Hypnotized

Drama has never been a missing component of my life. I have, among other similar experiences, had my teeth pulled out without any numbing, been knocked unconscious as a result of falling off of a high chair, and been so angry as to decide to bite my annoying 10-year old cousin in the arm. However, this personal narrative is about none of these. This personal narrative is going to be about hypnosis – because hypnosis is the most useless thing I have ever done. At least, in the conventional sense, it is useless. In the “unconventional” sense, hypnosis changed my life in three ways – which are what this paper is really about.

First, some background information. The reason why I underwent five sessions of hypnosis was because I wanted to “fix” my life. My life was skating, and skating wasn’t going very well. Particularly, I was under a lot of pressure to learn a new jump – which was the double axel, and I was afraid. Very afraid. The first time I tried it, I fell so hard that I could hear echoes. The second time I tried it, I’m pretty sure my body made a kind of “splat” sound upon hitting the ice, virtually sideways. Well that only continued on and on. I was going slower and slower into the jump until I was virtually standing still in one spot and trying to get myself to spin around in the air two and a half times. I was so scared that I would start to skate around in little circles for fifteen minutes at a time before building up the nerve to attempt the jump. I probably looked like a crazy person, which is most likely why my coaches decided that I needed to try hypnosis. They thought that that would somehow fix me, and that upon emerging from this magical trance, I would somehow land the double axel and win the Olympics all at once. My parents, on the other hand, were not happy.

My parent’s unhappiness, is what leads to the first thing I learned from hypnosis. I learned that there are people who believe in you, and there are people who pretend to believe in you but don’t really. My coaches did not believe in me. Maybe they thought I had talent, or maybe they were just desperate – I don’t really know. Either way, they didn’t believe in my character – that I had the character to stop going into panic mode every time I heard the word “double axel”. I guess it must have seemed like my personal growth wouldn’t happen fast enough, and that hypnosis would be just a perfect substitute.  But my parents had faith in me. My parents believed that my fear of jumping and falling was something that I could overcome on my own. They knew it was going to take time. They were ready for the long practice sessions that would include copious amounts of crying and Russian accented yelling from my coaches. They were prepared that I would, after those practice sessions, go to my room and start throwing things, and then go into the kitchen and start throwing things there too. My parents knew it was all part of the process. They knew that one of two things was going to happen: I was going to somehow overcome my fear and land the jump, or I was going to continue to afraid and never land it. I think they realized that either way, I would learn a lot, which was what really mattered.

The second thing I learned from hypnosis was a result of the first. I was naïve. I thought there was some kind of quick fix, some magic fairy that would make all of my dreams come true. And, I was narrow-minded – I believed that skating was the only thing in my life that was important. My parents gave into me at some point, because they saw how badly I wanted to try, and probably because they figured that the failure of this hypnosis would serve as some sort of lesson. I sat there in the hypnotist’s office. The office was in her house and she had a cat that attacked me when I walked through the door. Anyways, I sat there, on the couch, in the dark while she started talking really softly and slowly. When I think about the whole ordeal it seems funny, but I took it very seriously back then. I had my hands on my lap, because she said she needed to see whether my fingers were twitching, and I just sat, trying to fall into a deep sleep, while her cat made meowing sounds outside and the hypnotist continued to talk. Nothing had changed in my skating the next day. No change the day after. No change after a month of hypnosis. I listened to her recording every night until I fell asleep, but no change. Nothing changed at all in my skating. Only my confidence, which plummeted into the depths. That’s when I realized the naivety. That’s when I realized that maybe my parents do want the best for me, and maybe I should listen once in a while, because they have years of life experience that I don’t have. All of the struggles I had with this one jump, I can feel good about now. It is because of the struggles that I push through those “double axel” moments in my school work. Last semester it was a term paper – which left me with one of the most severe cases of writers block. But I sat on butt and stopped looking at the clock. I thought and thought, and probably thought some more, and finished the paper. It was nothing more. It was persistence, and mental exhaustion. No magic, just good old persistence. That’s what my parents knew when they initially refused to let me try hypnosis. Why bother when there is so much more in life that you can get from struggling with a double axel, than actually landing it?

The first time I landed my double axel, I was practicing by myself, in an isolated rink. My coaches weren’t there. They didn’t see it, and I was never able to repeat it in front of them. We don’t talk about the hypnosis stuff anymore, because I think it drove a wedge between my coaches and my parents. I think it drove a wedge between my coaches and I as well. But regardless, hypnosis did give me something. I learned to appreciate my parents for their faith in me and my character. I felt almost as though they had proven to me that their confidence in me was real, not superficial, not just there to get me to achieve what they wanted. I also learned things about myself. I realized how childlike and naïve I had been. I realized how silly it was of me to think that hypnosis would make my whole life perfect just by helping me land a single jump.