If you use hypnosis to lead people into awareness of unpleasant experiences, I think you should first make a choice about whether that is worthwhile. Many of us were taught that reliving unpleasant experiences makes them less harmful, and that absolutely, categorically, is not so. If there is one thing that academic psychology has learned, it's that that assumption is false. Academic psychology has learned that if a certain set of experiences teaches you to have a generalization, going through the same experiences again will only reinforce whatever you learned from them. If what you learned from an event causes you limitations, reliving that event over and over again in the same way will only reinforce your generalization and the limitations that result from that generalization.

Therapists like Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson all have people go back and relive events, but they have people do it differently than the event occurred the first time. Satir describes this as "going back and seeing with new eyes," whatever that means. Erickson had people go back into the past, and then he changed things totally. He reorganized history so that it had no alternative but to be different.

Once Milton did a fascinating thing with somebody. A client came in who had made a mistake as a very young child; he had committed a crime. Something about the course of events convinced him that from that point on he would engage in criminal activities. He became convinced that he would always make the same mistake, and so he did.

Erickson took him back into his personal history and gave him an experience in which he became convinced that he would no longer engage in crime, because he wasn't good at it. That event never actually occurred. However, if you ask that man today about that event, he will recall it for you with a great deal of detail, and it will be as real to him as anything that actually occurred.

Sometimes there is some meaningful purpose in taking a person back through unpleasant memories. It might provide you with information so that you can catch a criminal and prevent him from committing a crime against someone else. Possibly information from that event may be needed for some other purpose.

A friend of mine worked with a couple who had been assaulted, and they both had complete amnesia for having been assaulted. In fact, the only way they knew they had been assaulted was that they were both covered with bruises and lacerations. They were told that the lacerations were inflicted by some weapon, and that their money and their property were gone. The police kept insisting that they had been beaten and robbed. The man and the woman both said "We don't know. We don't remember anything."

I did some hypnotic investigation and discovered chat this couple had not been attacked; they had gotten into a car accident. After the crash, somebody pulled them out of their car and stole the car and their belongings. When I went through the experience with them to find out what had occurred. I chose to do it with only one of them, and took the other one out of the room; there was no need for both of them to suffer. Being the sexist I am, I decided it was best that the man suffer. However, I had him go through the experience in a different way to minimize any unpleasantness for him. Instead of going through the experience in the way he had before, I had him watch himself go through it.

I took this precaution both because I wanted him to be able to do it comfortably, and because he had been knocked unconscious. If someone got knocked out the first time through an experience, if I have them relive it in the same way, they will get knocked out again.

A student of mine had been in an accident and wanted to relive the experience. A lot of people had tried to work with him to get him to do this. They would have him start out with the feeling of the steering wheel and the sound of the engine, and then the visual experience of the trees, and then a horn honking, and then he would pass out. They would have to do all kinds of things to wake him up, and then they'd try again.

They could have anticipated that he'd pass out, because in the accident he hit a tree and got knocked out. If you relive something and do it in exactly the same way, you will go through the same experience in the way that you did the first time. If you got knocked out the first time, you'll get knocked out when reliving it.

If somebody has been attacked or raped or been in a car wreck, reexperiencing–the feelings they had then is not going to be useful, If someone is telling you about his heart attack, you don't want him to relive it in exactly the same way. "Oh, you had a heart attack last week. What happened?" That is the craziest thing you can ask somebody. If you do it well enough, you are going to give him another heart attack.

Many women who have been raped or attacked, subsequently have trouble with men. I'm not talking about having trouble with the man who attacked them, but with their husbands and their loved ones. Sometimes they can't even live in the house that they lived in, or walk down a street without absolute terror. Those women are reliving their unpleasant experiences over and over again. No one should have to suffer that way. If somebody was unfairly attacked, that is enough unfair pain. Having any more than that seems very unjust to me.

There is a procedure that allows you to separate out part of an experience, so that it's possible to relive it in a new way. You have them begin the experience, and then step outside of it so that they see themselves going through it. They hear what was going on at the time, but they watch themselves go through the event as if they were watching a movie. When they do it in this way, they don't have to have the feelings that they had when they were there. They can have feelings about the experience. This procedure is described in detail in Chapter II of Frogs into Princes, so I won't explain it here. We call it the phobia technique or the visual–kinesthetic dissociation.

When you have people relive unpleasant experiences, keep these ideas in mind. As a precaution against them re–experiencing the feelings, have them see themselves going through the experience. If you want to be really safe, have them watch themselves watching themselves go through the experience, as if they were in the projection box at a movie theatre, watching themselves watch the movie. If you have them go through an event this way, when they remember it later on, they won't experience the terror. That is a real gift to give someone who has been beaten or brutalized somehow. If they go back through that event from the position of watching themselves watching themselves, it will diffuse the intensity of the feelings and prevent them from building any generalization that would make them have to feel those unpleasant feelings again.