Healing Childhood Trauma with Alchemical Hypnotherapy
as developed by David Quigley
Reprinted from the Journal of The American Board of Hypnotherapy, Fall, 1994

Alchemy has traditionally been associated with the transmutation of base metals into gold. But the ancient Alchemists made clear in their writings that the substance of their transformation was the human soul. Their goal was the transmutation of the base metals of human emotions and instincts within the subconscious mind into the gold of self-realization. The vehicles of this transformative process were the archetypes, the Inner Guides.

Thus Alchemy can be defined as the spiritual discipline of working with Inner Guides. These powerful and autonomous beings live within the subconscious mind and can guide us effectively to health, happiness, relationships, prosperity, and most important, the fulfillment of our spiritual purpose! These Guides can be accessed through the hypnotic state.

Alchemical Hypnotherapy is a therapeutic process designed to assist the client in working with their Inner Guides to change their lives. Alchemical Hypnotherapy synthesizes techniques from many modern schools of Transpersonal Hypnotherapy and Psychology. It includes, Gestalt, Regression Therapy, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), Psychosynthesis and Shamanism with the ancient science of Alchemy as translated and channeled to the modern world by Dr. Carl Jung.

Specifically, Alchemical Hypnotherapy, as developed by David Quigley, includes all the following processes:

• The rescue of the inner child from the trauma, neglect, emotional pain of the past.
• Providing the inner child with new loving parents and the experiences of a nurturing childhood. We create with you a loving inner world in which someone is always there to hear and respond to your needs.
• Strategies for contacting, testing, and working with the Inner Guides (archetypes) through trance, movement, and shamanic practices.
• Contacting past-life memories within the collective unconscious to access creative abilities, resolve trauma, change karma, and alter contracts with significant others.
• Integration of sub-personalities (different voices within ourselves) to resolve conflicting desires and goals. This leads to the unification of the will and the achievement of dreams.

One of the primary goals of psychotherapy has been the healing of depression, anxiety, chronic anger, and other emotional disorders, as well as the alleviation of psychosomatic diseases whose source is in the client's suppressed emotions. As hypnotherapists, we are constantly encountering our clients' childhood pain and trauma while attempting to assist them in behavioral changes. David Quigley has developed some revolutionary new technologies for the rapid healing of these childhood memories. He calls his process "Emotional Clearing Therapy." This article will show how these new strategies of healing childhood traumas, accelerates the solving of these emotional problems.

Psychological research has strongly indicated that our patterns of emotional health or weakness are often determined by childhood factors. Sigmond Freud was the first modern psychologist to suggest that trauma in the early years of childhood may be of supreme importance in determining an individual's emotional adjustment in later life.

More recent research by behavioral psychologists has indicated that the basic nurturing a child receives in its first six years of life provides the critical foundation for happiness, maturity and responsibility in later life. Serious traumas occurring in this time period can permanently cripple that child's maturing process.

The healing of these emotional traumas, however, has been an elusive goal for most psychotherapies. Freud used such techniques as free association and dream interpretation to reach an analysis of the client's subconscious material after 2-5 years of weekly therapy. The insight gained by the client into the childhood sources of his current neurosis would, theoretically, allow the client to let go of childish or irrational behavior. The client's logic might be as follows: "Well, I can see that these feelings or behaviors might have been appropriate at age 3, but are obviously unnecessary now!"

Since Freud's day, the science of insight therapy has come a long way, but is still based on Freud's basic principle that insight leads to recovery. However, a large percentage of clients have discovered that insight alone is not sufficient to relieve the emotional symptoms caused by childhood trauma.

More recently, therapy pioneers like Wilhelm Reich and Arthur Janov have developed a new form of therapy called "emotional release" to deal with early trauma. By taking the client back to the scene of these childhood experiences and reliving them in gory detail, it is thought that a client could release the emotional charge from the experience, often by kicking and screaming. This would relieve muscular tension, anxiety, and neurotic behavior. Wilhelm Reich's work involved forcing the emotional release through deep pressure on the body's muscles in which the repressed emotional charge had been stored. Janov created a powerful group experience through psychodrama methods. These therapies are based on the concept that releasing locked-in emotion through acting out buried feelings in the context of being regressed to a childhood memory presented the long-sought solution for childhood trauma. Therefore, I call these methods "emotional release therapy."

Recently, some problems have become evident in this form of therapy as well. Many of my colleagues and students in this field have noticed that people who have done many months of emotional release become very adept at expressing feelings, but aren't necessarily feeling better. They often become fixated on acting out negative emotions. One client of mine who had worked with Janov for six months stated that asserting his feelings, crying, and being emotionally upset became a pattern for him and others in his group.

While getting in touch with his feelings felt good at first, getting stuck acting out his emotional pain all the time felt bad. His solution: he repressed his emotions and moved back into his intellect. Another friend found that Reichian therapy allowed her to open up all the anger inside, but her frequent fits of rage didn't make her very many friends or make her life easier.

Now a new style of therapy is emerging which utilizes an entirely new approach to dealing with childhood trauma. This therapy, which I call "emotional clearing", focuses on providing the client's Inner Child with an experience of being loved and nurtured by caring parents after being rescued from the trauma of childhood. This mode of therapy is especially effective because it provides the opportunity for the client to experience, in a childlike state, the fulfillment of emotional needs and completion of the emotional maturation which was blocked by traumatic experiences. Furthermore, while emotional release therapy may fixate the client in the expression of negative emotions, emotional clearing allows the client to experience profound states of bliss and joy which the therapist can then anchor (through post-hypnotic suggestion) to the client's daily stressful situations, replacing tension and fear with bliss and joy even in difficult crisis.

For example, one client who had a phobia of crowded supermarkets ("agoraphobia") entered a childhood trauma which connected to this phobic response. During the course of the session, we rescued her child from this traumatic scene by having the client visualize her adult self and other persons that she trusted enter into the hypnotically-induced scene. After rescuing this "inner child", I suggested that she become the rescued child. She felt this experience as waves of bliss and relief in her body. I then used post-hypnotic suggestion to anchor this bliss, stating, "Every time you enter a supermarket, you remember this wonderful feeling of being rescued."

This linking process is simply a teaching the subconscious mind to change its response pattern from (supermarket = childhood trauma = panic) to the new pattern (supermarket = childhood rescue = bliss).

After one session in this case, a one-year follow-up revealed a complete remission of symptoms.

Thus we see that emotional clearing doesn't merely give us insight into emotional responses, or only allow the expression of repressed feelings, but actually replaces negative emotions of fear, pain, loneliness, etc. with positive emotions of love, joy and acceptance.

There are at least three distinct schools in the field of emotional clearing work taught in hypnotherapy schools in California.

The first of these, developed by Milton Erickson, involves the use of hypnotic suggestion in which the hypnotist feeds "new" childhood experiences or ideas directly into the client's subconscious mind, while the client is in a regressed state. The therapist takes complete control of redesigning the client's childhood.Erickson even used deliberate amnesia to prevent the client's conscious mind from interfering with or negating the process, although this step has not been found necessary by modern practitioners of his technique.

A second more interactive strategy ("interactive" means that the client and therapist work together in the process of healing) involves the client setting up a new ending for the injured child's experience. This modality, described by Frieda Morris in Hypnosis for Friends and Lovers, involves the therapist helping the client relive a traumatic event first. Then therapist and client together decide on a new experience which is a positive one to replace the original memory. For example:

Therapist: "Well, what can we do differently now with this experience with your mother?"

Client: "I'd like her to be nice to me. She could say, 'I love you. I'm sorry I lost my temper. It's not your fault'."

Then client and therapist together re-create the memory as a series of positive words and images while the client is in a regressed state. This allows the client to feel love, bliss and nurturance.

These two methods work well for many clients, but often fail to address the client's underlying feelings of frustration, helplessness, anger, guilt, or abandonment. If the client, for example, feels angry about mother's behavior, neither Erickson's nor Morris' technique provides a complete solution. Also, many of my clients experienced such a poor relationship with a parent that it is impossible for them to imagine their mother being a loving, understanding parent.

As a third method, Alchemical Hypnotherapy combines the best features of emotional release and emotional clearing therapy. It creates a dramatic encounter between the client's adult personality, the hurt, traumatized child and important people in the client's past. This process, called the "rescue mission", allows the expression of feelings which stem from the incident, as well as empowering the client to heal himself. Here's an example:

The client is feeling helpless and angry in the midst of a memory of being beaten up by father in a traumatic regression.

Now, I interject: Therapist: "Let's imagine your adult self is entering the room right now. What would you like to say to your father, Mr. Adult?"

Client: "I'd like to shake some sense into my father! (grabs an offered pillow) Now you listen to me, you jerk!"

Therapist: "Good! What is his response?"

Now the client has the opportunity to release all of his repressed feelings toward his father (including grief, abandonment, admiration, etc.) and clear the way for a new level of understanding with him. Often this dialogue moves the client towards forgiveness as he begins to hear about his father's stressful life and underlying love for his son.

Most important, however, is that the client is empowered to rescue his "inner child" from the past. This nurturing relationship between the adult and his inner child can continue between therapy sessions. This considerably reduces the time needed for therapy by giving the client an opportunity to heal and revise his own childhood during a few minutes of every day.

In Alchemical Hypnotherapy, this self-nurturing process can be expanded to include "inner parents". A new mother and father are discovered in the child's own subconscious mind who fill the child's needs while providing both love and wisdom to the client's adult self. This allows the client who has a seriously disturbed childhood (and therefore no knowledge of what parental love feels like) to recreate a happy childhood from scratch with a minimum of time spent in therapy learning to contract the sources of love and healing in his own subconscious mind.

Any way you look at it, emotional clearing is therapy that creates the solid foundation of love, support, and positive nurturing necessary for emotional security and happiness. In the complex world of modern therapy, emotional clearing is the wave of the future!

The Alchemy Institute