Christine Blasey Ford can’t remember key details of the night during which she claimed that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her. Furthermore, even the few details she does remember changes with every retelling. Perhaps her purported skill in self-hypnosis isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Christine Blasey Ford co-authored an academic study that was published by the Journal of Clinical Psychology in May 2008 entitled “Meditation With Yoga, Group Therapy With Hypnosis, and Psychoeducation for Long-Term Depressed Mood: A Randomized Pilot Trial.” It explains how self-hypnosis and can be used to retrieve suppressed memories and “create artificial situations.” In other words, invent memories that the person wants to believe.
Ford’s paper cited a controversial 1964 paper on the use of hypnosis to treat alcoholics and claimed that “hypnosis could be used to improve rapport in the therapeutic relationship, assist in the retrieval of important memories, and create artificial situations that would permit the client to express ego-dystonic emotions in a safe manner.” The study by Ford and her co-authors also used “self-hypnosis” to help treat their randomized sample of patients.
“Participants also were taught self-hypnosis to use outside the group for relaxation and affect regulation (as described in H. Spiegel & Spiegel, 2004),” the researchers explained. “The group’s experiences using hypnosis were the basis for discussion in the middle of the group sessions.”
The 2004 text by Spiegel and Spiegel referenced by Ford and her fellow researchers discusses in detail the use of hypnotism, and even self-hypnotism, to recover memories from traumatic episodes.
“Remember that all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis,” the authors of the referenced 2004 text on hypnotism wrote. “[T]herefore, therapists are only tapping into their patients’ natural ability to enter trance state.”
The authors noted that hypnosis as a means of recovering traumatic memories could also lead to the “contamination” of those memories.
“Patients are highly suggestible and easily subject to memory contamination,” they noted.
Deeply true. Two most unreliable, but often believed, forms of testimony: 1) confessions; 2) eye witness recollections. https://t.co/72Q2V6SzTm
— Robert Barnes (@Barnes_Law) September 28, 2018
She was under a hypnotic trance. pic.twitter.com/N0BOrQb2Tl
— KenWeaverII (@nostrilmandias) September 30, 2018
BREAKING: This is HUGE (waiting for permission to h/t): One of Christine Ford Blasey's research articles in 2008 included a study in which participants were TAUGHT SELF-HYPNOSIS & noted hypnosis is used to retrieve important memories "AND CREATE ARTIFICAL SITUATIONS." pic.twitter.com/11n1JVnArM
— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) October 1, 2018
Sources: The Federalist, American Thinker
