let go, and this gave me a tool to do that," she says.

"In fact," she adds, "it's already worked for me. I'm not afraid anymore. You leave class and you're actually excited about labor."

Hypno What?

What is it?
HypnoBirthing is a type of natural childbirth in which the mother is in a conscious but hypnotic state during labor to achieve an easier birth without drugs or other medical intervention.

Who created it?
New Hampshire hypnotherapist Marie Mongan developed the trademarked curriculum in 1989 after using self-hypnosis during her own childbirth.

Why does it work?
Because the mother is deeply relaxed, she doesn't react with fear and increased tension to her body's natural muscular responses, advocates say. In turn, her body does not release adrenaline that can cause stress to both herself and the baby and prolong the labor, they say.

What does it look like?
Through spoken scripts, recordings and light touch, the "birthing companion" (often the father) puts the mother into a state of deep relaxation, which is maintained until the baby is born. It is important for the mother and companion to have thoroughly practiced this process before labor, advocates say.

Where does it happen?
A HypnoBirth can take place at home or in the hospital. Because the mother is open to suggestion while in the hypnotic state, it is important that those attending are positive and supportive of the birthing plan and that the room itself is peaceful, advocates say. Although the majority of births are without complication, it is important to have competent medical help - a midwife or doctor - readily available should they arise, advocates say.

What does it cost?
In the Albuquerque area, where HypnoBirth classes are offered only by private individuals, the cost is about $300.00 for the mother and a birthing companion to attend four to five sessions. This charge is for classes only and does not include someone attending the birth. Insurance coverage varies widely; check with your health provider.

Where to learn more?
Go to www.hypnobirthing.com

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Till Death - or Marital Counseling - Do You Part
Studies Say Couples Therapy not so Effective
The New York Times - 2005 May
by Susan Gilbert

Each year, hundreds of thousands of couples go into counseling in an effort to save their troubled relationships.

But does marital therapy work? Not nearly as well as it should, researchers say. Two years after ending counseling, studies find, 25 percent of couples are worse off than they were when they started, and after four years, up to 38 percent are divorced.

Many of the counseling strategies used today, such as teaching people to listen and communicated better and to behave in more positive ways can help couples for up to a year, say social scientists who have analyzed the effectiveness of several treatments. But they are insufficient to get couples through the squalls of conflict that inevitably recur in the long term.

At the same time, experts say, many therapists lack the skills to work with couples who are in serious trouble. Unable to help angry couples get to the root of their conflict and forge a resolution, these therapists do one of two things: They either let the partners take turns talking week after week, with no end to the therapy in sight, or they give up on the couple and, in effect, steer them to divorce.

"Couples therapy can do more harm than good when the therapist doesn't know how to help a couple," said Susan M. Johnson, professor of psychology at the University of Ottawa and director of the Ottawa Couple and Family Institute.

One couple, in Boonton, N.J., saw two marriage counselors over 13 years.
"One therapist hurt our marriage and actually caused our separation," said the husband, Jim, who did not want his last name used out of concerns for his privacy.

"She told my wife, 'You don't have to put up with that,'" referring to his battle with alcoholism, he said.

To be sure, many couples credit counseling with strengthening their marriages. And therapists say they could save more marriages if couples started therapy before their relationships were in critical condition.

"Couples wait an average of six years of being unhappy with their relationship before getting help," said John Gottman, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington and executive director of the Relationship Research Institute in Seattle.

"We help the very distressed couples less than the moderately distressed couples."

Los Angeles-area marriage counselors said that, with patience and commitment, therapy can help keep many couples together. Success rates might appear low because couples entering therapy often have significant problems, said Gary Stollman, a therapist with a practice in Beverly Hills.

"If you took two different couples, and they both had the same problems, and one went into marriage counseling and the other didn't, the one in marriage counseling would fare far better," Stollman said.

"You can't compare the divorce rate with unhappy couples with happy couples that don't seek therapy. If you already have something that is beyond repair, it will dissolve."

For counseling to be effective, the counselor and he couple must reach the core issue of the problem, which takes time and trust, said Sydelle Menashe, a therapist with a Woodland Hills-based practice. Both members of the couple must be committed to making the relationship work, too, Menashe said.

"If people come in, the first thing I need to know is, are they both committed to the marriage," Menashe said. "If one is not committed and one is, then it won't work. I've been counseling individuals, couples, children and families for over 30 years with excellent results and very few divorces."

In the past few years, efforts to find ways to save more marriages and other long-term relationships have increased.

With an experimental approach called integrative behavioral couples therapy, for example, 67 percent of couples significantly improved their relationships for two years, according to a study reported in November to the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy.

Instead of teaching couples how to avoid or solve arguments, as traditional counseling techniques d, the integrative therapy aims to make arguments less hurtful by helping partners accept their differences. It is based on a recent finding that it is not whether married people fight but how the y fight that can destroy a relationship.

Especially encouraging, all of the couples in the study were at high risk of divorce. "Many had been couples-therapy failures," said Andrew Christensen, a professor of clinical psychology at UCLA and the lead author of the study.

But some experts who were trained as couples therapists have now become so disillusioned that they question the value of couples therapy in any form. They say couples are better off taking marriage education courses - practical workshops that teach couples how to get along and that do not ask them to bare their souls or air their problems to a third party.

Two large, nationwide marriage education programs - Practical Application of Intimate Relationship Skills and the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program - offer such workshops.

Three types of couples therapy have been found to improve people's satisfaction with their marriage for at leas a year after the treatment sends.

The oldest approach, developed more than 20 years ago but still widely used, is behavioral marital therapy, in which partners learn to be nicer to each other, communicate better and improve their conflict-resolution skills. Another, called insight-oriented marital therapy, combines behavioral therapy with techniques for understanding the power struggles, defense mechanisms and other negative behaviors that cause strife in a relationship. With each method, about half of couples improve initially, but many of them relapse after a year.

A relatively new approach that studies have found highly effective is called emotionally focused therapy, with 70 percent to 73 percent of couples reaching recovery - the point where their satisfaction with their relationship is within normal limits - for up to two years, the length of the studies.

Johnson, who helped develop emotionally focused therapy in the 1990s, said it enabled couples to identify and break free of the destructive emotional cycles that they fell into.

"A classic one is that one person criticizes, the other withdraws," she said. "The more I push, the more you withdraw. We talk about how both partners are victims of these cycles."

As the partners reveal their feelings during these cycles, they build trust and strengthen their connection to each other, she said.

Surprisingly, Johnson said, until emotionally focused therapy came along, therapists were so intent on getting couples to make contracts to change their behavior that they did not delve into the emotional underpinnings of a relationship.

"It was like leaving chicken out of chicken soup," she said.

Researchers have begun to identify which qualities in a couple make for a lasting relationship.

Over more than two decades of videotaping and analyzing the behavior of happy and unhappy couples, Gottman has found that all couples fight and that most fights are never resolved. What is different between happy and unhappy couples is the way they fight.

The happy couples punctuate their arguments with positive interactions, he said, like interjecting humor or smiling in fond recognition of a partner's foibles. The unhappy couples have corrosive arguments, characterized by criticism, defensiveness and other negative words and gestures.

Los Angeles area counselors' comments came from interviews with Daily News Staff Writer Josh Kleinbaum.