Bryan :
If you can think of it as a well, this is one of the things we teach, and the useless information just filters to the bottom of the well in sludge, that’s one aspect. With Post Traumatic Stress you cause an ember of anxiety down into that sludge. It’s there and when a like situation occurs the ember will roar into play and you’ll get a violent reaction.

Now the thing is, that ember, people think is in the subconscious which it is in that sense if you think of that barrier, but if you can recall it by putting a bucket down and hauling it up and dealing with it, it’s got to be there all the time.

It’s in the well but the bucket brings it up to the surface and that is what hypnosis does it brings that forgotten or malicious belief system to the surface where it can be dealt with.

Chris :
So people who believe that what you’re doing is bypassing the critical faculty or whatever it is and bringing out of the subconscious is very similar to what you’re describing really. If they want to go down that route of subconsciousness.

Bryan :
Yes you’re absolutely right when you mention a filter. We’ve all got filters that we deal with some of them are subconscious in that we automatically don’t think about them. But it’s those filters that distort what’s going into the mind and can cause reactive behaviour that you don’t want.

An example of that, as I said before is Post Traumatic Stress.

An example of that was one of the patients I saw here domestically in my house. He was referred because he’d gone through two marriages and he’d had a violent outburst with his then girlfriend, the third relationship and she walked out on him and he was quite disturbed. He’d been a soldier in the Vietnamese war, and there was a platoon of 13 soldiers going through the jungle.

And he stopped to urinate and the other 12 went on and were wiped out by the Vietcong they were all killed and he hid and was under bushes and the Vietcong were going past him and he said he could actually feel the mud displaced from one of the boots near his hand and he really had a shocking experience. It took him 72 hours to get back to his base and of course soldiers can’t show fear.

So what happens? It gets repressed. But the sound of a car backfiring or even crackers, he couldn’t stand crackers, anything fireworks. Any noise at all would send him into this violent rage and all of this would come out.

Now he had been to an army psychiatrist and several psychologists but none of them had the tools if you like to find out what really was the case and the factor that was involved.

I have to explain that emotions are in layers, and anger covers fear and grief. He was expressing anger which was hiding the grief that he lost all his mates and the fear he went through. Soldiers can’t show fear so it was founded. When he was hypnotised we found all this out.

And it was this feeling of what they call Survivor Guilt.

Why should he live when all his mates were killed? Now I, under hypnosis, said right you’re one of the mates that have been killed. You’re looking at this other person who has escaped. How would you feel about that? And he said I’d be feeling very good and I said well why are you punishing yourself because this is what happened.

And it made sense to him and the look on his face was absolutely amazing because he looked like a hunted man, haunted even and all of a sudden peace came over his mind. All done within an hour and yet he’d had probably 20 years on and off of therapy and suffered all that time unnecessarily.

So that’s where the value of hypnosis is. You can get through that filter right into the old brain neuronal pathways that give it the power to change behaviour.

Chris :
Listening to you has been absolutely fascinating. I mean apart from listeners you’ve given me a lot of food for thought as well because I did go through the mill in terms of my training as well.

There’s been, I’ve got a lot to think about from what you’ve said and thank you much indeed for that. I always end by asking somebody for a piece of music that they find inspirational or motivational or that they just enjoy and I play it afterwards.

Do you have a piece of music that you’ve grown up with?

Bryan :
Well Walter Houston’s September Song. The full version of that is particularly appropriate to me at the moment. It’s a great song and I resonate with it.

Chris :
Well Bryan for somebody who is 88 and how many trips have you got abroad this year?

Bryan :
I’ll be travelling through 7 countries.

Chris :
Well I think at 88 it’s probably still a spring song really for you rather than a September song.

Thank you very, very much indeed it really has been enlightening and it’s been a real pleasure to talk to you and thank you very much for agreeing to doing it.

A fascinating interview with a really fascinating man, 88 years old travelling to 7 different countries to spread the word through the course of this year.

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