Introduction

This week, I speak with James Harrison. James is a clinical hypnotist, a life enrichment coordinator for elders, and an author. He’s about to help us understand the link between neuroscience and hypnosis. Listen up, because here we go with the neuroscience of hypnosis, insights into the brain, with James Harrison.

Welcome to Super States. I’m here with James Harrison, James, I’m excited to have you on the show.

Yeah, I’m glad to be here. What do you want to say to start?

James, why don’t you start by describing what you do and let us know how that makes a difference in people’s lives.

James’s Work and Background

Sure, these days, I’m a Life Enrichment coordinator in an elder care facility. I work with folks with dementia and complex mental health problems, and it’s kind of an extended mind model where I’m helping them do task completion, which is part of what gets hard with age and with dementia. People can follow through less and less, but with somebody there to help them, they can have a good day. They can ground and orient to reality, often, not all the time. It’s a pretty cruel thing that happens to the brain. It’s literally degenerative, but I came into that after kind of a long history of doing Jungian Shadow Work, becoming a clinical hypnotist, and now I’m writing a book on clinical hypnosis.

From my experience working in a hard science medical institution, trying to explain it to the doctors and nurses that I work with, who, depending on where they went to school and what their training was like, they may or may not be ambivalent about hypnosis, and every hypnotist has come across this 1000 times in our career. You know, I took that idea to our medical director. Could I do a pain clinic? Could I do this or that? Long story short, the book comes out of that. Is there a way to describe what we do in clinical hypnosis that is distinct from psychotherapy and that kind of approach that dovetails with current neuroscience? So, you know, long story short, that’s a piece of my path.

Yeah. And, you know, I really, one of the things I appreciate about you, James is you kind of have an art, an artist background, right? You’re, you were a sculptor for many years and that shifted when you started moving into the Jungian Shadow Work and hypnosis, but the work that you do like you’re not necessarily hanging up a “I’m a hypnotist” shingle. You’re using all these skills that you’ve got to make a difference. I want to say it’s not exactly like a small scale, like it’s making a big difference, but it’s doing making a big difference for these individuals that are at the end of their life, really, and it’s palliative care, is what we call it.

Hypnosis and Deep Work

There’s a thing. I mean, I was, you know, I did clinical hypnosis before COVID, and I kind of tended to fall into doing deep, really deep dive work with folks, like two and three hour sessions, a lot of past life regression. I love doing that kind of work. It’s a mystical experience for the practitioner and the client, but it’s kind of weird to you know, oh, it’s noon, I gotta go get a sandwich, having a profound experience, and then you can’t really talk about it, because you you know, without, you know, your client, privacy and that sort of thing, so a couple of those a day, it’s kind of a trip.

And when COVID hit, I’m like, I’ve got to switch it up. And I ended up, you know, there’s a backstory, but I ended up working in a care facility with 40 beds, and I love it because it’s dated, it’s daily contact with lots of folks. And, you know, the artist part of me was about, I kind of did large, large scale reenactments of or my attempt at healing childhood trauma around some really bad stuff that happened to me and a lot of us in this line of work, if we’re empathic, or some version of that, of having special senses, if you will, it’s often because of things adversity that we went through.

So the art became an arena where I was safe and had control and could manifest something from another realm, in a way. I mean, I’m not sure how else to put it, I worked in material, but it taught me how to connect ideas and material, the immaterial and the material. So that skill doesn’t hasn’t left me. I just the focus is not on healing myself anymore. It’s on working with others and community and making that safe. Because it is about safety, we get folks that come to our facility and, you know, I often say they come in hot. Sometimes they’re off the street, and the first thing is to make them feel safe.

Neuroscience and Hypnosis

The parts of our brain that process where we are, it all happens top of brain, parietal, dorsal stuff, and it’s that’s all happens up here. It’s fast. It’s the fastest thing that happens when stuff goes from our eyes back to what they call the, you know, occipital lobes in v1 and then it shoots up. Then another split that happens is the wet stream. So where am I? Happens? First, am I safe in this environment? And then what’s going on? Not surprisingly, if you think about it, happens between the ears and the mouth, right very midbrain, the semantic part of our brain. What’s going on? Naming things takes a beat longer.

So I see that every day, all day with my folks, they’ll come into a room and they’re looking around. So I call their name, smile, do all the postural stuff to link up with them, and then I can help them find a seat. And it’s, yeah, it’s absolutely what the philosophers call extended mind, which is the idea that we all complete each other, right? Or that in a social setting, somebody else is compensating for what you don’t know, and you’re doing the same for them and, etc. Turns out I love it, you know, I couldn’t do the job if I weren’t a hypnotist. I’ll put it that way. See, a lot of caregivers just bonk because they get mad that somebody has OCD and dementia, or they get mad that somebody forgot or but it’s like, no, you are the missing link for that person. You know, then it, then it can go well and be beautiful.

I think that hypnotists tend to have developed a certain way of listening, of being present with people, because we’re calibrating, we’re tracking our clients, to give them what they need. And not all, not all therapists even do that. So it’s kind of a unique skill that most. Guiding people.

Hypnosis vs. Traditional Therapy

It’s not so that, you know, I think the short answer on that is a lot of Western psychodynamic current therapy modalities, and undoubtedly there’s a zillion of them. But generally in the talk therapy world, it’s called relational, or it’s considered relational you and the therapist building a relationship that mirrors or mimics how the person behaves in the outside world. And sooner or later, you’re going to get mad at the therapist, and then you have a something to work on, or, you know, that sort of thing. It’s like hypnosis. We don’t do that, and we’re we’re guiding people.

So like you say, we calibrate like I have a patient who she’s not with us anymore. Lovely woman has Parkinson’s, and from what we understand about Parkinson’s, it’s where the insula in the midbrain stops producing dopamine, or slows down, you know, to a trickle producing dopamine, so the person’s motor sensory system has a hard time initiating, right? But, and this is not universal, but for some folks, you can get them going by entraining with them. So with this woman, I could entrain with her, very subtle, like I’m doing with my shoulders now, right? And that would get her, she would start to do this. And eventually, you know, during bingo, I would play love shack. Well, that’s her favorite song. She would get up eventually, you know, we’d do this, we’d mirror each other and dance, right? She got to where I wouldn’t even have to entrain her. After a couple months of it, she would just get up when she heard love shack, and she would dance for six minutes. It’s a long song.

So, you know, occupational therapy and physical therapy come in the room and like, oh shit. What are you doing? James, yeah, she’s fine. And they came to see like she is. It’s like, once she got going. So is she borrowing my dopamine? I don’t know. I’m not going to make claims like that, but she was able to get her own going. Is that a mirror neuron thing. Maybe the research on mirror neurons is kind of 50/50, right now, the research on mirror neurons that you and I have them, and we’re watching, and it’s the basis of empathy that jumps the gap from one person to another. And the research on that is not very old. It’s a decade, and some started in monkeys, but practically speaking, a lot of what I see in the hypnosis world that we’re aware of is we do experience stuff like that. It’s like, well, if you call it mirror neurons, that sure seems like what’s happening now with me, entraining with this person, is the science there? Yet maybe it’s working on it. Sometimes it’s saying no and we’re still saying yes. You know, that’s okay. We just have to, as long as we’re open to studying the science and accepting when it tells us we’re wrong, pivoting and being open to, you know, science doesn’t know everything. There’s plenty of metaphysical realms. It just isn’t really set up to deal with. And we’re kind of, you know, a bit of a foot in each world is what it seems like.

So, but we’re definitely doing stuff that psychology doesn’t really touch on, and it’s because we guide people through state change, right? So, you know, she’s this, this woman is in a rigid state where she can’t move, or where she’s got tremors, and gradually, by doing this, she gets into a flow state, you know, and then, I mean, the outcome of it is, it’s not like her Parkinson’s goes away. Her body’s still physiological, or biologically, is not producing dopamine, you know, how much can we do about that? I don’t know. I’m not a doctor. I don’t know the medical side of you know, can you take a dopamine pill? Well, maybe that’s called Sugar, I don’t know, but for those few minutes, she has a good day, and she gets the rush of all the other good neurotransmitters that make her feel loved and safe, and she got some exercise. So, you know, we’re not there to cure stuff. Just give somebody a better day or a reframe. And it’s very different from folks in midlife. Working with elders.

The Book on Clinical Hypnosis

So as you’re writing this book, I know that you have been doing this for, I don’t know, about a little over a year now, I think, and really been working with scientists as well. You know, you’ve made different connections with them on Well, it used to be called Twitter, whatever Twitter.

Elon Schmuck,

Can you share some of the biggest learnings that you’re getting from the book?

So it’s this is crazy stuff. One of the things I thought is like, well, if I’m going to try to prove hypnosis to the folks I work with and or the medical community or heal the rift with hypnosis and medicine. First of all, it’s a tall order, and it’s a ridiculous thing to try. Who am I? I don’t have degrees in this stuff, but I’m, you know, I can read, and I’m 56 I kind of feel like I got nothing to lose. So why don’t I start by trying to disprove hypnosis, because good scientific type of process. So I started reaching out to neuroscientists on Twitter and asking them questions in reading the current literature, it’s like, I don’t want to hear another reframe from the hypnosis end of what hypnosis is, there’s crazy amounts of that, right? But I want to hear from neuroscience, what you know? What are they doing right now?

And I just started seeing a ton of parallels to the kind of work we do. One of the first folks to really just be open to me talking to him is a researcher, a neuroscience researcher at Boston University, and I remember saying to him one of Melissa Tiers’ terms, where she talks about self directed neuroplasticity. I said, Well, that’s how we describe hypnosis. And I went into that with him, and he goes, James, we just call that learning. So learning’s a thing is learning is possible. And he’s like, yes, learning is is fine. You’re on, you’re on solid footing with the idea that learning is possible. So we might call it self directed neuroplasticity, or neuroplasticity, but to neuroscientists, it’s learning. And of course, they study learning quite a bit, in fact. So that was a fun moment of going, Okay, we all have our lingo and our terminology.

It’s not the easiest thing to wade into. But for some reason, at least for a while, and still, even at even with Twitter imploding around us, and I can’t wait to leave personally, but I’ve got so many contacts and saved documents and research papers there, moving them over, but It’s kind of a water cooler. So you have neuroscientists from all over the world who share papers with each other, and you know they don’t, they don’t know who I am, but if I can ask a decent question, oftentimes they’re happy to to answer it. And in that space, there’s a ton of philosophers who work in what’s called philosophy of mind, which is the study of consciousness, right? Anybody interested in that, and in our field, I’m getting less preoccupied with that, because, man, talk about a rabbit hole philosophy of mind. Don’t go there, if you can avoid it. It’s It’s intense. It’s very, very intense.

I’m much more skirting the the way scientists view it is all about causality and what they would call physicalism or materialism, and cause and effect. And then how does you know that you’ll you hear the term emergence a lot more these days, that you know the parts add up to more than the whole. That you can’t look at a carbon atom and predict it could be both a lump of coal and a diamond. So how does that property, as they would say, emerge through complexity. And then, you know, when you get into the brain, it’s, we’re going from the old place based model in the brain, which was what phrenology was, which folks have heard of you? Know that this happens in this part. This happens in this part, which is not untrue. It’s it’s not a terrible model, but you have to add in the network property of the brain.

So the brain has gray matter in places, and they often do tasks that are well task specific things, but the brain is so unbelievably networked that, you know, like you hear the phrase the limbic brain all the time, right? Sure, yeah, well, it’s that, you know, the the lead folks like Luis Pessoa, like, sorry, not accurate anymore. When you look at what lights up during, let’s say, fear, it’s not just the amygdala, you know, it’s not it a whole bunch of stuff lights up in any given task state. So I’ll go into this a little bit, because it is interesting. There’s what we call task states, which is somebody doing something, right? Okay? You know, picking your nose, farting, singing opera using the telephone. Oh, I go to the old fashioned folks. So what, you know, what’s going on when I do that? That’s, that’s a task state. And then there’s resting states.

20 years ago, a researcher named Marcus Raichle wanted to test what lights up in the brain during task states versus resting states. So in between states, this kind of stuff, if you’re a hypnotist, you’re like, Oh yeah, you know it, it kind of all rhymes, right? So you would think that resting states or zoning out in between doing this and that you’d be using less energy, less wattage. It’s not true. They discovered that you use just as much wattage in a so called resting state. So that’s led to a flurry of research, and where it’s what I started gleaning from looking at things like that. And then there’s a very highly regarded, maybe dean of the neuroscientist named Steven Grossberg. He and his wife, Gail Collins, came up in the early 80s with this idea called adaptive resonance. And I can go into detail on

that, but in a nutshell, it’s fits with the oscillatory model of this, then that this, than that, all day long, this than that, with every task always weighing in comparison, comparing things. I’m like, this is a lot like Association and dissociation, you know? And I’m like, Well, if hypnosis is a thing, it has to have, there’s, there’s got to be an evolutionary reason, right? I mean, it otherwise, it’s a weird parlor trick that Mesmer came up with, or, you know, like, that’s not very satisfying, so there’s got to be a reason.

So I’m thinking about adaptive resonance, and I’m thinking about Association and dissociation and task states versus resting states. It’s like, to me, they it’s like they feel like they’re talking about the same thing or then, and so to me, it occurred what, you know, let’s follow that way, way, way, way back to me, it’s foraging. It goes back to approach something or avoid something. It’s, you know, hunt for food, gather resources or fight or run away, right?

And that goes way back. So holding this wonderful book called brain architecture, understanding the basic plan. And I highly recommend that for hypnotist, it’s such a good read. But, you know, he traces, he starts with the with the brain of a flatworm and of sponges. And really, you know, basic creatures like flatworms, and builds up from there. And what happens is, you know, we did a lot of things without a nervous system before we had a nervous system. So not everything’s neural. We learned approach and avoid before we had a nervous system. And when I say we, I mean, you know, the animal kingdom, our ancestors going back to bacteria.

So if we had to approach or avoid, you know, that gives you a 50/50 shot of getting it right. Well, I should have avoided that. You know, x is over the eyes. You’re dead, start again. So life is another generation, and after a while from that, my conjecture is that that’s how memory, or the reason there was so much pressure for memory to develop, is because I don’t know death is kind of costly, right?

Yes.

So if you had a way to compare so early memory is comparison, so you’re comparing what’s happening in front of you to what you recall having had happened. And to go from what has happened to just flip it into what we would colloquially call the future, would be a super useful skill to have, right? So here I am in this moment. Here’s this giant thing with teeth in front of me. I am not sure if it’s smiling or salivating. Oh, I remember seeing what it did to Uncle Fred. I’m going to check out right now. So what a useful skill.

So that, to me, is like the basis of association dissociation, and it’s the reason that hypnosis works. We guide some folks. We got our folks into a slow state where they can compare the thing that happened to them to what’s real now, what’s real and true in the moment, they can go, okay, because their system is not jacked up in fight or flight, right? And that’s, I mean, that’s it. That’s why what we do works so well, because it’s a non cognitive thing. And now there’s great research papers that do describe all the you know, hypnosis. Hypnotist folks know all about brain waves and alpha, beta, gamma, delta, theta. There’s really good research on the oscillatory aspects of that so, but I’m going to pause and breathe a lot of stuff. So you know that that’s where I’m at.

Okay, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s fascinating how we are at this place where we’re learning so much now about the brain, and we can measure it like, where before it wasn’t really, yeah, getting better at measuring it. Before we could make some guesses. But now you can actually put somebody in a in a machine and find out exactly how their brain is working in

Historical Context of Hypnosis and Neuroscience

You’re pointing out something that’s critical. If you rewind the clock to the there is a very specific moment. This is something I wanted to search for. Why did hypnosis get kicked out of the crib? Why did we get separated out from medicine? Because up until 1900 we were pretty central. And so there’s a guy. Some folks have heard of him. His name was Sigmund Freud. He was a neuroscientist. And there was another neuroscientist named Santiago, Ramon y Cajal. He’s less famous in America, super he’s on the money in Spain, baby. So he’s very famous in Spain. They were contemporaries and Freud, and they were both neuroscientists.

So Cajal spent his time literally drawing what he saw of neurons in the microscope, and Freud decided that he couldn’t figure out what we would now call the neural correlates of consciousness. You know, how mechanistically the brain creates your sense of you? So he thought, well, I’m going to try to, instead of figuring out the brain, I’m going to try to figure out the mind. So that’s when, literally 100 years ago, right now, maybe 103 years ago, his famous book, the name spacing on me, but the one where he goes into ego and ID and super ego came out 100 and some odd years ago, like 103 years ago.

So that was Freud’s conjecture, because he couldn’t see it in the brain. He was going to come up with, do his best attempt to come up with a framework that described the inner workings. Well, they’re so wrong, they’re not even. And wrong, which is the term this German physicist came up with when something’s just, you know, completely off base. So Freud was not even wrong. We can still use the term subconscious and unconscious. You know that that’s fine in a very generalized way. But it turns out Ramon y Cajal was Santiago. Ramon y Cajal, the Spaniard, was much, much, much more correct. And the reason was he did the first drawings that showed basically a cognitive loop going up and a motor sensory loop going down.

And really you could say the subconscious is the motor sensory loop. Sure, you could say the unconscious is interoception, which is all the internal feeling stuff that happens, everything from a hot flash in menopause to a surge of adrenaline, to I need to take a poop, to I feel in love. That’s all varieties of interoception, right? And we’ve tended to lump all of interoception into kind of one boat, if you will. And a lot of what we do in the hypnosis world is tease that out for people, whether we’re talking about the chakras as a metaphor for, well, you know, that’s different parts along your enteric nervous system and your autonomic nerve

Clusters of nerve endings?

We, guess what? We have clusters of nerve endings around our organs. Oh, my God, who thought, you know? So, you know, you look at like the wisdom traditions of cultures that came up with things like chakras. Well, it’s not surprising, you know, we actually have that, and the parasympathetic is way, way slower than the sympathetic system, so because it’s doing something different. So no wonder when you have somebody slow down, breathe, slowly, get into a slower brainwave state. Now, tell me what’s true for your heart in this moment. Whoosh, you know, all kinds of good stuff comes up, or, you know, I mean, I’m sure other folks do this, like, okay, we’re talking to your kidneys today. Or we’re talking, you know, we’re gonna talk, we’re gonna go in and talk to your lungs. Were gonna and I remember thinking, that’s fucking weird, but when you do it as a hypnotist, you’re like, No, it it works.

You slow down enough, and it’s, it’s kind of like you move everything else out, and you create space for the person’s lungs to really talk to the person in the way that they haven’t heard in a long time, or they’ve suppressed the signal. Or, you know, that can be a real profound thing to do with the smoker, and that’s interoception. So we have much, much, much, much, much more fine grained and accurate ways of talking about it than Freud did, because at the time, it was considered that the brain told the organs what to do, and there wasn’t considered to be a reporting relationship back, right? And that’s afferent and efferent, so the signals coming in turn out to be important, the philosophers call that the brain in a vat that we can’t like consciousness would not exist for a brain in a vat. Or Antonio Damasio talks about it, the somatic marker hypothesis. You need all of this, all of your body. You know, this isn’t your brain. This is your whole spinal column, your skin, your body, your guts. It’s all your brain. It’s much better to think of it that way, reporting back in so we’re really having to shake Freud off.

So in the book, I take Occam’s razor to Freud. It’s fun with with Ramon y Cajal’s help. You know, Freud’s been killed in a lot of ways. A lot of Freud’s great, you know, I, I love it, I, I enjoy it, but it’s just it was the best attempt 100 years ago. We really need to get past it now. But you know, given the term unconscious or subconscious, still, you know, kind of useful, but it it misleads people. So, you know, when people realize, like, Oh, you mean, I can talk to my heart, oh, I can listen to what different parts of my body is saying and not just try to block that feeling. Yeah, it’s okay to listen. It’s okay if that part is angry at you, if you listen to it, maybe we can repair the relationship. You know, whatever it is, right?

Yeah, it’s it for whatever reason, it just came back to how you interact with your people, with your with the dementia people.

I run a card game in the afternoons, and it’s beautiful, because each person around the table has very, very different mental health and dementia needs to complete their portion of the game. So I come home, I’m dripping with sweat from that one, but it’s really lovely. It’s fun. And then you create group cohesion, and the you know this schizophrenic will help that schizophrenic and this OCD person will help that bipolar person, but I don’t diagnose, I’m just that’s what’s on their charts, you know. So we all need each other. I’ll put it that way, like I need them. My God, it’s great, you know. And I don’t, you know, once I get the book done, I do want to re ramp up my private practice, because I love it, but I also love the group stuff. So who knows? You know, open to the mystery, bro.

Yeah, here we go. I love it. When, when do you expect to have your book ready to be published?

Book Details and Publication Plans

So the good news is, I’m writing the last part, but as a way to force some aspects of the the middle, the first the first third is done. The second third is pretty close. I know what I want to say. It’s just kind of I’m a 12 to one guy. It takes me about a dozen passes on any given part of the book to make it well, let’s use the word readable, but also enjoyable and entertaining. And you know, it’s dense subject matter, on the one hand, but I don’t want to stray from my lane too much. So to answer your question, I’m aiming to be done before next summer, and hopefully sooner than that. But I do, and I do want to say the name of the book, because I haven’t said that.

Oh yeah, let’s hear it.

So it’s called The Four Diamonds of clinical hypnosis, bridging neuroscience and Western medicine. And the quick walk through the Four Diamonds are, let’s say, four strong cornerstones, if you will, of neuroscience that aren’t really in dispute. They just have good, solid research behind each of them, and they are things that we do already as hypnotists. So the first diamond is state change. The second diamond is interoception, which we’ve been talking about. The third diamond is the reverse of that exteroception, the external perception, the stuff that orients you in the world. So typically eyes and ears and smell, you know.

So there’s like feeling inside, feeling outside, noticing outside,

Yeah. And then the last one, I’m using the term predictive processing, which actually comes from AI, but it’s a another way of saying memory, the our bodies, our brain system, is continually feeding us what it thinks we want next, right? So, you know, walking down the sidewalk, someone’s coming. They’re on the same side as me. Oh, I need to switch sides of the sidewalk. Do you say that to yourself? Well, in one way or another, it happens, right? So that sort of thing. And then you, you know, you get up, and you look back up, and the person switched as well. And then you got to do another postural repositioning, because your brain predicted incorrectly based on prior information that you had.

So we all know like habituation is the word we use in the Hypno world. So predictive processing goes into the memory systems and then the intero and the exteroception is like, again, think of your whole body, your skin, everything as maybe a recept, like all these finely tuned different ways of apprehending information. About yourself and the world, and so it’s way beyond what hypnotists call VAKOG, visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, gustatory. Yeah, that’s just five. There’s a there’s a lot. It’s a big number, like there’s ion channels in the skin alone that report touch and pain and pleasure and temperature, right? And that ain’t the nervous system. That’s a different thing. And of course, there’s nerves that also detect pain and pleasure, blah, blah, blah.

So there’s a tremendous amount you’ve got, one bookend of memory, another bookend of state change, and in the middle is our guts and our experience. And you know, how are you feeling in an aroused state? How are you feeling in a relaxed state in a given circumstance? And what is your brain remembering and telling you to do? Because, honestly, it’s more efficient for your brain to just feed you something than for you to have to think, sure and that there’s a ton of research on that. It’s in general, if folks hear the term free energy principle, and Dr Karl Friston, that’s what that is, kind of referring to it just takes less wattage to do the habit, baby.

So if you want a new habit, guess what? You got to put some inner new energy into the system. But that’s okay, like it’s just for a while, and it’s totally worth it. So if you think of your habit like a trough, right? We’re down here. Well, I want to be in this other trough over here. So there’s a peak in between that we got to get over right? We already do that all the time. So it’s not hard for our bodies to go from peak to trough to peak to trough. We do it constantly. You know? It’s just finding what works for that what motivates that person to get over that peak into the into a new trough that’s waiting for them?

What do you hope that this book? What kind of effect do you hope that your book will have?

I hope neuroscientists read it and go, Yeah, this is, this is fine. There’s nothing outlandish in it. It’s, it’s trying to shoot right down the middle on that, not make metaphysical propositions that can’t be tested. I want to reunite my my ultimate goal is for clinical hypnotists to be accepted on medical teams. So tall order, but hey, I’m I’m 56 I’m shooting my shot, so I’m on a medical team right now, and that’s part of it, because I look at the at the job description I have, it’s perfectly accept. So I’m a Life Enrichment coordinator in you know, that’s the hat that I’m wearing here. It’s perfectly fine. They encourage me to elicit people’s creativity and imagination all day long, where I work, well, that’s half of hypnosis, right there.

And then there’s other folks on the team, like occupational therapists, who are concerned with task completion and habituation. And how can we help retrain this person to use a walker or a wheelchair, that sort of thing, or this person has had a stroke now they can’t use their right side as much. They need to compensate with their left until so we’re already on the team, and then the physical therapists do a lot of the physiological work. Well, you know, the roots of hypnosis really go back to physiology. So what all I’m saying is we do a lot of the same things, but there are things that make us unique from each of those fields and unique from therapy or mental health interventions. And that’s the guide stuff. We’re really good at eliciting states with, you know, voluntary cooperating folks who want to have that happen.

You know the media and, you know the world painting of what hypnotists do is this involuntary mind control, whack a doodle, shit. And I hate it. It’s like, it’s not even wrong, but it, you know, it’s out there. It’s not, it’s not

what we do. I’m, I’m not interested. You know, it’s unbelievably unethical to try to get somebody to do something they don’t want to do, like, I’m not in that game at all. So the goal of the book is to show how easy. Way it would be to have clinical hypnosis as a complimentary adjunct to the medical field. So that’s the goal. You know, I got other thoughts. I’m not putting them in the book. It’s like, No. Keep it as narrow and as I can.

I’m actually trying to keep the book at about 200 pages. I don’t want it to be a long read. It might be a little bit difficult. Hey, you know, it’s challenging material. I’ve had to grow and stretch, but I’m hopefully putting it in an understandable way. It’s not going to be as dense as reading the neuroscience research papers, and for those who do want to do that, all that will be in there, sure, but I’m also, at the, at the end of the book, I’m going to put, like a cheat code. I’ve got like a, it’s about a 15 page section of here’s the book in a nutshell. If you’re getting stuck, just refer to this. You know, it’s all pictographic. I can do diagrams and say, you know, here’s, here’s what we’re talking about. Here’s a picture of Freud, here’s a picture of Cajal duking it out like, these are, this is where the split happened.

You know, and psychology is really having a crisis since the, you know, they call it the replication crisis that kind of started in the 90s, 2000s where folks were research researchers are coming along and dusting off psychology papers and trying to replicate the results and Finding they couldn’t do it. And so, you know, psychology is it’s in a tight spot, as they say, so I’m taking advantage of that. Could I be wrong? I’ll probably be wrong about some things, you know, hopefully I’ll be either right or pointing in the right direction on others.

But it just seemed to me, the model of hypnosis that I learned just feels like it’s dated and goes back to the 50s and is just like, I’m like, nobody talks this way anymore. So I want to, I want to hear it from the neuroscientists. What do they do? They do study interoception and exteroception and memory and state, like, of course, they study that stuff, you know, volume, you know, huge, huge, huge amounts of stuff come out on that. So we’re, I hope, to put us on good footing going forward.

So it’s actually, you know, I’m like, Oh, God, is this going to piss off hypnotists or what? The more I write it. I’m like, No, this is, like, really good for us. Yeah, it’s kind of what we’ve needed. So, you know, maybe I’m guilty of writing what we’ve needed, you know, that’s maybe, you know, that’s my cognitive bias, and that’s, you know, science is let the chips fall. But I think there’s plenty of let the chips fall where they may in the book, and we’ll see. You know, could be a nothing burger. Could get crickets? I hope not. I hope folks will read it. I’m trying to make it merciful. Well, 700 page book for my first book.

Yeah, it sounds really fascinating, like you’ve done a ton of research and talk to all kinds of people. I’m excited to to read this when, when you’re ready to release it?

Ready, we’re ready. You know, it’s like,

If somebody wants to stay in touch with you if they want to learn more about you? James,

Contact Information and Final Thoughts

I am on, let’s see. Well, James M harrison.com, is my website, and that’s just, you know, I’m not a huge social media guy. I’m on Twitter, and blue sky, which was the guy who made Twitter in the first place? Jack Ramsey, Dorsey. Dorsey, yeah, yeah, you know, whatever. Another, maybe strange person.

I don’t Okay,

But I’ve been on Twitter since the 1800s I got on it maybe day two. You know, they’re pretty early, so I’m definitely on Team fuck Elon Schmuck, but so there’s an alternative, and a lot of interesting folks are going to blue sky. Okay, so I’m there, and I’m on Facebook in the in the hypnosis channels, I pay attention to that stuff. So if somebody has a question, like David Snyder has this great evidence based hypnosis channel on Facebook for more of the sciency folks. Um. You know, I came out of the woo world in a lot of ways. That was my intro. Was shadow work. But right now I’m doing the science stuff,

So I’ll make sure to, I’ll make sure to have links to all those different places that you just okay, just described in the show notes. And if there was, if there’s one thing that you want people to leave with today. What? What is that, James,

Do your own shadow work in midlife, in group settings? Or what I should, I should say is, don’t do that. That’s what worked for me. You know, so full disclosure, but it’s the non cognitive, non thinking type of work that I think is the most profound, getting in touch with the parts of yourself that you don’t want the outside world to see, that you hide or repress or deny. My intro to it came through doing it in a group where they don’t let you off the hook as long as you agree to be there. You know that that kind of stuff is best addressed when you’re fully cognitively intact and have a lot of agency in midlife, because by end of life, it’s too late.

Like, I’m not trying to fix my folks at end of life. I’m just trying to love on them and make them feel safe. And, you know, God knows, I get to go buy beer and cigarettes for them. Like, what the hell you know, here I am a hypnotist, but they don’t want to stop smoking or drinking. That’s their coping mechanism. And so, you know, I’m not there to change them. I’m there to love on them. But you know, for all of you middle aged folks who are cognitively intact and interested in this kind of work, do every modality under the sun till you find what resonates for you, and then be a helper. We need more helpers. The world’s got enough hot heads.

Love it. Thank you so much for your time today, James, it’s been fascinating to talk with you.

Love it. Josh, good to see you. Thanks very much.