No High Hypnotizability, No Dissociative Disorder

This session is available for 1.5 APA and ASWB credits.

Abstract
In the mid 1990s, due to an erroneous interpretation of correlational studies of hypnotizability and dissociative symptoms (r = ~.12), the dissociative disorders field and the hypnosis field mistakenly rejected the role of hypnotizability in the dissociative disorders. This mistake occurred despite the fact that DID patients were known to be more hypnotizable than the patients of any other psychiatric or medical diagnosis. This error sent research and understanding of the dissociative disorders down the wrong path for the last quarter-century. During the last 25 years, the dissociative disorders field has focused, almost entirely, on a trauma model of the dissociative disorders. Today, evidence increasingly suggests that high hypnotizability is THE fundamental and necessary cause of the dissociative disorders – not trauma. In the absence of high hypnotizability, no amount of trauma can cause a dissociative disorder. But, when high hypnotizability is present, inescapable pain and discomfort (i.e., “trauma”) MOTIVATE a person to imaginatively distance themselves from the pain -- via high-hypnotizability-enabled, dissociative feats. If carried out repeatedly, these high-hypnotizability-enabled distancing-maneuvers become habitual. They become a reflexively-functioning, procedural learning pattern that we call “a dissociative disorder.”