Carol Ginandes' True Adventure: A Smashed Toe, an Isolated Beach, and the Power of Hypnosis
For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, I’m delighted – no, tickled pink! (one of my mother’s favorite phrases) - to introduce one of our top content providers, a brilliant practitioner who adds two new titles to her growing library of Health Journeys titles.
This is, of course, Boston based health psychologist, hypnosis expert, Harvard affiliated researcher, and globe-trotting mind-body consultant, Carol Ginandes PhD.
Her Rapid Recovery from Injury has been a top seller for us for years, and her hypnotic meditations for Relieving Allergies have tamed many a histamine response.
And when we were flooded with requests for reliable, strong, effective, evidence based, hypnotic programs for alleviating Tinnitus and TMJ - we could think of no better master of the form than our Carol.
I first met her, as I did so many talented colleagues, at one of Ruth Buczynski’s NICABM conferences at Hilton Head. Over the years I’ve come to deeply appreciate her consistently first rate work and her personal kindness, integrity, gentleness and generosity.
She deliberately uses a kind of Ericksonian hypnotic pacing and sing-song phrasing that may at first strike you as odd, but, trust me, it’s purposeful, and it gets the job done.
Here she is telling her personal story about using hypnosis for one big, bad, potentially destructive toe stub she experienced, alone on a deserted beach. It’s quite a story:
My Right Toe
A True Story by Carol Ginandes, Ph.D. © 2018
Over the decades, I’ve specialized in integrating clinical hypnosis into my psychotherapy practice, because I believe it to be the best mind/body method I can use to help my clients create change and healing.
And sometimes, I even get to be my own patient. Here’s a true story,
Some years back, I was doing a solo, early morning, barefoot run along a Cape Cod ocean beach. All of a sudden, I felt my large right toe contact something very solid – it was the top part of a concrete post buried in the sand. In that instant, I both felt and heard the crack, and realized I’d badly fractured the toe.
Being far away from any medical resources, I knew I was going to have to deal with it myself. So I immediately went into a hypnotic state and imagined wrapping my toe in a very cooling ice pack; then I imagined surrounding it with a stabilizing, protective boot - the kind they give you in the emergency room. And then I slowly made my way back up a huge dune, got into my car, and drove two hours to the hospital emergency room back in Boston.
The x-ray taken there revealed I’d fractured the toe very badly - in fact, there were three fractures. They sent me home with the kind of boot I’d imagined, plus crutches, and instructed me to come back in five days to see the head orthopedist.
I went home and spent the next few days going deeply into the hypnotic state and giving myself all sorts of hypnotic suggestions to soothe the swelling, bruising and pain, and to accelerate the healing of the fractures themselves.
Five days later, I dutifully showed up for my appointment with the orthopedist. I remember it well, because it was a brief and dramatic encounter. I was sitting on the exam table with my legs hanging over the edge when he came in.
Before saying a word or even looking at me, he went straight to the light table to view the x-ray. He let out an audible, “ Wow , that’s a bad one!” Then he turned around for the first time and looked at my foot.
He looked startled - presumably because the foot hanging off the exam table didn’t look anything like what he expected to see from the x-ray. His entire communication to me consisted of one sentence : I have no idea what you’re doing, but whatever it is, keep doing it.
And I have. In fact, I went on to conduct a pilot study, for which I created a hypnotic intervention protocol designed to accelerate the healing of bone fractures. The results of that trial suggested that using the hypnotic intervention could help people heal their fractures more quickly than those who did not.
That trial intervention subsequently became the basis for one of my most popular Health Journeys hypnosis audio programs: Rapid Recovery from Injury.
Now I’m delighted to add two new titles to the Health Journeys list: Hypnosis & Guided Imagery for Tinnitus and Hypnosis & Guided Imagery for TMJ. If you suffer from either one of these challenging and sometimes exasperating conditions, please consider hypnosis. You’re likely to discover a whole world of relief, tucked away in the remarkable capacity of your own mind.
Carol Ginandes, Ph.D.
Health Psychologist
