The Best Time I Pretended to Be in a Trance

by Claire Carusillo

In the consultation session immediately before I got hypnotized, I was eager to please the hypnotherapist. She cooed at me like a mystical great aunt and told me I had wise eyes. I liked her and I wanted her to fix me, so I was forthcoming with personal information: She asked me about my parents and I told her about my whole family. She asked me about my dreams and I told her about my nightmares. I was earnest and she seemed to understand me, so after our talk, I agreed to surrender my subconscious to her, to let her lead me away from my anxieties and into self-actualization. I was relaxed and open until she held a Reiki crystal up to my forehead and I flinched instinctually. “You’re high strung,” she told me. “Your chakras are completely blocked.” Oh shit! This was serious!

And then the hypnotherapy began. “Imagine a happy place, Claire,” she whispered, “a relaxing place.” Forget that small hiccup with the Reiki crystal, I thought. I’m totally gonna nail this one. I had the perfect moment in mind: Last August my best friends and I stayed overnight in a cabin on a mountaintop in Colorado. When we got to the site, we convened on a cliff, playing the one Enya song we had (1988’s “Orinoco Flow”) on tiny portable speakers and pretending that the mishmash of tree poses and downward dogs we were trying out was actually part of an ancient and powerful sun salute. In the back of all of our minds, we knew we were creating one of those moments everyone needs if the “happy place” concept ever comes up in a therapist’s office, on a bumpy flight, or in a low-level English class. This was it, I thought while laying on the hypnotherapist’s couch, this was my time. My breathing slowed and I went deeper into the memory.

As it turns out, some memories should be recalled only in fleeting glimpses and Twitpics; I remembered that a few hours after that moment of cosmic calm, we discovered that we had forgotten the hot dogs. Hunger and thin air were starting to get to us, and our tight-knit group quickly devolved into a loose assembly of ponytailed girls in high-performance outerwear accusing one another of hot dog negligence. In the aftermath, we ate Cheetos tucked inside hotdog buns smothered with mustard and acted stiffly polite. Later, while everyone else was sleeping, I saw my friend Megan sprinting from the outhouse 40 yards away back into the cabin. I was convinced she was going to murdered and/or mauled, but I didn’t do anything about it, because I was terrified of what might happen to me if I got up. The next morning, not dead, I brought it up to her, and we had an awful moment where I was called out for “always looking out for number one” and farting in my sleep.

On to the next one, I thought, supine in New York, while I paid someone a substantial amount of money to teach me not to think. I had lost track of what the hypnotherapist was saying while mentally obsessing over hot dog-gate 2010. I was failing hypnotism. It was time to focus up and make my heavy breathing sound a little bit more convincing. I let out a guttural noise to let the hypnotherapist know that not only was I in a trance, it was a really deep one. Maybe I’m overacting, I thought, but let’s just go with it. “Imagine a white light over your head,” she said slowly, “visualize it and feel the warmth and light over your scalp. Now send that light over the forehead and down your neck and so on.”

I was good at this. I was so good, in fact, that the imaginary white light pulsing through my body felt the exact same as the hypnotic UV light of a tanning bed I had once grown attached to in suburban Illinois. I had a secret bout of tanning late in my high school career to prepare for prom, for which I was secret-excited. As a “joke to myself” I often stuck one of the disposable Playboy bunny stickers the salon kept by the front counter to my pelvic bone before I went into the tanning bed, so that after a session I could rip it off and have a lighter-colored Playboy emblem left over. That way I could gauge my tan and also share a tiny, private chuckle with myself. I seized up at this point in the session, convinced that this far in I was supposed to be in a pretty deep trance. Better take some more deep breaths and sort of flutter my eyelids to prove to the therapist that I am committed, hard-working, and spiritual, and that I’m not just a beaaautiful face with wise eyes.

As I was debating whether or not to let my tongue loll out of my mouth or speak parceltongue, my hypnotherapist said in a hushed voice, “We must find your third eye, which is your intuition. It is the place where only positive thoughts come through. Any time you have a negative thought, say ‘cancel, cancel’ and change it to a positive thought. Good.” This bothered me because it seemed disjointed, but mostly I was thinking about an episode I had seen the week before of Ice Loves Coco, where Coco explains to her assistants Soulgee and Sparkle that her obsessive-compulsive disorder is getting worse, and that every time she thinks a negative thought, she feels compelled to say “transmute, transmute” out loud and oh my god I need to call home immediately and make sure that someone is DVRing tonight’s episode. But I also was taken back to that brief, exciting time when I flirted with obsessive-compulsive disorder myself, ages 8–15, counting all of the syllables and then all of the letters of every sentence I head someone say aloud. Ice Loves Coco: 12 letters, 4 syllables. We must find your third eye, which is your intuition: 42 letters, 13 syllables. Oh god, I’m doing it again: 19 letters, 8 syllables.

Get your act together, Claire, I thought. Think of your happy place, before the fallout. Think of the real sun waiting outside instead of a strip-mall tanning bed. Think of how you laughed and laughed at that little dog wearing a parka on Ice Loves Coco. Calm down. Never let them see you sweat. Only let them hear them hear the precision of your lungs. Move on — see, the hypnotherapist already has! “Your arms and legs should feel very heavy,” she said. And they did. I lay like a lump on the couch in her strange purple office, anchoring my body while fighting hunger and frustration. I recognized those were some of the negative emotions that I was supposed to presently be battling, but I didn’t think I could do it any longer. Instead I thought about lunch, the G train, my middle school gym teacher, and cutting my hair. When the session and the trance-that-never-happened was “broken,” I walked out of her office not feeling any elation, not feeling any freer, not feeling any less scared, but I also didn’t feel like I had to pretend to not feel those things anymore.

Claire Carusillo is the Hairpin’s most qualified intern. She often dabbles in alternative medicine but usually just ends up taking like seven Advils plus two Tylenol PMs.