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The Hypnosis of Illness

Paul Bahder, MD & Teresa A. Bahder, MA

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Illness is a learned activity. Illness is an "acquired state." While we spontaneously know how to be well, our bodies do not know "how to be sick;" they must learn about illness from external teachers. We must learn from the outside - from our environment - how to interpret sensations, how to label them "pain," and how to behave when we are "sick."

Little children have not yet learned to be sick; they have no idea of illness; for them, ailments may be part of a play, as much so as playing hide and seek. Even life threatening diseases, such as leukemia, do not affect children the way they affect adults.

Disease means much more to adults than to children. By the time we reach adulthood we have learned to value illness. By then it has become a "cherished" commodity, a source of "power." Part of the loss of our childhood innocence involves the knowledge of dis-ease. Separated from our childhood ease, we discover the world of personal struggle. Illness stops being just another experience to go through. It takes on an ego value, and becomes something to use and benefit from.

I remember breaking my elbow at the age of five. It hurt and I screamed. The entire family - mother, father, aunt, and uncle, - all came around me to console me; all were trying to help. In a few minutes the pain had mostly gone away, at least it was not so great that I needed to scream.

I looked at the entire family around me, relating to me because of my pain and misery. How could I give it up? I no longer needed to scream, but I had to. For them. And for myself. It was like being invested in the pain. I had become a recognized member of the clan through my misery. I felt I would disappoint my family now if I stopped crying. I knew they expected me to hurt and to carry on. And I obliged them.

I kept on weeping and screaming. I felt their closeness and a deep sense of "belonging" with my family (I wonder if this experience was not crucial in my becoming a doctor?) And it was at that point that I learned how to put on pretenses; making noise and carrying on, I had lost my innocence. A few hours later (it was a very bad injury) I started believing in the intensity of my pain. I no longer wanted to cry, but I could not stop weeping because the sensation was no longer just my "experience." I had become what it was. It was my "pain" and I was "injured." I had acquired a piece of identity.

Uneasiness filled my insides. The depth of my inner being was now called "pain." I was remolded from without in the image of pain, with the help of others who showed me its importance.

Observant of this external influence, I was learning that what mattered was not "the Kingdom of Heaven that is within," but the kingdom of hell that is without. I discovered 'love' through suffering, and acceptance through giving myself up to an external definition of my pain. I took an important step toward becoming an externally created person, emptied of inner light.

This experience had many important aspects:

  • I was taught to identify and 'label" a particular sensation as "pain."
  • Because I labeled this experience "pain," I became the center of my family's attention and entered into intense interpersonal relations with them. I became "part of the clan."
  • Through accepting "pain," I acquired an "identity." "Hurt" made me into a "somebody."

In addition, the "world view" of others - their understanding and interpretation of reality - became my own. I was no longer discovering the world in awe and reverence. I was pursuing the approval of others by giving up my own wonder for the mystery of life and exchanging it for the knowledge acquired from them.

It appears that a child simply experiences life without labeling its events as good or bad - without ascribing the socially agreed meaning to them. For this reason, young children usually cope quite well with diagnoses of terminal illness, until they learn from adults how they are expected to behave. Children learn about the world and the meaning of their life from the reactions of people around them. They also learn about suffering and death. Often it is the children themselves that console the parents. Still seeing life innocently, children look at life from an impersonal view. They often see life as unending at death. I am reminded of the terminally ill child who told one of the doctors that the way he sees life is that

each child is like a book, temporarily on loan from God to parents. When your time is up, you are recalled to go back to where you came from.

One parent may over-react, another may ignore a sick child; each conveys a message about the importance of disease. From the first parent the child finds his or her illness to be of over-riding concern, from the other he or she learns it is a taboo. In either case, disease becomes an initiation into a world of suffering, a life that culminates with "death."

By learning that illness is "negative" we learn that the world - and our body which is a part of that world - is a dangerous place. Disease becomes not just another moment in life but a significant one - an important symbol serving as an organizing focus for our psyche. We learn of the mysterious power of illness when it stops being just an experience and is judged negative and labeled as "disease." Being sick is no longer just another simple life experience - a "game" to the children. It becomes a means of connecting with - and often controlling - the world around us. It also becomes a way of organizing our life and communicating with others. Elderly people spend much time concerned with their ailments, talking about the physiology of their bodies. A good bowel movement becomes an engaging topic of conversation as well as a reason to get up in the morning.

In time, we loose our innocence and accept disease. Not as children of God but as children of our culture, we learn to behold illness and witness life's pain and misery. Not through the eyes of innocence, but with the words of suffering, we learn to define our existence. To know we are sick we need "the word made flesh," not in the image of God and health, but in the image of disease. We must have "our words" to stand in place of "God's word" in order to create the experience of illness.

If we look closely we can see that being sick requires a "fantasy" to uphold it. The fantasy is an image - a picture which gives illness its "word" to become flesh. The fantasy imprinted in our mind - a photograph of trauma, or an image of our compensation to counteract it - sustains disease. A dialog, words spoken in anger, a Put down, or a fright - all are haunting thoughts that constitute illness's hypnotic suggestion. We experience them as chatter, meaningless background noise, or as nagging and persistent words capturing our mind. Such thoughts can even take the form of songs heard or pictures seen, sustaining our worries. Anything on which our mind is focusing gives our psyche direction and our body its shape. Such recurring thoughts are always, sooner or later, associated with disease. Only a still mind is immune to being sick.

A still mind is the mind that takes its life from spiritual light. It does not depend on itself. It rests on the ground of its being. When we "take no thought" it is "God's good pleasure to give us the Kingdom." When we become like the "lilies of the field that toil not and neither do they spin," we can discover the real nature of who we are meant to be - manifested through us without our personal effort. We epitomize the lesson learned from that oriental proverb: a restless mind is a sick mind, a calm mind is a healthy mind, and a still mind is a divine mind.

In a calm mind even the experience labeled by those around us as "disease" can be accepted as just another experience in a succession of many. Our experiences of ice cream, moonlight, or pain are just different states of mind which, in and of themselves, do not mean anything and therefore do not require our reaction. To maintain our learned - and not our inherent - way of being sick, we utilize our imagination to psyche ourselves up into the physiological state of illness. We dig-up and recall feelings of anger, fear, being hurt, and so on, to fuel our mental /emotional processes. In turn, these create the kind of sensations in our body that will sustain j&-ease and eventually produce the image of illness carved in flesh.

The hypnotic spell necessary for illness requires an artificially altered state of mind - achieved through our ego. Fear, anger, guilt, and doubt are some of the states of mind clouding our understanding and maintaining a deluded mind. Judging others allows the mind to be active and to seem wakeful while remaining under the hypnotic spell. Through our inner reactions - our judgments - our ego ascribes a meaning to outer experiences.

Normally we do not know the world the way it is. We know the world by what we bring to it. All meaning  is within and not in the world. So in order to "know" the world around us, we must judge it and react to it. Our own reactions within serve to anchor our meaning to the world without. By decreeing how things affect us, good or bad, we believe ourselves to be "above the world," which we condemn. Through judgment we feel superior to that which we judge, and in this way, the more we judge, the more superior we believe ourselves to be.

In our fantasy we believe that that which we judge, we create. This is based on a partial truth. We do create - our judgment and reactions - but not the world. We confuse what we feel inside with the world outside. The more prideful we become, the more we need to judge to enlarge the world of our creation. The delusion becomes a reality and the reality seems a delusion. The more we judge, the more separated we become from the awe and appreciation of "what is."

Yet in ego's world, it is through more judgment that relief is effected. In illness we find a release and a renewed hope for being a "somebody." Usually unconsciously, disease becomes both something to judge and something to create. Through our confused reasoning, we create disease; the more we are sick, the more our ego is a creator.

One of the reasons we find it difficult to give up disease is that we are its maker. Like an artist who paints his canvas and takes pride in what he has made, we too derive satisfaction from our disease - the product of our making. We do not want to let go of the one thing for which we can feel totally responsible. Beautiful or ugly, pleasurable or painful, illness speaks of who we have become and it reflects our desire to be a somebody - to have an identity.

In addition, our reactions enable us to project the blame onto the other person, the "outside;' by claiming that we are just an effect of something external. Not only do we become a god, but we become a "good god." Through becoming victims, we feel justified in passing judgment on the "bad" world that victimized us. To that end we use people, places and things to react to in order to have the basis to be a judge. Our objective is not so much to bring others to their downfall, but to define ourselves by passing judgment on them - so we walk the earth looking for trouble. We react and suffer so that our pride may be fulfilled.

Putting it simply - to be sick, we need to be in an altered state of mind. We must be in the kind of consciousness that will not be capable of innocently looking at life's experiences. Instead, we must dwell on images and suggestions, that will sustain disease. This state of mind is best called "resentment." It is not the same as anger. In fact, it is not an emotional state at all, but rather a state of spiritual failing that can embrace any number of emotional experiences. To "resent" means "to feel over and over again the same experience." It is a state of creating our personal sense of reality according to our image and of sustaining it by the force of our personal effort. Believing in the images sustaining resentment, we dwell on "the word" that is to be manifest in the flesh in the form of disease.

Resentment can manifest itself by a sustained rage toward, one's parents, for example; or, by an infatuation with, a girl friend or boy friend. Resentment locks us into past experience - "yesterday's manna" - devoid of life. Like an exiled king without his kingdom, we hang onto the images of the past to desperately believe in our own glory. Eventually illness becomes our prop to help us see ourselves as helpless victims, unjustly banished from the kingdom, rejected in spite of our deep self-worth, the bastions of abused righteousness.

Disease requires dedicated work "by the sweat of our brow." Allow some joy and laughter and we may not be able to be sick. Cheerful consciousness breaks the spell of mind necessary to maintain symptoms and also to maintain our interpretation of them. This is the reason why there have been reports recently of people being cured from terminal illnesses by using laughter as a therapy. This is also the reason why so many Buddha statues portray him with a smile that breaks through the illusion.

Health is a natural state. Illness requires struggle and effort. Health is effortless and spontaneous. It is easier to be healthy than to be sick, yet for many it feels more "normal" to have ailments than not. The good news is that we do not have to do anything to get well. Rather, all we need do is to stop the sustaining effort we put into keeping the images of illness alive, and health will come through of its own accord. Awake to reality, we become subject to the light of truth and not the falsehood of hypnotic images.

Let's take a look at another example of this hypnosis in "real life." A nine- year-old girl was brought to our office because of severe asthma for the last three months. She was a good student, with many friends and without any overt stresses. On further questioning she admitted that she lived in intense fear that her parents will separate. In reality her parents were planning a divorce but keeping it from her. Lack of parental love and the projected fear of their physical absence were experienced by her as lack of air. Her illness was an expression of the truth she felt.

There just wasn't enough of fife-giving essence to go around, love or air. She lived in a state of depravity that was reinforced by shortness of breath. Lack of air was a hypnotic trigger that allowed her to believe that there just wasn't enough love to go around. Perceiving the world through her breathing she saw it as withholding what she needed. Asthma gave her an opportunity to fight for every breath, just like she had to fight for every iota of love she needed.

Illness, just like our entire life, is a metaphor. Taking it at face value is like insisting that the meaning of a flower can be found by pulling petals off the stem and counting the number of rods in its center. Even the very idea of meaning implies a generalization - a deeper seeing beyond the appearance.

Unless disease is understood as a meaningful communication from the Great Unknown, we will only remain mechanical creatures, affected by the big and bad world out there. But we are not mechanical. We are spiritual beings that have forgotten our spiritual heritage. Disease is an echo from the vast depths of our being, calling us to awaken. It hauntingly beckons us to come out of our fantasies and into the light. It requires no effort!