On my blog entry entitled How I Integrate DID Persecutor Parts, a reader posted the following comment:
[W]hen he was trying to ‘put me under’ an odd thing happened: I had this urge to laugh. I didn’t laugh – it was just a feeling that I couldn’t place – but I told him about it. It seemed to disturb him, but we never followed it up, and he said it was difficult to hypnotise me… So that urge to laugh has me really troubled. I haven’t been able to find anything on line that could help me to understand what it’s about, but my fear is that I DO, or at least might, have parts inside me like my mother. God, I would absolutely hate hate hate that. I logically know that the urge to laugh could come from all kinds of reasons, but even coming up against the possibility that I could have anything like my mother inside me is absolutely terrifying and sickening. ~ birdfeeder
This is just an excerpt from the comment. You can read the full comment here.
I have some thoughts on this urge to laugh. If they are helpful, I hope you will find reassurance that your reaction is “normal” and not indicative of having parts of your mother inside of you. Trust your own intuition on whether or not my guess at an explanation fits or not.
I find it interesting that these urges to laugh happened when therapists were trying to put you into a trance. One possible explanation is that your child abuse involved trances, such as hypnosis or other forms. If you had expert abusers “putting you under” as a child (as is common with ritual abuse), then the idea of being “put under” could have triggered this reaction in you.
The laughter could have been aimed at these attempts to put you under because you figured out a way to avoid being put into a trance, so it was a “bring it on” kind of laugh. Another possibility is that being put into a trance was scary for you as a child, but you weren’t permitted to express fear, so you instead responded as a child with nervous laughter. In either case, the act of trying to put you in trance would be the trigger causing the laughter.
In your comment, you said that you do not have dissociative identity disorder (DID). However, you also say that you fear you have “parts of your mother” inside of you. Whether or not you have parts, rest assured that your mother doesn’t have the power to “be inside you.” All parts inside (if you do, in fact, have parts) are YOU, not your mother, which makes them all loveable. You don’t need to worry about your mother living inside of you.
I hope this helps! It’s my educated guess. If what I have said fits, run with it, and if it doesn’t, disregard it.
Photo credit: Hekatekris
Blooming Lotus 
I spoke to my therapist concerning the use of EMDR on DID persons today. This post reminded me of my own EMDR experience of a chap attempting to engage my brain whilst asking wildly impersonal and invasive questions, it really did re-traumatize me. My therapist advises that EMDR is the WRONG option for DID persons or if used it has to be done really carefully.. Chronic abuse sufferers can find the feedback from this type of therapy overwhelming and are likely to dissociate due to the process. It is much better suited to sufferers of single incident trauma.
Hi, bambooswaysinwind.
Good to see you posting again! :0) Did you get my message on this blog entry?
https://faithallen.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/integration-from-did-giving-up-dissociation/
I want to make sure you know I did not censor you on the blog. :0)
~ Faith
EMDR can be fuge inducing.
Using hypnotism for a person who has experiences RA or government sponsored “mind control” would be damaging as far as I know. In my wildest imagination I can not see it as appropriate. Then again it might be.
I have had a mad hysterical laugh. It would be scary to observe. I let it happen and it to date has always lead to a sobbing and then a deep sleep. I go with it is part of the process or healing from that which is not normal.
I can relate to this. I have found myself spitting out in laughter various times in therapy when my therapist wasn’t meaning to be funny at all and was seriously attempting something or trying to be really nice.
Once I recall he was trying to hypnotize me. It was the first time and the whole ‘putting under’ process just seemed so ridiculous to me, so stereotypical, so dreamy and la-la-land-ish, and it was like some part of me was mocking his efforts and letting him know I wasn’t buying into it. RIght after I spat out in laughter, I felt terrible. It wasn’t anything I’d meant to do. It was more like a knee jerk reaction, but it did feel somewhat mean/cruel/sadistic, and I felt like I should apologize. It reminded me of my dad and how he would laugh at people’s earnest efforts to do something he found far-fetched. A couple other times I was under a light trance, and I laughed when he asked me questions that I thought were stupid psychobabble stuff like you’d see on a movie, questions that required me to pretend or imagine and that I was not comfortable with. It was like my laugh was saying, “No way, you’ve got to be crazy if you think I’m going to play your stupid little game. Like this would really work anyways, huh!” And hard as I tried I couldn’t seem to wipe the smile off my face once I realized and didn’t like how I’d laughed. Kind of a sheepish, ‘shit-eating-grin’ as my dad would say, and again, like a smile he often had. Sometimes I actually did apologize to my therapist for laughing.
The other times I’ve laughed inappropriately like that, it’s felt like nervous laughter, or relief laughter. Like if I was crying and he said something, I might laugh at what he said (if he showed he was worried about what I think about him and what he said, or thought maybe I’d be overly sensitive to what he’d said and he was trying to correct himself and walk on eggshells around me). I might laugh and wave it away, like thanks, but I don’t need that, you don’t need to be that way around me. A little pit of a patronizing laugh, I guess, a protective laugh, definitely a defense. Like don’t pity me, don’t worry about me. I hate it when I laugh like that in therapy, because I know it must come off as condescending to him, or mocking. And I know he can see right through it, too! But then I remind myself that if he can see right through it, he knows I don’t mean it and it’s more like a reflex thing.
My therapist at times suggest doing things for “therapy” that to me are very laughable. Like pillow therapy, where you pick a pillow to represent different people and then talk to it.
I was able to self-hypnotize myself really well two times.. Both times intense terror brought me immediately out and I have never been able to since, no matter what I do.
No, whenever I try, I start itching in different areas of my body. Without fail, I will start itching and it distracts my mind. Besides the fact that my mind will not be hypnotized anymore.
I read somewhere that your mind figures out what you are doing and will not allow it to happen again. That is what I think.
Thank you Faith, for posting about this, and to everyone who responded. I felt silly when I made the original comment – that I was making a big deal out of nothing. Your comments have helped me a great deal.
I’m in my 50’s, and I’ve had no indications that I’m an RA survivor, or even DID for that matter. However, I have amnesia for most of my childhood (and vast chunks of my adulthood too, for that matter). I feel like I’m in some kind of nameless limbo in terms of what I’m dealing with. Faith, I felt like a fraud coming to your site at first, but I have to say that it’s been one of the best resources I’ve found. It gave me the nudge I needed to go back to therapy, but this time to finally look for a therapist that treats RA. Even if that’s not what I’m dealing with, I have some confidence that she’s OK to hear whatever I bring up, and to go where I need to go.
It’s helped me out immensely that I’ve heard from others on this site with similar experiences to mine. Your comments here have, again, made me feel like there are others out there who get it.
Bambooswaysinwind, thank you for the heads up – I’ll be sure to ask my therapist about that, and make sure we have a game plan. And HeavenlyPlaces, I was actually looking into doing self-hypnosis – thank you so much for sharing your experience. I also can’t do the ‘pillow’ work you mentioned – I get the same reaction.
“9”, your entire second paragraph reads as if you were writing about my own experience. I don’t believe that I actually laughed out loud during my hypnosis, but every single thing you wrote in that paragraph feels and sounds so familiar: I felt exactly what you felt even if I didn’t actually laugh out loud (at least I don’t remember doing that). It was immediately after that session that my therapist went on vacation, after which he came back and told me he’d had a professional ‘crisis of faith’, said I needed someone with more expertise than he had, and he dropped me as a patient. So I suspect that even if I didn’t do anything more than just tell him about wanting to laugh, he recognized that if we were to continue working together he was going to have to deal with something “mean/cruel/sadistic”, even if I didn’t realize it. So a big part of my fear this time was remembering his reaction to something that seemed so minor at the time (but still frightening). Thank you so much for sharing that – I can’t tell you how validating it is to read that someone else has experienced this.
Michael, thank you once more for your unorthodox perspective, which always takes me far beyond my preconceptions. Reading that you had a scary “mad hysterical laugh”, but that letting yourself go into and through it led to healing on the other side is SO helpful, and gives me an anchor to use when I attempt it again. That’s similar to the advice you gave me another time: to think of the wild animals in my dreams as guides rather than as threats – which was brilliant and really helped.
Funny, to my knowledge I was never abused as a child, but I had the same kind of reaction when my high school gym class was forced to listen to relaxation tapes for a week. But then again, I always seem to have a reaction opposite to what “relaxing” activities are supposed to produce. (Yoga makes me angry, massages just hurt and make me anxious, meditation breathing makes me dizzy, and without the regulated breathing I get annoyed or fall asleep, and relaxation tapes alternatively make me laugh or tick me off.)
I agree that it’s important to remember that laughter is a cathartic response and doesn’t necessariy indicate amusement. It’s very similar to crying in some ways; like Michael, I sometimes laugh before I cry, one turns into the other.
I didn’t know that EMDR could potentially be damaging for multiple or DID people. I haven’t had it, but I have kind of wondered how it’s supposed to help when I can’t remember most of what’s happened, since you have to go through the memory. The only thing I have done that’s similar is that if a memory comes back, and it’s one that I find humiliating, which is a real problem for me, to deliberately flick my eyes from left to right for about half a minute. It does seem to help me experience the memory properly instead of being overwhelmed by it, though it may just be an associative thing (people’s eyes often flick from side to side when they’re trying to remember).
if I relax and do not think to much my eyes so something weird. It starts and then usually may jaw starts to shake and it can lead to my body jerking around. I just go with it although I have a sense when things are going well it happens in sleep.
It is know that the nostrils switch now and again. I find that it is helpful to slowly toss and turn. It seems to be what the body needs and does naturally sometimes. It is not uncommon for me to go to sleep wake up on one side and slowly turn to my other side with out opening my eyes. This never used to happen as I would wake up evaluate my surroundings and go back to sleep as that is what used to be necessary,
Some time my eyes go in figure eights some times they trace angles and or squares. Key for me is not thinking I should be doing something else or I need and explanation.
The eye thing was known to athletes long before the mental health filed got a a hold of it. Watch pro players before a game and you can see them tracing things with there eyes. Golfers the same thing.
yeah hypnotherapy and emdr. it must be from the same place where artificial sweetener and …(fill in your own symptom-treatment of the day) come from. To me its like the same as taking anti-depressants, believing depression is caused by a chemical imbalance of the neurotransmitter only. well it is, but thats just the symptom. We here following this blog all know that there is more to us human beings than just neurotransmitters gone wrong, and we all know on some level that we are more than our symptoms (disorders, addictions,..) and would laugh at the proposal of anti-depressants being the answer to our problems(or any other drug for that matter). to laugh at that is a very healthy reaction:) While they do alleviate the symptoms, they do not HEAL. relieving symptoms is not the same as healing. hypnotherapy and emdr are just relicts of that misunderstanding. I hope it will have changed in a 100 years 🙂 I mean if Im taking myself seriously as a human BEING hypnotherapy and emdr are short of insulting me in my healing capacity. I also think that it is actually detrimental and can be very dangerous to the natural healing process due to its invasive nature.It just shows me that a lot of people do not get the nature of trauma nor the nature of healing (nor the nature of human beings). I would even go so far as so say that no one has ever been really helped by it, alleviated maybe, disturbed definitely, but not helped. it goes with the trend of the quick fix, the instant healing, but does not offer any true understanding, with only the latter one leading to healing. Healing cannot be done, healing happens. tough lesson for most of us.
The whole EMDR thing started when a therapist alone was walking in a park and started doing it on her own. That is good information. When it turned into a program that is when it got messed up. I do it naturally alone and always have. No method needed.
I know one person who had EMDR and is not on a fugue. Not good. The therapist that did it is afraid of hearing about abuse which many are.
I do allow that it can be a work around for a short period if the trauma is very specific. The real work needed to be done. I do wonder if the human body has a trauma threshold and some people have just not yet met it.
Hi Birdfeeder. I am so proud that your beautiful system inside came up with a perfect response to any body trieing without permission to get in your head. that is totaly private. Keep up the good work!! And thank you all for listening. It is a privledge to have friends like you!!!