Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] You're listening to The Love Vox with psychotherapist Amynah Dharani.
[00:00:19] Amynah Dharani: Hello everyone. I'm your host, Amynah Dharani, and I am so excited to be here with you today. This is the podcast for people who are passionate about the human condition by people who are equally passionate voices in their field.
If you are a new listener to our podcast, welcome to the show. I am a psychotherapist by training and more so, I am the forever student, the mind geek, the archaeologist, digging away for the stories of our lives.
In today's episode, we are exploring two very misrepresented concepts of the mental health field, dissociative identity disorder, also known as multiple personality disorder, and clinical hypnosis.
I believe at least part of that responsibility lies with the media and its portrayal of mental health.
As I think about the intricate relationship between media representations and public perceptions of mental illness, it doesn't cease to amaze me the powerful influence that popular culture has on shaping our understanding or misunderstanding of this complex topic.
To me, it's clear that the narratives presented in films, television, and news can deeply affect how society views mental health, often perpetuating harmful stereotypes that link mental illness with violent behavior.
And I think that is the core issue, that mental illness is portrayed as violent behavior.
Now, I do want to say that I love a good story, and psychological thrillers are one of my favorite genres, and that's the part that I play in consuming this type of media. I accept it.
One movie that portrayed dissociative identity disorder is split, written, directed and produced by M. Night Shyamalan.
The portrayal of the character, Kevin Wendell Crumb is played by James McAvoy.
In my opinion, the movie is really good storytelling with a powerful performance by McAvoy.
Interesting that the main character's last name is Crumb, a subliminal indication of the many pieces of the of the main character. No doubt that Mr. Shyamalan is a skilled storyteller.
The second misunderstood concept of the mental health field we are discussing today is clinical hypnosis.
And I have a very special guest today to discuss this technique and to explain how he uses it to treat individuals with dissociative identity disorder. Let's go meet him.
I have here with me Dr. Louis Demi. He is a clinical psychologist. He is a diplomat with the American Board of Professional Psychology, a fellow of the American Academy of Clinical Health Psychology, fellow of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, and a fellow of the Biofeedback Certification International alliance. He is a past president of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. Welcome.
[00:03:44] Louis Damis: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
[00:03:47] Amynah Dharani: Wonderful to have you. So I wanted to have you here today to discuss clinical hypnosis, specifically around the techniques and how it works with people with dissociative identity disorder, which is also known as multiple personality disorder. Before we dive into that, what was your introduction to clinical hypnosis?
[00:04:13] Louis Damis: When I was back in graduate school, we took a course during the summer on treating stress management conditions or stress disorders. And the faculty was someone that used hypnosis. So I got my introduction to clinical hypnosis, then did some readings on it. But what really got me hooked on hypnosis was when I took my first position, employment position, and the director of the facility that was the Rhode Island Group Health association at the time had been trained in clinical hypnosis by Daniel P. Brown up in Boston. And he said that I should follow up with him and get some training from him. And once I started, I was addicted. And I took as many workshops that Dan ran, and he brought experts in on different topics, including Rick clough on dissociative identity disorder, Helen and Jack Watkins on ego states treatment, and others. And then I had the opportunity of doing a year long externship with Dan Brown, which was one of the most phenomenal experiences I've ever had.
[00:05:23] Amynah Dharani: Before we go into how clinical hypnosis impacts or treats dissociative identity disorder, if you could address what are some common misconceptions that the lay public has about hypnosis?
[00:05:38] Louis Damis: Oh, there are significant misconceptions about hypnosis, and I'm glad you asked that, because I always want to educate people on that. People tend to believe that if you remember something in the state of hypnosis, then it has to be true that hypnosis can make you do things that you would not normally do, and hypnosis can make you remember things that you otherwise would not be able to remember, and those things are not really accurate. Hypnosis will do nothing to enhance the validity of a memory. You can have accurate memories in the context of hypnosis, but you can also have inaccurate ones. And it's very important that individuals that are going to use hypnosis are aware of this. Hypnosis can't make you do anything that you wouldn't normally do. If you were to be given a suggestion that goes against your values, it would more or less bounce off.
[00:06:29] Amynah Dharani: So, simple example, I could not make somebody go and rob a bank if they didn't already want to do that. Okay.
[00:06:36] Louis Damis: If they weren't a criminal already, they wouldn't do that. And hypnosis is more impactful on about internal experiences, emotional states, perceptions of yourself. Post hypnotic suggestions will help to maintain that, but it's not as powerful, necessarily, with behavioral post hypnotic suggestions. So even if someone was willing to commit a crime, a post hypnotic suggestion to engage in something as complex as that would not necessarily be as effective as a suggestion or working with cultivating in a positive emotional experience that you want one to maintain the state of trance.
[00:07:20] Amynah Dharani: It sounds exotic when stated you're going to be in a state of trance. It sounds very movie ish.
[00:07:29] Louis Damis: I'm glad you brought that up, because along with other misconceptions about hypnosis are the belief that it's a dramatically altered state of consciousness and that you can, and you lose control of yourself, your emotions, or what's happening in the context of it, you lose the ability to speak or that it's going to disinhibit you. So like truth serum would. And you'll say whatever you're asked or do whatever you asked, and that's not true at all. Hypnosis is a lightly altered state of consciousness that we actually drift in and out of on a regular basis. We don't notice it, though. We don't label it. But if there's ever been a time when you were focusing on reading a book, watching a show on tv, and maybe someone called your name and you didn't answer right away, and then they called it louder, and you thought to yourself, I better respond to them before they really start yelling. And you pull yourself out of that focused and absorbed experience on whatever you were reading or watching or daydreaming, for instance, and you pull yourself out of it, and you then respond to the individual. Those are hypnotic states. Hypnotic states are experiences of somewhat, maybe focused attention and a decreased awareness, but not a blocking of awareness, an increase of what you might call it dissociation, a little less awareness of the immediate physical and temporal surroundings. But you are aware, and if something went toward were to happen, you'd open your eyes and be right on it. So one of the big things is when we're working with individuals, we want to let them know that they're not going to lose control. And that's a typical fear that people have. People fear they're going to be out of control. Someone's going to be controlling them. They're going to put a suggestion in their mind and take over their mind, or they'll make them say or do something that'll be embarrassing. And that doesn't happen.
[00:09:27] Amynah Dharani: Now, why is it important to reach this trance state? What is it that the clinician is trying to do?
[00:09:33] Louis Damis: That's a very good point, I think. And a lot of people will say that when you're in that more of a trance, or the altered state of consciousness we call hypnosis, that you're going to be more responsive to suggestion. I like Erika Fromm's talk about greater receptivity to suggestions. It doesn't mean that you're gonna do whatever you're told, but that you'll be more likely to respond to it if it's something in your best interest. And one of the things that I appreciate is that the wisdom of our unconscious is monitoring everything going on, and your mind's not gonna let you experience something that's too discrepant from what it knows to be the norm. And that's even the depth of trance one goes into. We also know that you do not need to be in a deep state of trance to benefit from it. And I have my own thoughts about what makes trance a more positive and engaging experience.
[00:10:35] Amynah Dharani: Moving on to dissociative identity disorder, or as it was known in the past, multiple personality disorder. There's such Hollywood representations of this diagnoses, and in fact, I it's met with skepticism by some in the mental health community as well. How do you understand that? And how is it understood from the perspective of somebody who's going to use clinical hypnosis to treat this? How would you even know a client has dissociative identity disorder?
[00:11:06] Louis Damis: And sometimes you don't.
Sometimes you don't, unless you've done a very thorough assessment, and there were clear indications that warranted that you may not know till you do some hypnosis.
Dissociative disorders, there's a spectrum of them, and at one end of it, there's ego state disorders, where the boundaries between different partially self states, or ego states, are much more transparent. When we talk about a true dissociative identity disorder, there's usually some degree of amnestic barriers between the different self states. And one of the main features is that the self states can take full control of the person, and the other self states may not be aware of what's going on.
[00:11:52] Amynah Dharani: I'm going to pause you right there, because this is our language, and I'm wondering how this could be simplified for the public who's hearing this. Right? So just a brief understanding of ego states. What do you mean by that?
[00:12:09] Louis Damis: That's a good question.
We all have what I would call ego states. If you're out with your friends, you may speak a little more openly and assertively in different ways, as opposed to when you're in a classroom and you're teaching, you're going to follow the rules of what's appropriate for that setting. If you're out with your buddies, you may make some sometimes very open, rash remarks at time because you know the context there is, okay, if I have a child when I'm on the floor playing with him, being really silly with him, those are going to be different states of interacting with someone, and it follows the different sets of expectations for that situation.
When individuals have very traumatic experiences, these different ego states or parts of oneself, and we all do that, we say, you know, part of me wants to do this, part of me wants to do that, and that's all very normal way to think about things. But when people have had very intense traumatic experiences, they have to respond in very sometimes extreme ways. And sometimes if you're being harmed by a parent who is your caretaker, who you're completely dependent on for everything, part of your mind wants to maintain the sense of security and safety that this is my parent, they're going to protect me. So those parts of the mind sometimes get blocked out, and another part of the mind will just be present and will learn about this aspect of the experience. So this person is harming me and I need to avoid it. But then in other parts of the mind may hold on to the belief or the perception that they're not always harming you. Sometimes they're reasonable and treat you okay, and it'll hold on to that. And this is what I mean by different parts of the mind or different. We call these ego states or self states.
Can I give an example of self?
[00:14:07] Amynah Dharani: Absolutely.
[00:14:08] Louis Damis: I worked with someone who was having trouble sleeping, and so she would take various medications to help put herself to sleep, and they weren't working to help her get to sleep. And what I learned was that when she was younger, she had tried to commit suicide by overdosing. So what we discovered was that when she took these pills to go to sleep at night, a part of her mind remembered when she was trying to kill herself and deliberately kept her awake to make sure she wasn't going to die.
[00:14:43] Amynah Dharani: That's fascinating.
[00:14:44] Louis Damis: And once we identified that that kind of part of the mind was doing that and we negotiated that, would you help going to sleep if she didn't take the medicines? And we resolved the sleep difficulties.
[00:14:58] Amynah Dharani: Wow. So to go back, you have a patient a client coming in and you start working with them, maybe you have some idea that they have trauma in their history, and as a practitioner of hypnosis, you're working with them, and then what are you coming across where you are realizing that the client may have dissociative identity disorder or did.
[00:15:26] Louis Damis: Usually when a different ego state, or what we call self state will pop out and will have a very different set of knowledge, opinions, and emotional states. Maybe anger. One time, early in the work with someone, when I was still flushing out, not knowing fully that they had a dissociative identity disorder, part of her just came out and started speaking with me very angrily. And the expectation was that I was going to be angry back, but I didn't. I kind of appreciated that that anger was a source of strength and protection and energy. And we talked. I talked with that part of the self and identified how it was helping. And I valued that resource and that strength and the anger that could be used to protect oneself.
[00:16:21] Amynah Dharani: So how are you treating people through hypnosis?
[00:16:24] Louis Damis: Well, people that have a dissociative identity disorder or multiple self states that are so distinct that they each have developed their own ways of perceiving, though the different cell states will evolve out of different contexts that people are going through. And whatever that context is, that's what it learns about. And sadly, with people with dissociative identity disorders, it's win lose, and they're the ones that are always going to lose. So when the mind senses something similar to this dynamics or situation, where a self state developed and identified a way of coping, that part may come forward to take over and will respond in the way that was the best way to manage things back then. And that's often very inconsistent with the current situation, and it may look strange. For instance, self harm. Sometimes people harm themselves for many different reasons and actually real situation. I worked with someone, and they had a pattern of re traumatization, of going back to situations where they would get assaulted again. And what happens is, because they've been assaulted so many times, as time passes and nothing has happened, the fear of it happening again increases. And a way to kind of end that fear is by having the assault, and that part will take them out to actually get assaulted, and then that calms it. And since that hadn't happened in a long time, I reached out to that part of the mind that did it, that took him out for this. And I says, how come? She said, if I didn't, they were going to kill themselves? So that fear was building up when you're in an uncontrollable situation, the only thing left is to be dead. And that's the last way that an individual, or the only way an individual can exert control. And sometimes just thinking about it or knowing that you can is empowering. But in this case, it was someone that was. The fear was escalating to the point where they thought something horrible was going to happen, and then the only solution was to be dead. So its other part made this event happen to prevent suicide from occurring.
[00:18:57] Amynah Dharani: So you would take this client into that state of trance, and in a case of did, what are you trying to do with. With this example that you've just given?
[00:19:11] Louis Damis: What goes on in the mind of someone with did is that the world they grew up in was win lose.
So somebody won. Somebody lost. So when a conflict emerges about, say, a perception of some kind of threat, you may see a conflict in parts that want to kill themselves, think that's the only way to solve this, and other parts that don't want to die. So there's conflict that emerges. And the model, the philosophy that covers the interactions and sets the goals is this win lose, because that's what they grew up learning about. So what you do is you want to impart on them a new philosophy, a new set of rules for problem solving and get to a win win. And over time, whenever you meet a part that's trying to do something, like, say, harm themselves, you want to understand how it's helpful, where it originated from, and then help it to identify other ways to accomplish whatever goal it was. Usually it's some kind of relief of some sort. And if there's a conflict between parts, it's not unusual in the beginning that parts think, well, the solution is we just got to get rid of that part. You know, we just got it. We got to kill that part and get it out of because it's causing trouble for us. But over time, as you meet each part and you engage with them and you talk with them and learn about why they're doing things and how they're trying to help and where it all came from, the other parts start to listen, and then they become more empathic themselves. So when conflicts come up, they may all go to the conference room that you've used before. And over time, they learn to work it out themselves and to say, okay, this part is trying to do it. There's a reason for it. In some way, they're trying to help. Let's understand that. And they internalize that philosophy, and that doctrine on how we can work together.
[00:21:11] Amynah Dharani: Do people with dissociative identity disorder, do they know they have this condition?
[00:21:19] Louis Damis: Sometimes? It's not at all unusual that they don't know in the beginning. And the first phase of working, once it becomes apparent, is disbelief, not wanting to believe this. And it takes a little while for them to reduce the fear of it. And little by little, as you begin to work with one part and another and get a couple parts working together, and they come to understand it. But we can take year, maybe longer, or even everything's going smooth for a while when the fact that it's apparent again to them, they still have a kind of phobia for it and don't want to believe it.
[00:22:00] Amynah Dharani: Right. It sounds dramatic, how it's been also portrayed.
[00:22:05] Louis Damis: What is dramatic is some of these misrepresentations of it in the media.
It's not been my experience that they want to harm anyone else themselves, not like serial killers, and they want to go out and harm people and they get something out of that. It's not at all like that. They're very, very wounded individuals. And the mind has split up like this. It's a complex form of adaptation to an irreconcilable experience. In childhood. When you're a caretaker, the person you're dependent on for everything is also your perpetrator, you get a conflict between approach and avoidance. So part of the mind wants to say, this is dangerous. I got to stay away. Another part says, this is where I go to get help and safety. And, in fact, that's one of the theories for why memories of abuse get repressed.
[00:22:57] Amynah Dharani: You bring me to that important point of the etiology or the beginnings of did, and we're going back to childhood for this.
[00:23:06] Louis Damis: Everyone that I've worked with that had it had horrific childhoods. There is some evidence that sometimes people can develop this capacity to have multiple cells without having that irreconcilable childhood that that splits the mind apart. And there's probably some biological ability or propensity to be able to dissociate to that degree that it creates these amnestic barriers.
[00:23:34] Amynah Dharani: Well, I'm wondering if I am a family member and one of my family members is unwell, has mental health needs, and they're such a spectrum of different mental health conditions.
What would be some visible signs?
[00:23:51] Louis Damis: Oh, usually those are often dramatic, like somebody was upset and trying to leave their house, and the spouse was trying to prevent them from leaving. And it activated the memories of horrible abuse in childhood. And a very strong protective part came out and punched them and broke their jaw. Another time, another individual had a fugue state. She just disappeared. And they got.
[00:24:21] Amynah Dharani: What does that mean, a fugue state?
[00:24:22] Louis Damis: A fugue state is when somebody basically ends up somewhere else almost living a different life and they have no memory for how they got there and why it's happening. I'm glad you mentioned that. So this individual disappeared from the family after several months. They got a detective and they found her at a college campus, enrolled in school and just having a great time partying with all the college students. And then they brought her home, and then that was a different part of herself. An altar, sometimes they call it, we call them self states now. And it's more than just an ego state because there's an amnestic barrier between them.
[00:25:06] Amynah Dharani: And what does that mean, an amnestic barrier between them?
[00:25:09] Louis Damis: Good question. They don't know about the other parts, and that part can go out and do something and the other parts of the mind have no knowledge of it. And in this case, that was a part of this person that liked to have fun and had a good time and was able to do that where other parts of the mind are holding the memories of the horrible abuse, thinking that the therapist is going to be doing the same thing to them that the abusers did, and fearing that, or sometimes having a flashback and a feeling that the past is recurring and then engaging in a behavior that will be protective.
[00:25:51] Amynah Dharani: That makes me sad to hear that, just to hear what somebody would have had to have endured for this coping mechanism to have occurred. This is how I'm understanding it.
[00:26:01] Louis Damis: Oh, absolutely. It's very. It's very sad and it's very heartbreaking. And sometimes when the memories of the assaults come out and they describe them, you know, it's heartbreaking for sure.
[00:26:15] Amynah Dharani: And I'm thinking for an individual to come to this place of I need treatment, they would have had a variety of different treatment processes. They would have tried out and eventually maybe come to someone like yourself.
[00:26:33] Louis Damis: On average, people have had a five or six therapy experiences before the actual diagnosis is made and they're treated for what is the surface looking symptom. One of my clients would abuse some substances, so they thought it was all substance abuse, but that wasn't it at all.
That was a concern, and you had to regulate the substance use, but it was really the dissociative identity under that was the problem boy.
[00:27:04] Amynah Dharani: And so that would really require someone with your level of experience to be able to even pull that apart. What part of it is a substance use. And to be in remission from that substance disorder. To be able to see the foundation of the mental health concern.
[00:27:20] Louis Damis: Yeah. Unlike the person that disappeared as a fugue state. They thought that that person had a substance abuse disorder, put her into substance abuse treatment. And it was the dissociative identity disorder that caused that disappearance. And that other part coming out on another person. It was the protective, angry part that punched the husband. One of the things Rick Hough has done a lot of work in the area of dissociative identity disorders. And one of the things that he said that I think is very important to appreciate.
It's not only a multiple identity disorder, it's a multiple reality disorder. So that when something gets activated that reminds the person of what happened, of something from the past, they start to see the whole reality as it was in the past. And it distorts what's the actual possibilities and potentials of the current environment.
[00:28:18] Amynah Dharani: That is a powerful understanding, because that really just explains also what they're responding to.
[00:28:23] Louis Damis: And one of the things that I talk to my clients about and I, when I teach, I say that the mind doesn't do anything without good reason. One exception. If somebody has a physiological psychotic condition and like delirium or something, that's a full blown florid psychosis where they're hallucinating and having delete illusions. And the brain isn't working in a way to be rational except for those types of situations. And especially in dissociative identity disorders, that everything they do, there's a reason for it. We can't see the reason for it when we look at the contemporary world. But if you get to understand that part and when they came into existence and what the conditions were, they came into existence and how they were, what they were doing to protect themselves or was the best coping solution at that time.
We can make sense of this and we can work together with them to find other ways to attain those goals.
Without doing something like reenacting and setting themselves up to be raped again resulted in some other way.
And when people have a dissociative identity disorder, Bruce Perry talks about how states become traits. When we're young, our mom. When you're young, if you're working with a child, you don't have to do a hypnotic induction. You can just tell them to now imagine this. And their minds are so flexible that they can, they go into trance states readily and all the time, even when they're just playing in normal waking states. But when you're so when you're young, there's a greater tendency to dissociate, and it's normal. It's not anything abnormal. But when you add traumatic experiences that drive extremer states of dissociation, and there's multiple occurrences of these extreme conditions and states that the brain learns to dissociate more readily, what was a state of just going there at one time now becomes a trait. So when distressed, the mind will quickly dissociate. And it's not unusual that as people integrate more and we resolve the internal conflicts and we bring parts to work together in each part of the mind. That or the alters, they often have two things. One is they have their own, sometimes unique set of skills and ways to handle things, and they all have some degree of energy. And as they begin to work together, that energy comes together, and they can be more effective and more powerful in accomplishing things. And they. You get a blend of the different skills, that part of the mind that punched the husband out and broke the jaw with the therapy and learning about things and coming forward, she learned skills from other parts of the mind. And in a more recent years, the police came to the house, and she knew how to cooperate with them to avoid getting arrested.
But those were the integration of the knowledge of other parts of that came together, so it made them. Made her much more effective. It's not just hypnosis. Hypnosis for accessing, if you want to say. Now in the more normal end of the continuum, ego states. And I have another example of ego states. We all have experiences, and we say, oh, that really pressed. That person knows how to press my buttons. And that's when somebody does something or says something that hits, like, a wound of yours. And that wound is probably tied to a more remote experience where someone did something that was very hurtful for you, so it triggers your defensive reaction.
Those are essentially ego states. Ego states are like little pockets of knowledge about situations and ways to handle them. In many ways, when we get into dissociative identities and altars, they start to have their own personality and characteristics, and they may even dress differently from others. That's a sign of an act of dissociative identity. So if people find in their closet unusual clothes that they didn't buy, that's a sign that there's another self state that's gone out and bought them, maybe wore them and went out and did things with them, and now they're in the closet, but you don't need to use. It's not going into trance that's important when you're talking about us with our buttons, the more when you get into the ego state dimension and normal people, we're aware of ourselves. I know I can be silly and play on the floor with my son, or I can have fun with my dog in ways.
And I'm different when I'm formally out here teaching or when I'm hanging out with friends or talking with my spouse. We behave differently. We have different sets of rules for our behavior, and those are more like ego states and for the more ego state kind of situations, going into that lightly altered state of consciousness can allow for greater access to these buttons or ego states.
You don't necessarily need to do that with the dissociative identity disorders. And much of the therapy goes on with dissociative identity disorders without using trance per se.
[00:34:21] Amynah Dharani: There's so much to learn about this condition. In closing, what would you like people to know about clinical hypnosis and the uses?
[00:34:32] Louis Damis: I'm glad you asked.
Clinical hypnosis is a wonderful tool, and what we want to do is teach everyone how to access their own hypnotic talents. People have varying degrees of hypnotic talents. About 10% of the population have very powerful hypnotic talents and have strong mind body connections and can produce some amazing things. Fortunately, most of us, about 60%, 70% of the population, have more average levels of hypnotic talents, and we can benefit from using them in the therapeutic states or interactions.
One of the beauties of hypnosis, of the lightly altered state of consciousness associates hypnosis, is that it allows the mind and brain to be more flexible. It becomes easier to think out of the box. Hypnosis is a wonderful way of generating emotional states. And I say here I emphasize positive emotional states.
Feelings of sense of safety is one of the first things that people with any kind of trauma background need to cultivate so that their brain and their mind learns at a very deep, implicit level that they can be safe. Most people that have had traumatic backgrounds, they don't feel safe at all. They're always on guard. They're hypervigilant. And that hypervigilance keeps their body in a physiological state of stress that plays a role in the development of physical conditions.
I just did a workshop on that included fibromyalgia and autoimmune disorders. And combat veterans are four more times greater likelihood of developing an autoimmune disorder. And it turns out that many of the autoimmune disorders have involved individuals that have had multiple prior traumatic experiences or major stressful events in their lives. So, and when you become hyper vigilant and you think the only way to maintain safety is by watching out for everything and worrying about everything. It creates a physical toll on the body as well as in our emotional state.
So we want to kind of. And hypnosis is a wonderful tool for creating a felt sense of a positive experience. And it's not thinking you're safe that helps you to become safe, it's feeling safe. And hypnosis is a wonderful tool for making the mind a little bit more flexible to do what we invite it to do in the service of itself. Not what I want people to do, but what's the best way for the individual to. Hypnosis can be a conduit for the evolution of experiences, of a positive state of fellow sense of safety, number one, and then positive sense of positive emotions or a sense of strength, empowerment, competency.
And in the context of creating those felt senses, that's what the mind takes in, into its implicit memory. And it'll get to some of the deeper, older things that really need to be modified for stable change to occur.
[00:37:55] Amynah Dharani: I wanted to thank you for taking your time to speak with us today, and I hope you will come back and talk about some other conditions and clinical hypnosis. Thank you.
[00:38:06] Louis Damis: Well, I thank you for the opportunity to share some accurate information about the nature of hypnosis and the ways it can be used to help people move forward to experience and do the things that are going to be healthy and enhancing for them. And you can't be made to do something that's not right for you. And I might add one more comment is that hypnosis won't. The mind is like every organ system in the body, and it's designed to maintain stability or homeostasis, as we call it. So if your mind is thinking one way, maybe it's not the ideal way, and you're experiencing in yourself is, you know, not a good enough person or not a competent enough person. You can't tell someone in hypnosis, well, now you're just going to be feel incredibly competent and wonderful about yourself all the time. Your mind won't let you go there, even if it's something positive. And when we use hypnosis, we want to invite people to kind of move in that direction at the amount that's right for them at that time and let the mind kind of gradually take in new information.
[00:39:20] Amynah Dharani: Thank you so much, Dr. Louis Damis.
[00:39:23] Louis Damis: My pleasure.
[00:39:26] Amynah Dharani: Welcome back. So what are your thoughts now about dissociative identity disorder and clinical hypnosis?
More specifically, how do you think these mental health concepts should be represented in the media?
Do you think that Hollywood has a responsibility to represent mental health in a more accurate way?
I'll tell you what I think.
I think that the popularity of documentary films on the rise more documentaries need to be made on mental health topics with accurate portrayals, including the struggles of individuals, families and communities.
I believe these films can be made using really good storytelling formats, and maybe Uber talented filmmakers such as M. Night Shyamalan could take on such projects.
If you have seen the movie split, you may remember that Shyamalan masterfully weaves the story of the main character as having a traumatic childhood.
What do you think? I'd really like to hear from you.
If you'd like to learn more about my private practice, you can go to thelifeinterrupted.com. in the meantime, please connect with The Love Vox on Facebook Instagram, and if you'd like to contribute to the show, please visit the show's website, thelovevox.com, where you can leave voicemails that can be featured on the show. And you can also contribute you to stories we are looking to feature. Until next time, stay passionate. Stay curious.
