Treating Tourette's syndrome with hypnosis
Tourette's is a disorder that causes you to suffer from a tic that causes you to swear. This can have far-reaching consequences on your life and cause all kinds of other complaints. That is why I think it is important to give attention to this disorder and to show how hypnosis can help
Tourette's effect
The question often arises as to why people with Tourette syndrome randomly blurt out a swear word in a situation where it is completely out of place. This is actually a symptom that only 10% of people with Tourette syndrome experience. Most people have a tic that causes them, for example, to squint their eyes, shrug their shoulders, or clear their throat or cough.
If you have the coprolalia form of Tourette syndrome, this is also known as coprolalia. In addition to Tourette syndrome, brain damage, a stroke, dementia, epileptic seizures, and other neurological damage can also cause this form of Tourette syndrome.
Scientists are not yet entirely sure why this happens, but it is suspected that the amygdala is damaged. This part of the brain is associated with anger and aggression. Swearing is a form of verbal aggression, and damage to that part of the brain can cause it to manifest anyway[1].
Secondary symptoms that may arise include feeling ashamed of your condition and becoming socially isolated, or isolating yourself as a precaution[2]. You may even experience problems within your family. If you develop coprolalia during childhood, it can begin between the agesof 2 and15. Usually, the diagnosis isn’t made until 3 to 5 years later, because your parents may initially think you’re just an unruly, foul-mouthed child[3].
Treating Tourette's syndrome with hypnosis
As early as the 1980s, Tourette's was treated with hypnosis. In one case study, a man receives 9 hypnosis sessions over the period of 6 months that cause his tics to change almost completely.
In doing so, they have used the following techniques:
- Deepening relaxation
- Mirror Eye roll test (to test how hypnotizable one is)
- Visualizations[4].
Visualization and relaxation exercises are also used for children with Tourette syndrome to help them cope better with their symptoms. In a study of four children, medication could be reduced for one child, discontinued for another, and no medication needed to be prescribed for athird child (who was not yet on medication). (2nd source)
Visualizations for reducing Tourette's syndrome
Depending on the age of children, hypnosis is used differently to induce visualization.
For example:
With young children, start with:
"Let's pretend...."
With children who are just beginning to pubicize (early graders), you can start with:
"Ok, go daydream about a place where you feel good and where nothing bothers or irritates you..."
For children who are already nearing adulthood, you can begin a visualization with:
"Take a moment to clear your head and imagine having a really fun time with friends. This can be something you think of yourself or have actually experienced. Just see what comes to mind and enjoy it. Some people close their eyes and see it as if they were just there. Other people visualize it more like a movie on a screen."
This is a great start for children to discover self-hypnosis. This also fits right in with children's perceptions.
Deepening hypnosis is then done by focusing on other things, such as:
"Notice how the weather is exactly how you love it. Notice who is with you and who is not, that you may not be alone. The more you notice, the better you feel. You notice the sound in your visualization that it is there, or not. Maybe it's people talking, maybe it's music or maybe it's just quiet and you listen to the silence. You notice the smells maybe of the air or the place or something you're eating. And you enjoy the taste and you notice what it tastes like. And you like it all because you are in control of it."
Then you also indicate and prove that the person is doing well under hypnosis by, for example, indicating that his/her body is nice and relaxed or something else by which you notice that he/she is well under hypnosis[5].
Then, when the person is well under hypnosis and visualizing properly, you can visualize the desired behavior. Functioning without Tourette's.
Hypnosis and neurology in Tourette's disease
It is generally thought that psychological treatments can have little effect on neurological disorders. These case studies show that hypnosis is one of the few mental treatments that can do something for neurological disorders.
Scientists have also recognized this, which is why they conducted a meta-analysis in 2016 on the effect of hypnosis on neurological disorders that cause involuntary movements, such as Parkinson’s disease and Tourette syndrome, with its tics that cause you to move even when you don’t want to.
The research looked promising, but because the methods in the studies using hypnosis were not well scientific, they could not yet say that it works. They did find hypnosis interesting for investigating neurological anatomy (how your neurons are put together and such) and where the functions in that neurological network are that cause unwanted movements[6]. So in itself, they are incredibly positive about hypnosis.
To understand what this means, it is important to know what "scientists" consider a good experiment. You have 2 similar groups of people with one group receiving hypnotherapy and the other not receiving it. With that, you measure the effect of hypnosis by seeing a difference between one group and the other (or not in the case where hypnosis has no effect).
The therapy they receive must be exactly the same for everyone in the group receiving hypnosis. Usually a standard script must then be used.
That very thing is very difficult with hypnosis. At the HIN we have not worked with fixed scripts for a long time, because the problems people experience are different for everyone. Therefore, a unique approach is needed for each person.
The induction of hypnosis can still go somewhat through a script and so can the beginning of the treatment, but then the client is also going to do something under hypnosis and you, as a hypnosis expert, then have to respond to that in turn and that response, of course, depends on what the client is doing and so is difficult to standardize for scientific research.
This is why it is so interesting to see the case studies that scientists first used when they were just discovering the usefulness of hypnosis. With everything scientists just discover, they look at case studies first before experiments are conducted to see if there are certain "rules" that can be applied to a "population." So, in this case, whether there are general rules that can in principle be applied to any patient with Tourette's with hypnosis.
Can hypnosis help against Tourette's?
Yes, looking at the case studies, hypnosis can certainly help with Tourette's disease. That scientists are also curious about hypnosis and neurology I also find incredibly special and promising in terms of the effect of hypnosis on even neurological problems, but so the scientific evidence is not yet applicable to the entire population.
Herein is also the question of whether you want to go under hypnosis if you have Tourette's disease. After all, hypnosis doesn't take you over; if you don't want something, it's not going to happen. Not even when you are under hypnosis. Then the hypnotist can apply his techniques however he wants, but if you then "pretend" to be under hypnosis nothing is going to happen.
Fortunately, as a hypnosis expert, you can check if someone is faking or really under hypnosis and then you can really help people.
Would you like to know if you can put someone under hypnosis and help them? Then come to the hypnosis workshop (in Wormerveer or Zwolle).
Want to get started right away? Then check out our calendar for other events and to register for one of our trainings.
[1] https://www.livescience.com/33384-tourette-syndrome-people-curse-uncontrollably.html
[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00029157.1987.10402701
[3] Ericksonian communication and hypnotic strategies in the management of tics and Tourette Syndrome in children and adolescents. D Kohen - Difficult Contexts for Therapy-Erickson Monographs, 2013 (page 118)
[4] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00029157.1989.10402780
[5] Ericksonian communication and hypnotic strategies in the management of tics and Tourette Syndrome in children and adolescents. D Kohen - Difficult Contexts for Therapy-Erickson Monographs, 2013 (page 127)
[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0035378716300285