Raped at age Six
Date: Spring, 1984. Place: Seattle. Client: Denise
Denise appeared on my doorstep in tears. She had come for help to eliminate the excess sixty pounds she’d been carrying around for a number of years. She was thirty-four years of age. She also disclosed that she was tired all the time, needing far too much sleep. And she felt that she needed to constantly watch her two daughters, ages seven and nine, in order to “protect them”.
In her first session, she proved to be a good subject for hypnosis, and entered into a medium trance rather quickly. A few hours later, however, she complained of not being able to fully “arouse” from the trance. Suggestions were given that she lay down and close her eyes in order to enter a nice state of relaxation. At that time, she was to count herself up, becoming fully awake. Later that evening, she called again with the same feeling of “sleepiness”. She was directed to get a good night’s sleep, after which she’d awaken in the morning “feeling wonderful and alert.” In the morning, she called once more, still indicating that she was quite sleepy.
I instinctively knew that her problem was not a matter of not coming out of the trance, but that she was trying to escape back into it. She was instructed to return that afternoon, at 2 p.m.
Back in my office, I took Denise very, very deep into hypnosis. In this state I used the phenomena of age regression, wherein the following details were disclosed: At age six, she had been raped by her babysitter’s husband, along with her five year old sister. She did not reveal anything immediately following this incident, up to the time her mother re-married. Denise was nine-years-old at the time.
Note: I did, however, uncover minute details about the rape which will not be discussed here. There are specific techniques for resolving traumatic issues in deep hypnosis, followed by direct suggestions for concious amnesia of the events in order to protect the client.
For the next two years, she was repeatedly raped by her stepfather and by his two sons. She had no present conscious memory of these occurrences. In deep hypnosis, however, she revealed the minutest detail. In trance tears flowed like rain, and at the end of our first two-hour session, she was emotionally exhausted. I intentionally created amnesia for the session, and she only observed that she’d done a “lot of crying”. After five more two-hour sessions, Denise terminated therapy. Neither she nor I felt that she needed any further work.
About a month later, Denise’s husband called me, stating that it seemed as if he was living with a new woman. She’d already lost fifteen pounds; she jumped out of bed at six o’clock every morning; and she let her kids play with their friends, without Denise watching over them.
On that last day when Denise left my office, she gave me a long hug. Holding back tears of joy, she revealed that while she rarely read the newspaper, she’d felt impressed to pick it up that day where she happened upon my ad regarding hypnosis. She felt as if fate had brought us together. And perhaps, it had.
Update: At the time of this writing, it has been seventeen years since I last saw Denise. One day, as I was teaching a class, I happened to relate the above story. After class, a young woman came up to me and asked if I happened to know the last name of Denise. I told her that I couldn’t recall it. She told me that the woman I had just spoken about was her mother. Coincidentally, she was Denise’s seven-year-old daughter. I was shocked by this revelation, especially since it was so many years later, and more than 600 miles from the location of the sessions. What were the odds of running into her daughter? They had to be enormous.
She felt it was an ironic twist of fate, as it had only been in the week before my class when her mother had told her most of what she, herself, had recalled about those events. Though I’d created amnesia for Denise at the time, information slowly came to the surface as the years rolled by. I had given the following suggestion to her, subconsciously. (When I speak directly to the innermost mind I refer to it as if it were a distinctly separate person.)
Therapist: You will not need to reveal any of this information to Denise, when you bring her back to full conscious awareness. You will decide if and when it is important for her to know any of the details. If you would like to let her know some of what we’ve just discussed, that will be up to you. You will reveal what you want, in your own time.
I did get a chance to meet with Denise again shortly after my conversation with her daughter. She began by telling me some of what she remembered. It didn’t bother her to know. We did resolve one interesting issue that day which had caused a bit of curiosity over the years. I asked her what information had come to the surface. She remembered that the rape happened in a trailer behind her babysitter’s house.
At this point, I asked if she could remember the color of that trailer. She could not. I told her it was green. With a look of relief, she said, “You know, I’ve hated green things all these years, and never knew why? I forced myself to eat green bell peppers a few years ago. I really liked them but the color always threw me off. Thank you for clearing that up.”
Denise is a happy woman. She got divorced about two years after the therapy. She said that I had, inadvertently, opened her eyes to the abuse taking place in her marriage. She’s still divorced and very content with her life. Her sister, incidentally, is heavily into black magic, devil worship and other dark things. She does not want any help.