.jpg)
How We Can Heal
A podcast to share deep conversations about How We Can Heal from life’s toughest circumstances.
How We Can Heal
Trauma, Dissociation & Hypnosis with Dr. David Spiegel
Dr. David Spiegel, Wilson Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, brings over 40 years of expertise in trauma, hypnosis, and mind-body medicine to this fascinating conversation. Drawing from decades of scientific research, Dr. Spiegel reveals how hypnosis serves as "controlled dissociation," offering a powerful pathway for trauma recovery by allowing people to revisit difficult experiences while maintaining physical comfort.
The conversation takes us deep into the neuroscience of trauma and healing. Dr. Spiegel shares remarkable findings from brain imaging studies showing how hypnosis actually turns down activity in the brain's alarm system and reduces self-judgment, creating space for new perspectives and healing. Particularly fascinating is his explanation of how hypnosis can reduce pain perception by over 50% - without medication or side effects.
Personal stories bring the science to life, from Dr. Spiegel's first experience using hypnosis with an asthmatic girl in crisis to his wife successfully using hypnosis during childbirth. His genetic "illness" of hypnosis, inherited from his psychiatrist father who used it to treat trauma in World War II veterans, creates a touching through-line in his lifelong dedication to understanding how our minds can heal our bodies.
The conversation bridges clinical approaches with accessible self-help strategies. Dr. Spiegel explains how two-thirds of adults are naturally somewhat hypnotizable, then details how his Reverie app makes these powerful techniques available to anyone dealing with stress, insomnia, or trauma. The discussion reveals fascinating parallels between hypnosis and yoga, showing how both practices engage the brain's natural capacity for healing through focused attention and absorption.
Ready to tap into your brain's natural healing abilities? Discover how hypnosis might serve as an underutilized "app" you already possess, and learn why focusing on what you're for rather than what you're against creates more effective healing. Whether you're a clinician or someone seeking relief from trauma or stress, this episode offers profound insights into our remarkable capacity for transformation.
Season 5 of How We Season 5 of the How We Can Heal Podcast is sponsored by SimplePractice. Whether you're a therapist, counselor, psychiatrist or allied health professional in private or group practice, their easy-to-use online system can help you simplify your business so you can focus your energy on caring for clients. About 7 years ago, I made the switch from logging everything on paper I know so old school to their online practice management software and I'm telling you I will never go back. Everything is organized now and it's easy to schedule, share files and provide super bills to clients. I only wish I'd made the change sooner. If you're just starting out or want to simplify the business side of your clinical work, I highly recommend Simple Practice. Right now they're offering a seven-day free trial with 70% off. Your first four months. Go to simplepracticecom. Forward, slash how we can heal, or use the link in my show notes to take advantage of this offer.
Lisa Danylchuk:Today I want to give a big shout out and extend a huge thank you to the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, the ISSTD, for sponsoring this episode. If you've been listening to this podcast for any amount of time, you've heard me talk about ISSTD and the incredible researchers, clinicians and advocates I've met during my time as a member and a volunteer there. The ISSTD has been delving into the science and best practice of treating trauma and dissociation for over 40 years now and they have a rich catalog of educational offerings for both professionals and non-professionals on their website that's cfasisst-dorg. If you're a mental health professional, I highly recommend you consider becoming a member of ISSTD. I'd love to see you during the live educational offerings and at the annual conference in Portland, Oregon, in March 2026. Visit isst-d. iorg. org to learn more.
Lisa Danylchuk:Today, our guest is Dr David Spiegel. Dr David Spiegel is Wilson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, director of the Center on Stress and Health and Medical Director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he's been a member of the academic faculty since 1975. Dr Spiegel has more than 40 years of clinical and research experience studying psycho-oncology, stress and health, pain control, psychoneural endocrinology, sleep, hypnosis and psychotherapy for cancer patients. He has published 13 books, 404 scientific journal articles and 170 book chapters on hypnosis, psychosocial oncology, stress physiology, trauma and psychotherapy. He was a member of the work groups on stressor and trauma-related disorders for the DSM-IV and V editions of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. He's a past president of the American College of Psychiatrists and the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Lisa Danylchuk:I recently attended Dr Spiegel's plenary address at the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation's annual conference in Boston, massachusetts, and I'm happy that he's able to share some of the wisdom and insights from his many studies of trauma, dissociation and hypnosis here with us today. Please join me in welcoming Dr David Spiegel to the show. Dr Spiegel, welcome to the how we Can Know podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.
Dr. David Spiegel:You're welcome, Lisa. I'm very glad to be here with you.
Lisa Danylchuk:So I'd love to start a little bit with your beginnings. I'm curious because I don't think I've heard this anywhere else how you came to specialize in stress and pain control and trauma and dissociation, stress and pain control and trauma and dissociation.
Dr. David Spiegel:Well, it began with an interest in hypnosis. That is a bit of a genetic illness in my family. Both my parents were psychiatrists and psychoanalysts and my father got interested in hypnosis just before he shipped out to World War II. He met a Viennese psychiatrist who had escaped the Nazis and had studied hypnosis in his practice because he had a smallpox scar right in the middle of his forehead and Gustav von Schaffenberg was his name. And he noticed that prisoners he was a forensic psychiatrist who he was interviewing would sometimes just sort of look at that spot on his forehead and kind of nod off. And he realized they were going into some kind of altered mental state and it turned out it was hypnosis. So when he got to the US he couldn't serve in the military but he wanted to offer to train army doctors in hypnosis. So he trained my father among many others, and my father used it for trauma, for acute stress reactions, for pain control and combat.
Dr. David Spiegel:And when he came back he sort of went back to psychoanalysis. He had a supervisor, frieda von Reichman, who was a famous interpersonal psychoanalyst, who asked him why he was going to stop. He said, well, freud stopped. And who am I kind of to do this and she said what are you being so precious about your reputation? For You're going to teach a course on hypnosis in the Analytic Institute. Because I'm going to take it, so you better do it. So he started and he noticed over time that he seemed to be getting better follow-up results and he would call up his patients after he'd seen them and you know some would say, well, if you need more patients, I'll talk to some of my friends and that didn't sound very promising. But the ones who he'd used hypnosis was, you know, I stopped smoking or my anxiety is better or I'm controlling my pain better. So he gradually shifted his practice and I you know the dinner table conversations were interesting and you know my parents told me that I was free to be any kind of psychiatrist. I wanted to be, and here I am.
Dr. David Spiegel:But I took a course in hypnosis at medical school and I'll tell you, lisa, the first, the first patient I ever used it with and it's now been about 7000, was an asthmatic girl under tremendous stress. She was in status asthmaticus in the hospital Children's Hospital in Boston and I walk in and her mother's standing there crying. She'd been unresponsive to subcutaneous epinephrine times two and they were thinking about general anesthesia and giving her steroids and I didn't know what else to do. So I had started the course. So I said you want to learn a breathing exercise? She nodded and I said well, I got her hypnotized and I thought good, now wait a minute, we haven't gotten asthma in the course yet.
Lisa Danylchuk:Uh-oh.
Dr. David Spiegel:What do I say? So I said something very profound and clever. I said each breath you take will be a little deeper and a little easier. And within five minutes she went from someone with white knuckles struggling for breath, mother crying, to lying back in the bed and clearly feeling more comfortable. And so the thing is not only was it effective, but you could see it happening, you know. And so my intern came running in and I thought he was going to pat me on the back and he said I want to inform you that the nurse has informed the nursing supervisor that you violated Massachusetts law by hypnotizing a minor without parental consent.
Lisa Danylchuk:Oh, Massachusetts law.
Dr. David Spiegel:Well, this despite the fact that Massachusetts has a lot of crazy laws. That is not one of them. And her mother was standing next to me when I did it and this girl had been hospitalized every month for three months in status asthmaticus and he said well, you're going to have to stop. And I said why. He said it's dangerous. And I said you're going to give her general anesthesia and put her on steroids. And you think my talking to her is dangerous? Take me off the case if you want, but I'm not going to tell my patient something I know is not true. So he stopped out and they had a council of war over the weekend with the attending and the chief resident and they came back with a radical idea on Monday. They said why don't we ask the patient? And she said I like this. So she kept doing it.
Dr. David Spiegel:She did have one subsequent rehospitalization but went on to study to be a respiratory therapist and I thought that anything that could help a patient that much, that fast, that safely, and violate a non-existent Massachusetts law and piss off the head nurse and you know the attending had to be worth looking into.
Dr. David Spiegel:And so I've been doing it ever since and I just I realized that there are ways that just we people can make these rapid shifts in mental state and rapid shifts in physical state and their perception of pain and their stress, anxiety, because there's this kind of feedback interaction between mental stress as you know so well, lisa and physical reactivity, and then you notice the physical reactivity and you get more anxious and then your body reacts to the increased anxiety and it's like a snowball rolling downhill.
Dr. David Spiegel:And there are things we can do about that in a hurry and you know, with the kinds of things you do too with yoga and and dealing with trauma, it's, it's not real. Treatments are not just medication, and I'm a physician, I use meds, but there are a lot of other things we can do to teach people to better manage their bodies, and one of the key things how I got into trauma in part was hypnosis is a kind of controlled dissociation. People who have been traumatized dissociate. They separate part of themselves to sort of maintain some sense of sanity from what's happening to their body, and it's a way of taking control in response to a situation in which you lost control. The essence of trauma is helplessness and so if you can use techniques like hypnosis, like yoga, to take, to reassume control of your body. That's a step toward healing.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, and when you can use things that are so readily available and when medication isn't working, it's great that we have those tools and we have pharmacology. But if you're giving subcutaneous epinephrine and it's not working and talking is, or a calm, engaging presence asking questions or offering suggestions if that's working, great. I mean it's cheaper. There's so many potential reasons why we might go that direction.
Dr. David Spiegel:Well, you know, lisa, it actually. It alternatively angers and saddens me that one reason that it's not more widely used is that it's cheaper. There's not a hell of a lot of money to be made, you know, and so I'm competing against, you know, big pharma, and that's a tough, that's a tough battle, you know. So it troubles me that, you know, I don't have a team of ex cheerleaders to go around to doctor's offices convincing them that hypnosis is the best treatment for their problem, and so that's actually our part of. Our difficulty is that it is not expensive, and so there isn't a whole lot of money to be made doing it.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, you do have a long career and a lot of research and experience, and I mean even status being at Stanford right, like you, have a position to share with consumers directly. In the climate we have now, we can do that a little bit more so that people know okay, I do have choices, I could take medication. Maybe that works. If it, especially if it doesn't, here's this other choice right, here's something I can practice in minutes a day. Or here's something and not to make it sound like a miracle, but it is something that can be powerful and we can talk a little bit about. You know how people respond differently to it, but it's an option and I think it's important for people to know these things are an option.
Lisa Danylchuk:It's really common for people to think of hypnosis as I'm going to go on stage and click like a chicken, or for people to think of trauma as only pertaining to war veterans, and you and I are both children of therapists. My parents are both a psychologist and an LMFT and my dad was a war veteran. I get that kind of trauma, but there's so much more and that's becoming commonplace now. So I'm curious for you, as you speak to this wider span of people who've experienced trauma. What do you see in hypnosis that can benefit them?
Dr. David Spiegel:Well, you've stated the problem very well, lisa, and what I see is a way to help people in a hurry, to help them get in touch with some of their own inner resources, to manage stressful experiences and reactions to them better many times, you know, the irony is that because you go into some kind of altered mental state and most people who are traumatized will tell you that they, you know, they may not remember parts of what happened, that they were conscious, for during that they somehow detached themselves. They did things that may have saved their life that they didn't think they could do. That they didn't think they could do. And so hypnosis has value in that it may help you, in a controlled way, enter the kind of mental state that is not too dissimilar from the one you were in when you were experiencing trauma. And so the worst thing about trauma is helplessness, and if you can reenter your recollection of this in a controlled way and experience it differently, it can have profound effects because it's salient to trauma. It's a kind of state people go into sometimes when they're being traumatized, and therefore it's got therapeutic potential.
Dr. David Spiegel:So I had a woman who wanted to use hypnosis she had been, it was an attempted rape as she was coming home from her the supermarket, and she wanted. It was getting dark, she wanted to see if she could get a better image of the assailant, and so she was very hypnotized. Well, I got her to go back back, reminding her you're safe and comfortable now, but let's keep your body floating and comfortable while you picture on one side of an imaginary screen what he looks like. And she couldn't remember much more about that. But she noticed something else. She said you know, and she, she had fought him and she suffered a basilar skull fracture as a result of fighting, and she was feeling terribly guilty that she got herself injured. So on top of that, she's berating herself for having gotten hurt. And as she looked at it, she said you know, this guy doesn't just want to rape me, he wants to kill me. If he gets me upstairs, he's going to kill me. And so I said now, on the other side of the screen, I want you to picture what you did to protect yourself. And she said you know what? He's surprised that I'm fighting that hard. He didn't think I would. So on the one, you know, you might say well, nice going, spiegel. You made her realize it was actually worse than she thought it was, but on the other hand it made her realize that what she had done probably saved her life. Yes, and so she was.
Dr. David Spiegel:You know, the essence of trauma is helplessness. But she was not entirely helpless and she was, and sometimes fighting is not the right thing to do, but in this case it clearly was and she was able to emerge from it with a different perspective on the trauma and to acknowledge her own bravery. But wisdom in taking it as seriously as she could and fighting to save her life, and so entering that altered state, can allow you to dissociate in the sense that you keep your body comfortable. So your body doesn't have to go back reliving the terrible trauma. But mentally she could and she could examine what she did. In a way, most trauma survivors don't fully recognize and appreciate what they've done to keep themselves alive in the face of trauma. So it's a way of enhancing control of your body and expanding your cognitive and emotional perspective on what happened.
Lisa Danylchuk:You've mentioned trauma and dissociation a number of times. Most listeners are familiar with those terms, but I'm curious for you. You've been in this field a long time, bucket of decades. How would you describe your understanding of trauma, or just the understanding of trauma evolving in the last 40, 50 years?
Dr. David Spiegel:Well, I think we've come to recognize that the essence of trauma is helplessness. You know, it's a sense that you're being made into an object, a thing. I was just in Rome recently with my family, and there's this amazing Bernini sculpture of Daphne being pursued by Apollo. And she's turning herself into a tree. You see, her fingers are being and her way of escaping it is to turn herself into a tree. So he wouldn't be interested in her as the sort of myth of the story.
Dr. David Spiegel:But the story is kind of interesting because it's a visual image of becoming a thing.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yes.
Dr. David Spiegel:And it's, I think, important to recognize that. It's the involuntariness, so anything you can do in this altered state. So what you do when you dissociate is you say, well, there's part of me that's being hurt over here, but there's another part of me that's trying to get away and reflecting what can I do? Or what happened and why is this happening and how can I escape from it? What can I do? So it's you know, I've had patients who were repeatedly sexually or physically abused by a parent who just said I would go to a mountain meadow full of wildflowers, and it's a way of preserving some sense of normalcy and that you know he's got my body, but he hasn't got me kind of.
Lisa Danylchuk:Thing.
Dr. David Spiegel:And that's an adaptive reaction. You know we all dissociate in hypnotic-like ways all the time. So right now, for example, you're sitting in a chair. There are sensations in your body touching the chair, but hopefully you weren't even aware of that until I mentioned it to you. If you were, we could stop the interview now. So we naturally do it. But in more extreme situations the dissociation is more extreme. What it says is the brain is deciding what to pay attention to and what to ignore, and it's got thousands of choices of what to attend to. So learning to take advantage of that.
Dr. David Spiegel:And one of the things we see in hypnosis, lisa, is you turn down activity in the alarm system in the brain, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. We've used hypnosis with many research subjects in the MRI scanner and we can see what's going on in their brains. And one of them is they just to the extent that they're hypnotized, they're turning down activity in the alarm system. They're just saying shutting it down, I don't care what's happening, so a loud noise doesn't distract them anymore and we have a remarkable capacity to do that. And that can be a problem at times, but it very often can be adaptive and helpful and hypnosis is a way of focusing your attention, dissociating things that would ordinarily be in consciousness and turning down that alarm reactivity.
Dr. David Spiegel:It's also a way of turning down activity in the posterior part of the cingulate cortex. That's what we call the default mode network. So you mentioned, you know, people being nervous about quacking like a duck. You know I don't like stage shows where you make fools out of people using hypnosis, but there is actually a message in it. So if the football coach is dancing like a ballerina, it means he's able to shut down the part of his brain that is judging who am I? What am I? What do people think of me?
Dr. David Spiegel:and just be different. Now you know I don't make my living making coaches dance like ballerinas, but I do use this capacity to try out being different as a way of helping people see that they can be, or even they were, different. And that's a powerful tool in treating trauma, because you can help people to see that I don't have to feel as physically uncomfortable in remembering the trauma as I was when the trauma was happening.
Dr. David Spiegel:I can get perspective on it. I can give myself. I can. So my body can be floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub or floating in space and I can still be picturing what happened, but in a way that acknowledges the dissociation that it happened then and it isn't happening now, and it acknowledges that, in having me relive this, you're trying to help me.
Lisa Danylchuk:You're not trying to hurt me again.
Dr. David Spiegel:There's this, and I'm sure you've seen this in your yoga work that there are times when people feel that you're just re-inflicting misery on them and what's the good of that? And so they will identify you with a traumatizer. And it's very important that when we work with people who have been traumatized, we acknowledge that, that we're respectful of it, that we don't force them or push them into it, because the key is using it to help them recover and handle it differently. And so respect. You know I've often wondered. One of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder is flashbacks. You know, reliving the traumatic event. One of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder is flashbacks. You know, reliving the traumatic event. One of the major treatments is helping people to confront and relive trauma. But why don't the flashbacks heal people? If reliving the trauma, if confronting the trauma, is therapeutic, why don't they make them better? And it doesn't.
Lisa Danylchuk:That's a great point is therapeutic why didn't they make them better?
Dr. David Spiegel:And it doesn't. It's a great point, and it's because, in hypnosis and psychotherapy and working with people with yoga, you have an agreement with them that you're using it in a way that they can control, so you can confront how you felt, how you feel, how your body felt, how you can control your body, but you're not being forced to do it, you're being invited to do it, and so that puts it in a different context.
Lisa Danylchuk:It does. And you're also talking about dissociation from the perspective of, during a trauma right Some part, not being aware or not being able to fully process or take in, pay attention to the horror of what's happening. But you're also talking about dissociation as a healing tool, being able to experience your body floating in space, floating in the lake, while you're also going back to something really challenging. So I'm curious when did you first know that dissociation was a thing, and when did you know it from the harmful standpoint or the moment of trauma standpoint, and when did you recognize it from the oh this can really help us standpoint?
Dr. David Spiegel:I think early in my career I started because I used hypnosis. I started treating people with dissociative identity disorder, what we used to call multiple personality disorder. I chaired the committee that changed the name, actually in the DSM, and because I realized that it was more. It wasn't that they had more than one personality as I got to know them, it was that they had less than one personality, that it was fragmentation of identity rather than the proliferation of people, because I could see how different the people were and there were these identities. You know, some were a frightened child and wouldn't act like a young child rather than the adult that they were.
Dr. David Spiegel:Some would be angry and say you know what? She deserved it, and that's the way of fantasizing. Control is pathological, but saying she didn't run away, she's going to be punished and they would do self-physically punishing things. And so it was clear to me that, in the extreme sense of people who have gone through repeated physical and sexual trauma, that the dissociation happens and that they need to learn to understand and control it and work toward integration of these different elements of themselves to try and better understand and manage the residue of what has happened. And so it was clear to me that hypnosis, which is a kind of much more milder form of dissociation, could be used to understand and then control dissociation. So it came from my working with people who had extreme forms of chronic and severe early life trauma that got me seeing the connections between hypnosis and dissociation and trauma.
Lisa Danylchuk:The best kind of training right Directly from people who are seeking help, if you could. You mentioned that you contributed to the DSM. I believe four and five, maybe.
Dr. David Spiegel:That's right, that's right.
Lisa Danylchuk:If you could magically update all the books and trainings in psychiatry and psychology out there, what information would you include or what would you maybe retire?
Dr. David Spiegel:Interesting. Well, I think certainly what I work to include was the idea that the key problem is fragmentation of identity. It's that your sense of who you are becomes at times so painful and frightening that you just need to pretend that it didn't happen. But there's a price to be paid for that, and so I would like, as I worked with DSM and changing it from multiple personality disorder, because I thought that misrepresented what was going on. It's not that you have 12 people inside you. It's that you have this difficulty pulling together these different components of your experience and identity, and that learning to do that would be a therapeutic thing to do. And I see it in a lot of people who have been traumatized. It's not that they have multiple identities, but they do have multiple components of their experience, and that what I think we do need to see is that people need to find a way in therapy, one way or another, to revisit the trauma, but see it from a different perspective and see it in a way that helps you control how your body is reacting to it. You know, bessel van der Kolk wrote this wonderful book the Body Keeps the Score about trauma. He and I were residents together at Mass Mental Health Center many years ago, and the idea is that trauma is a somatic as you teach with yoga as well as a psychological problem, and the way your brain and body interact is clearly affected by trauma, and learning to control how your body reacts as you go through a therapeutic process is a crucial thing in treatment.
Dr. David Spiegel:And you know, one of the interesting things about trauma is there really is not much psychopharmacology that helps treating PTSD and again, I use psychotropic medications, but there aren't any, and even the big hopes that there would be new drugs that would stop nightmares and all that just hasn't worked very well, and so it means that it's a field that requires our developing psychotherapies that work and help people, and I was sufficiently frustrated that it wasn't getting to people and, despite a career of doing research and demonstrating in randomized clinical trials that hypnosis helps people it helps reduce pain, even during surgical procedures.
Dr. David Spiegel:It helps cancer patients, even with advancing disease, control their pain but it wasn't being used. So I built this with colleagues, built this app Reverie, to try and offer to people the capacity to use hypnosis for themselves to deal with problems like pain and stress and insomnia, all of which are things that go along with trauma because I wanted people to have access to it directly and use it whenever they needed it, and so my hope is that with work in these sort of relatively less you know, heavily used approaches to helping with trauma, that we can get it to people and they can try it for themselves and see if they like it. So that's why I develop reverie.
Lisa Danylchuk:You haven't mentioned this and I don't know that you've done research on this, but I also know people use it in labor and delivery.
Dr. David Spiegel:Yes.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yes, and anecdotally speaking, from friends with great success.
Dr. David Spiegel:Well, I'll tell you. I can tell you up close and personal, because my lovely wife, helen Blau, who's Baxter Professor of Stem Cell Biology at Stanford and, by the way, was just at the end of the Biden administration awarded the National Medal of Science for her stem cell work.
Lisa Danylchuk:Congratulations.
Dr. David Spiegel:Yeah, it was very exciting. She had both of our children with hypnosis as the anesthesia, and Dan, who I was just talking to on the phone now is a strapping 44-year-old architect, was 10 pounds, and so a first child 10-pound labor Ouch, you can say that.
Lisa Danylchuk:That's a lot of baby.
Dr. David Spiegel:That's a lot of baby, that's a lot of baby. And you know it was a nine-hour labor. And I said you know she would say you know, david, I teach pharmacology. There are drugs for this. And I said you're floating in Lake Tahoe, cool tingling, and I'm filtered. I heard out of the pain and open yourself up. And she wanted to be sure she was in control. We were a little worried because he was so big. There seemed to be some signs of fetal distress and we wanted to be sure that she was fully able to help him get out. And she was and she did. And our daughter, Julia was a scant, you know, five and a half pounds. And that labor, you know she went into labor at breakfast and we had lunch together after she was born. It was very smooth.
Lisa Danylchuk:Wow.
Dr. David Spiegel:So yes, you know, I mean, you know it seems, oh my God, how could you do that when we have all these meds? But there are problems with those meds and to some extent you lose control over the labor and delivery. And you know it's what humans have been doing for millennia. You know giving birth. You know often squatting rather than lying down so that gravity helps you and the brain. You know the strain and pain lies mainly in the brain.
Dr. David Spiegel:The brain is the processor, and we've been able to show Lisa that if you shock people who are highly hypnotizable and tell them your hand is in ice water, cool, tilling and numb, you reduce the brain's response to the shocks by more than by 50%. More than that at the beginning. In the first tenth of a second we look at the somatosensory ERP and you can see that the first component of the waveform just disappears. So the brain is just and they feel it. They say you know, it doesn't bother me.
Dr. David Spiegel:The brain is a remarkable structure for filtering out information you don't need or want and filtering in what you do need or want. And so the idea that pain is all physical is just wrong. You know you've got to have a brain responding to the sensory input and deciding what to do with it. And so, even in very painful situations and you hear that from people who've been traumatized too that they sometimes didn't realize they were hurt until after it was over that's dissociation, and so let's take advantage of that ability and teach people to do it, and so we have four pain programs on the Reverie app that teach people different ways of filtering the hurt out of the pain.
Lisa Danylchuk:I remember you talking about different pathways in the brain and different areas. You know the functional connectivity changed in fMRI, where, if you said the pain is less, or if you said you can manage the pain better, there was an impact, or a similar impact even, but it was through a different pathway. And that's so fascinating because there's many paths up the mountain, so to speak. Right, we can find what's going to be most effective for us.
Dr. David Spiegel:That's exactly right, lisa. This was a colleague in Montreal, pierre Rainville, who used PET imaging to tell people when they were giving them a shock like the experiment we did. In one condition they said your hand is in ice water. It's cool, tingly and numb, and you reduced activity. They got analgesia. They got less pain In the somatosensory cortex, which is a part of the brain that processes all kinds of sensory information. In another condition they were administering exactly the same pain but they were saying well, the pain is there, but it won't bother you very much, not very important, which is like how people feel on opioids sometimes. And then you got analgesia of an equivalent level, but it was through reduced activity in the dorsal part of the anterior cingulate cortex where in hypnosis you turn down naturally you turn down activity.
Dr. David Spiegel:So that's the alarm system in the brain the salience network that tells you and that's part of the pain processing network. So there are two different ways at least there are more, I'm sure by which you can get analgesia mentally by turning down activity in specific and salient regions of the brain.
Lisa Danylchuk:So great to know that there's more pathway than one, and there's probably more that we'll find in time. People listening are thinking if they haven't been hypnotized before or practice hypnosis clinically, people are probably curious how do people know if they are hypnotizable or where they land on that spectrum of hypnotizability? Where they land on that spectrum of hypnotizability?
Dr. David Spiegel:Well, one sort of simple self-test is to just ask yourself do I ever get so caught up in a good movie that I forget I'm watching the movie and enter the imagined world? So hypnosis has been called, believed in imagination. And if you have that ability to focus so intently that you, you know, stop judging the movie. You know you're just, you're more in the movie than you are in the theater or in your living room watching the movie, if you've had those kinds of experiences, the odds are you're at least somewhat hypnotizable. About two thirds of adults at least are somewhat hypnotizable, about a quarter are extremely hypnotizable and there's about a quarter to a third of people who just aren't very hypnotizable, extremely hypnotizable, and there's about a quarter to a third of people who just aren't very hypnotizable. We have a test in Reverie that takes about six minutes where you can go through some instructions about your hand feeling light and buoyant and if you pull it down it'll float back up and you pull it down and you see what happens. Does one hand really, you know, have a mind of its own? And we will tell you whether you're one of three types the poet, the people who tend to follow their heart and get deeply immersed in things. The diplomat people who will have the experience and then step back and wonder what was it like and renegotiate their relationship to it. And then the researchers, who we say are on the low end, who just analyze everything.
Dr. David Spiegel:I was just talking with a guy the other day who's interested in hypnosis. I was just talking with a guy the other day who's interested in hypnosis but a little skeptical about it. Turns out he's not at all hypnotizable and he said he was surprised, though, about what I knew about him being less hypnotizable, which is. I said you are a very rational person. You value understanding over experiencing. You want to take things apart and understand what's happening before you do. And he said how do you know that about me? Yeah, well, that's what I've seen in thousands of people based on their different experiences with hypnosis. So you can either go to reveriecom, download the app and take the test or just try out some hypnotic experiences and see how you react to them. But the nice thing about hypnosis is you can feel a change in a hurry Many people can and the worst thing that happens is it might not help you and that's not terrible. No side effects.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah. Yeah, that is nice. I'm thinking of a client I had after I did my training with Ash, the American Society on Clinical Hypnosis.
Dr. David Spiegel:Yes.
Lisa Danylchuk:Using it in my practice and I had a client who's very analytical and rational as an adult but who had been very artistic as a young person and he was coming to therapy, in part to reconnect with that self.
Lisa Danylchuk:And it was so interesting to watch because he would go deep into hypnosis and have all this imagery and this like to report. After he would share all this insights or you know, whole experiences he was having and I was just saying very, you know, banal words, like nothing really evocative of what he would share. But then when he came out of hypnosis he would share that with me and go on to dismiss it like, oh yeah, but that doesn't mean anything.
Lisa Danylchuk:Right, and it was so fascinating for me, not even knowing these types yet, right. I'm like working with cause. Some people would take that, that imagery or that, that inspiration or whatever came to them and and treat it like gold and walk away from therapy and come back next week and talk about it. But he'd be like, oh yeah, I I mean this big, amazing thing happened, but I don't think it's important, it's just like what do I do?
Dr. David Spiegel:here.
Lisa Danylchuk:This sounds like dissociation to me yeah, yeah, right he hasn't integrated these two sides of himself, and that's exactly what was happening was and that was what he was coming for was to integrate those two sides, but it was just such a stark contrast, like moment to moment. Okay, all right, well, we can hold all of this in this office and we can hold it over time and over time. He made some progress, for sure, but you know, I never feel like I quite got to what the resistance was there. I feel like there was something under the surface that never quite came to light, which is the case sometimes.
Dr. David Spiegel:Well, that's interesting. It may be that he has associated some traumatic or negative experience that he wants to keep at bay and not let himself. If he lets himself go, he could get back in touch with those feelings and that could be a problem. How do you use hypnosis in your yoga practice? Yoga and trauma practice.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yoga, I feel like, can be so hypnotic. I have had students in classes ask me if I'm trained in hypnosis before. I was trained in hypnosis because of the pacing, because of the way that yoga teachers and it depends. There's so many different ways to teach and practice yoga but I think I'm more drawn to some of the more hypnotic practices and the focused absorption and then suggestion hopefully positive, mostly positive suggestion that I think I was naturally passing on this process of okay, let's get focused, let's get internally connected, and then a pace and cadence of speech and, yeah, always just offering different suggestions. And so I've had people ask me if I'm intending to do that and usually the answer is no. Especially before I got trained in hypnosis, the answer was no.
Lisa Danylchuk:But now that I'm more aware of it, I feel even more aware of just the power of language, and especially as a trauma-informed yoga practitioner, teacher. I mean you mentioned during hypnosis how powerful language is and I feel like all the time, and especially in a yoga class, even if some people use cues like press down through the knife edge of your foot, and I'm like, oh, ouch, no, I'm not going to say that. And I'm not going to say that because I might be working with people who I used to be on the panel for California victims of crime Like I'm just not. I'm not going to mention tools that might have hurt someone while we're trying to build resources and so psychological resources. So that's one of the ways I use it as just being really intentional about the suggestions or options or choices I'm including and intending to the entire class or session orienting towards psychological resources right.
Lisa Danylchuk:So that, especially if I don't know of someone's trauma history and I might never know it, especially if they're just dropping into a class that I'm confident that I'm not digging in there and triggering them, but that hopefully they walk away more connected to some sort of internal resource or map that I might never be privy to.
Dr. David Spiegel:Well, I think I'm glad to hear that, and it's a very sensitive way to do it, and you recognize that.
Dr. David Spiegel:You know, helping people work with their bodies and change the way their bodies feel and act will change the way their bodies feel and act.
Dr. David Spiegel:Will, for people who have had trauma, naturally trigger sometimes recollections or emotions that come with changes in their body experience.
Dr. David Spiegel:And you know, I've had people who have had a traumatic event who very often people avoid going to places that are connected with the trauma or something like that. But I've had people who have had recurrent thoughts or experiences of trauma even when they go into a certain room in their house, they can't escape it, and so they have to learn how to manage their psychophysiological reactions before they can be comfortable even at home. And so it's useful to be sensitive to that, to recognize that the words matter, but also what you're doing is teaching them how to manage their bodies in different ways and therefore manage their feelings, and that has great therapeutic potential as well, because it helps them have a greater array of sense of control over. Well, even if I do stumble into something that's upsetting, I know what to do about it, I know how to handle it. I know how to change my perspective about what happened, and hypnosis, as you know, is very helpful for that, and I think yoga can be too.
Lisa Danylchuk:It's the cognitive flexibility, right. People think of yoga as contortion or hand, you know, handstands or backbends. Often, I mean, that's what we've seen for many years now on magazine covers. But the cognitive flexibility is a big part of where the healing can come from, of, oh, first becoming aware, like first becoming aware of sensation in your body, if there's something that we've been associated from but is painful, that we're ready to digest. But also becoming aware of patterns of thinking, ways we're thinking about ourselves, ways we're projecting on the room. Oh, I'm walking in here and I just think it's competitive or everyone's judging me. It's like that's not really necessarily the case.
Lisa Danylchuk:And I think over especially a longer yoga practice years. You start to cracks, start to form in what we project or what we think, or we start to just have space to go. That's interesting. I fell out of that shape and now I'm. I'm berating myself why I'm in a yoga class. I paid for this. Like I can step down, it's okay. It doesn't have to mean something bad. And if you have a teacher that's also holding that space or pointing out those moments where you might be just in the moment, unnecessary stress, like carrying something from the past into the present. I think we can slowly slough off some of the negative messages. Default mode network what do you call?
Lisa Danylchuk:it the my fault mode network, my fault mode network, exactly. So we can cleanse that. Hopefully you know more so than than just the physical side of it. We can. I mean it's all obviously interrelated and connected in one thing, but we can.
Lisa Danylchuk:We can cleanse through memories, ways we see ourself and and it's interesting because even when I got trained in hypnosis, the eight limbs of yoga line up almost perfectly at the end with what I was trained in in hypnosis, which was focused attention, absorption. And then the suggestion is the part that's not in the yoga sutras, but the focused attention and absorption that's dharana dhyana, that's straight out of the eight limbs of yoga. So every time I do a psychological training I'm like, oh, that relates to yoga in this way. Oh, that's so interesting, that relates to yoga. Even I just did deep brain reorienting and we're talking about base of the neck and forehead and eyes, and I can't even tell you how many times in a class I say notice what's happening in your forehead, can you soften your jaw, the base of your neck? So there's just these overlaps, right, it's not that we're doing hypnosis every class, or definitely not doing a certain protocol, but there's a lot of overlap in the trauma recovery world and the yoga world, and I think we can be intentional with that.
Dr. David Spiegel:Absolutely Well, and you know another way to think. I think all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis.
Dr. David Spiegel:So you don't have to be with someone who's consciously formally inducing hypnotic states. It happens, and I think of hypnotizability and hypnotic experience as a kind of underutilized app on your phone. You know it's there, you can learn to use it as you and you tap it, as you mentioned as part of the yoga training. But it's going to happen anyway. It's a naturally occurring part of the way we're built.
Dr. David Spiegel:And what happens when you find you surprise yourself by being different is that you have more activity We've seen in hypnosis in the executive control network, the prefrontal cortex, and the more of that you have, the less activity you have in the default mode network. So when you give yourself over to being different, to managing your body differently, to thinking about potentially stressful situations differently, you're inhibiting the part of your brain that says, oh God, this is really scary, you can't do this. You better get away from it and just shutting that down and focusing on what you can do and how it can feel different and how you can repair the unwanted dissociation between who you are and what you're doing. And so you're absolutely right that there are many ways to help people utilize these central nervous system resources that we carry around in our heads and underutilize sometimes.
Lisa Danylchuk:You mentioned the power of language. We were talking about that a moment ago. Is there anything that's changed for you over time in terms of the words you choose or what you bring linguistically to hypnosis?
Dr. David Spiegel:Well, I'll tell you one of the big major things is focus on what you're for. Yes, you know, we people who use hypnosis you may have heard it in your training at ASH is you know, the worst thing you can tell someone is don't think about purple elephants.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yep done. Purple elephants all over the brain. Yeah is, don't think about purple elephants.
Dr. David Spiegel:Yep done. Purple elephants Guess what? Yeah, so if you can reconstruct where you want to head by focusing on what you're for, you're much more likely to get there and get there comfortably. So you know, I don't tell people don't smoke. I say think of your body as if it were your baby. Would you ever put tar and nicotine laden hot smoke into your baby's lungs? Hell, no. Well, your body is as dependent on you as your baby was.
Dr. David Spiegel:So for your body, smoking is a poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body respect and protection, and the nice thing about that is that you can remember doing something good, making a decision to do something good for you. You're not depriving yourself of something you're. You're resetting your priorities, and your priority is am I for my body or am I against it if I put that junk in my lungs? I'm against it, but I want to focus on being a different kind of parent to my own body.
Dr. David Spiegel:And so, just using language like that and we have some people, you know, we've now studied thousands of people who've used reverie and they have four out of five of them get immediate reductions in stress.
Dr. David Spiegel:One out of four just stop smoking, just like that Learning to use self-hypnosis and that kind of approach, and so the language is a part of it and some of them while more hypnotizable people are more likely to respond, there are some non-hypnotizable people who respond, and it's because they're responding to the approach more than shifting into the hypnotic state and just saying I can, just immediately. I'm not feeling like I'm depriving myself of something. I'm feeling good about myself because I'm making a commitment. I'm feeling good about myself because I'm making a commitment, just like when somebody decides to learn yoga. They're making a commitment to enhance their mind-body relationship and improve how their body is functioning. So you're doing your body a favor, you're doing yourself a favor, but you're taking better care of your body by doing it. So it's the finding language that people can naturally affiliate with and feel good rather than struggle with.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, and orient to the result that you want, not to the thing you're avoiding.
Dr. David Spiegel:That's right, that's exactly right. Yeah.
Lisa Danylchuk:I'm curious. You've done so much research, written so much throughout your career. What's on your mind right now? Is there anything you're curious about unpacking, studying?
Dr. David Spiegel:Well, what I'm studying now, Lisa, is proving that it can work even in this widely disseminated way. I mean, the cool thing about apps is how scalable they are. You know, you just it's there. Get people to use it. We have 27,000 people enrolled at the moment. In Reverie. We've had almost 900,000 downloads and I want it to just go places.
Dr. David Spiegel:You know, I want to have as many people who want to use it be able to use it, and we're planning to use AI to translate my mellifluous voice into other languages so that it's pretty easy for us to make it accessible. And we do have a Spanish version of the Smoking Control Hypnosis app. What I want to do is make it as widely accessible as possible through Reverie and assess how well that works for people, and I think we're going to help a whole lot of people in a hurry, and that's what I want to prove. And also, we've had very few problems with it. With all these thousands of people. I've had less than 10 complaints. You know my migraine got worse instead of better, one or two. We have one woman who said I found myself out on the patio having sexual feelings in my body and I thought is that a problem?
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, I'm like is this a complaint? Is this a report? I'm not quite sure how to flag this one.
Dr. David Spiegel:So you know what I want to devote myself to now. My legacy project is to make it as widely available as possible and document how well it works and how easily people can learn to use it.
Lisa Danylchuk:So if someone's interested in practicing hypnosis for themselves, they can go to Reveriecom and it's R-E-V-E-R-I but no E at the end, so R-E-V-E-R-I, six letters.
Dr. David Spiegel:Reveriecom and you can download it from wwwreverycom or from the App Store or Google Play.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yes.
Dr. David Spiegel:And first week is free. You can just try it out, see what you think about it, and it's very inexpensive, even if you decide to enroll. But you can get a taste of it and see what it's like. I just hope that more people will give it a try and see if they can help themselves. And we're finding that people are sleeping better. We do pre-post testing, you know where we say how stressed do you feel now? And then at the end we ask them how, from one to 10, how stressed you feel later. And we're getting about a 25% reduction in stress in the first 10 minutes. So people can tell right away that they are. We were getting the most uses of the insomnia program. They wanted to help yourself get to sleep or get back to sleep, and at first I thought well, that's funny, so many people are using it. But we're not getting much feedback. And we started asking people and they said I didn't want to send back the feedback, I just wanted to go to sleep.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, and they said I didn't want to send back the feedback, I just wanted to go to sleep. Yeah, and they're done. If you love this podcast, I bet you would love the Yoga for Trauma online training program. This eight-week certification is for anyone who wants to learn how yoga philosophy and practice can help respond to the impact trauma has on our bodies and brains. Respond to the impact trauma has on our bodies and brains. When you join the program, you'll learn the theory and best practices for incorporating somatic skills into your healing work.
Lisa Danylchuk:Students often come into the program knowing that yoga can be helpful for stress management, but unsure about how to apply the practice to specific aspects of trauma recovery. This program breaks it all down and leaves you feeling clear about your choices as you support folks navigating post-traumatic stress, whether you're managing a program, working one-on-one with clients or leading therapeutic groups, of course the experience is good for you too. With eight modules and eight yoga classes, you'll get a taste of how it feels to practice yoga in a resource-building, trauma-responsive manner. Head on over to howwecanhealcom forward slash Y4T that's the letter Y, the number four and the letter T to apply to join the program today. Mention the podcast in your application for a special bonus today.
Lisa Danylchuk:Mention the podcast in your application for a special bonus. One more time, nice and slow. The website is howwecanhealcom forward slash Y4T. If you're feeling called to join us, I would love to welcome you and support you. Through the program, people can go to reveriecom to practice hypnosis. What about mental health folks who are listening professionals, people in any kind of healthcare really, or wellness who want to get trained? I don't think you're offering hypnosis training anymore, are you?
Dr. David Spiegel:Well, no, not regularly. I give lectures occasionally about it. There are good courses in ASH. The American Society for Clinical Hypnosis, the International Society for Clinical Experimental Hypnosis have both have research programs and lectures, and I gave a lecture at the last Society for Clinical Experimental Hypnosis meeting. I do that for professionals. The other is Division 30 of the American Psychological Association. The hypnosis division has training programs as well, and a former postdoc of mine is now the head of the division there, and so there is good training available. And we've written a textbook called Trance and Treatment Clinical Uses of Hypnosis American Psychiatric Publishing that, if you like reading instead of listening, that's a good way to do it. There are some ways to do it, so there are a lot of good teaching. Michael Yapko has a very good book that just came out on hypnotic techniques that people could use, so there are a number of ways of learning more about it.
Lisa Danylchuk:And is there anything coming next for you? Any speaking, next books, next articles?
Dr. David Spiegel:I have what's coming up. Well, we're going to have hopefully soon we're just completing the paper to submit on our experience with Reverie and with tens of thousands of users and their ability to reduce stress, and we're going to then go on to pain and other things. So we're now trying to publish our experience with Reverie. I'm getting to give a workshop a year from now in Nice in France to a French hypnosis society about hypnosis, and I just spoke at the International Society for Trauma Dissociation in Boston. Yes, about hypnosis and trauma.
Lisa Danylchuk:That was an excellent talk and for those who were there, it is recorded, and so you can go back and review it, as I think all the plenaries were.
Dr. David Spiegel:So that's what's keeping me busy at the moment and I enjoy doing it, and people who are curious about this way of using hypnosis therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, others can just play with reverie too, and you can get a feeling. You can sit in, in essence, on a session or two and see what it feels like and how we approach it. So that's another possibility.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah, that's great. I always ask this at the end and I feel like I have a guess, but I'm curious what brings you hope?
Dr. David Spiegel:these days it's a tough one. Well, I guess there is something about. You know we're getting a lesson in the worst aspects of the activity and thought. But you know there have always been people and ways that people learn to tolerate and adapt terrible situations and somehow surmount them. And you know it's been true for our country, it's been true for many people. I have seen people responding courageously and adaptively now to these very difficult situations around the world their own lives and to help others. And so, even when I'm feeling pretty down about the way things have been going recently, I keep hoping that good people will come together and surmount very difficult situations now and there's too much trauma people are going through. It's unnecessary, but I'm hoping that people will continue to use their inner resources and their collective resources to assert what is best in humanity. And it's a tough time, but I'm hoping we'll get through it.
Lisa Danylchuk:yeah well, we have a potential resource in our pockets here to cope with stress and sleep better, and all of that matters. I mean, as the mom of an almost two-year-old and I know you're a parent as well I can attest firsthand sleep really matters, that's right. If someone's having trouble sleeping and you haven't tried self-hypnosis, give it a try. You know, like you said, the worst case scenario it doesn't work. Best case scenario you fall asleep and you don't press 10 out of 10 at the review at the end.
Dr. David Spiegel:That's exactly right and people and again, just approaching it the right way of, rather than being frustrated about the fact you're having trouble sleeping, rather than being frustrated about the fact you're having trouble sleeping, focus on feelings and sensations that help your body and your mind allow itself to get to sleep and replenish resources. And it's possible to do. And I used to worry, you know, would reverie and we have an insomnia program there be as good as being in the office with me, and then I realized that if you wake up at three in the morning and need to get back to sleep, you probably don't want me in your bedroom telling you how to do it, but actually you've got it on your smartphone. So there are more and more resources available to help people do exactly what you're saying, like what you're doing, what we're doing, and I hope people will take advantage of them.
Lisa Danylchuk:Yeah Well, thank you so much, Dr Spiegel. It's been great being here on the show. Thank you for all your work over the years and I look forward to the next time I can listen to you, which might be very soon.
Dr. David Spiegel:That's very nice. I hope so. Thank you, Lisa. I appreciate how well informed you are in the work you're doing with yoga and hypnosis and trauma. It's very important.
Lisa Danylchuk:Thank you. Thanks so much for listening. Don't forget to go to howwecanhealcom to sign up for email updates. You'll also find additional trainings, tons of helpful resources and the full transcript of each show tons of helpful resources and the full transcript of each show. If you love the show, please leave us a review on Apple, spotify, audible or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're watching on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe, and keep sharing the shows you love the most with all your friends. Visit howwecanhealcom forward slash podcast to share your thoughts and ideas for the show. I love hearing from you.
Lisa Danylchuk:Before we wrap up for today, I want to be clear that this podcast isn't offering prescriptions. It's not advice, nor is it any kind of mental health treatment or diagnosis. Your decisions are in your hands and I encourage you to consult with any healthcare professionals you may need to support you through your unique path of healing. In addition, everyone's opinion here is their own. Guests share their thoughts, not that of the host or sponsors. I'd like to thank our guests today, everyone who helps support this podcast directly and indirectly. Alex shout out to you for taking care of the babe and the fur babies while I record. Last but never least, I'd like to give a shout out to my big brother, Matt, who passed away in 2002. He wrote this music and it makes my heart so happy to share it with you here. Thank you.