This is Day 2 of 30 for the Hypnotherapy Project, which you can read more about here.
At the risk of sounding like Sybil, someone else showed up today in hypno: the 12-year-old tyrant and Chief Keeper of the Lists. While the pole is placed pretty far up the poor girl's ass, Greg felt bad giving her an uptight name, so he settled on the gently teasing "Miss Lackadaisical", or "Miss Lax", for short. There's no real secret to "her"; it's the part of me that took over when reduced circumstances forced us to give up our home and move in with my maternal grandparents into a falling-down house of Gothic horror far, far from my friends and all that was familiar to me.
My very strict Swedish grandmother, Chief Enabler in the House of Alcoholics, was suddenly calling the shots. You toed the line and trod softly in her house. The adults drank, except for my grandmother. No one was happy. My sister and I were shell shocked. I was hungry, cold and/or lonely for a year and a half: all three at once, in the winter. If it wasn't for my youngest uncle feeding me National Lampoons, Led Zeppelin albums and Monty Python, I wonder if my spirit wouldn't have been entirely flattened.
It's not like I've ever forgotten the experience, of course. Those were seminal years, as formative and important in their hideous way as was the nightmare of Mean Girls at Camp. But I'd never connected the two until Greg put me under; once he did, it was startling how quickly the memory of those days bobbed to the surface.
Hopefully, I'll become more articulate on the process of hypnosis as I move forward. Right now, the closest I can come to describing it is a kind of super-relaxed waking state. For those of you who are super-relaxed in your actual waking state, this may be meaningless. But what I find is that the state of being hypnotized is much like my own waking state, only with the governors removed. I might be able to come up with some of these same thoughts, ideas, statements, etc. fully awake, just talking to Greg, we are close friends, after all, and don't have many secrets, but I'm less self-conscious about bringing them up under hypnosis, so they float to the surface more quickly.
xxx c Image by rosefirerising via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.