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Photo: Stas Pylypets / Stocksy United
It is not easy to escape the horror these days.
The brain says "Shutdown, Shutdown, Shutdown".
But there are ways and means to escape from this dictated thought.
I learned that when I did a TV report about hypnosis.
So I beam myself exactly there:
To person
Christina Pohl
was born the year the US bombed Vietnam with napalm.
In her youth she sought peace in the hippie caves of Crete.
She has been working as an editor in the SPIEGEL Group since 1991.
Photo:
Lina Moreno / DER SPIEGEL
It is cold in the operating room of the University Hospital in Liège.
Here doctors operate with the help of hypnotherapy.
Hypnosis instead of general anesthesia.
Francisca Diaz y Fernandez, a Spanish dancer, 71 years old, is lying on the operating table.
You definitely can't tell by looking at her.
Francisca looks like she turned the heads of quite a few men at a young age.
She must have been beautiful, her body is still graceful, just not so young anymore.
Francisca wants to be lifted.
Her face is given a local anesthetic and she is given a light sedative.
During the operation she will remain conscious, under hypnosis.
The anesthetist holds her hand and tells something about a “beautiful beach” and “the sound of the waves”.
The patient should squeeze the doctor's hand if anything hurts during the facelift.
Francicsa's freshly stapled face
Lifting sounds as harmless as if you were being promoted upstairs for a short time, but the truth is different: the surgeon completely removes Francisca's facial skin, then scrapes away the excess tissue underneath, cuts open and sutures the lids above the eyes it is wrinkle-free and finally staples the skin on the face again.
Yes, with a stapler!
Anyone who has ever insulated an attic knows what that sounds like.
The cameraman, who was already in the war, is having a great time and asks me to come closer, close-up at Frankenstein.
I'm getting a little dizzy, oh, if I could just follow the patient ...
Francisca, the dancer, hovers over a beach, or at least she thinks so. The anesthetist is really good at hypnotizing.
She even did this to the Belgian queen during a nose operation, she says.
The patients bleed less under the hypnosis, a side effect of the calm, low blood pressure, very useful for the surgeon, then the blood does not splash out of the vessels.
General anesthesia can also be dangerous for older people.
But thanks to the hypnosis, this patient is very fine again very quickly.
Half an hour after the slaughter, Francisca is sitting in her sick bed, happy and spooning a soup into her mouth with her freshly stapled face.
The little hunger after the operation, she suddenly had an appetite when she came to.
The dancer can hardly remember because of the hypnosis and actually believes she was "en el paraiso", in paradise, on the beach.
She is doing well, she claims.
I ask why she wanted this surgery so badly.
In her circles, she says, it is a part of dancing through old age with as few wrinkles as possible.
She is afraid that someone will notice that she is already in her 70s.
How do I manage to get some kind of inner freedom from wrinkles?
Who wants to be beautiful must suffer?
I had to have my broken nose fixed once after breaking it in a wave that was too high on the French Atlantic coast.
That hurt like hell.
The face is the part of the body where a person feels the most.
Never in my life would I voluntarily go under the knife again, no matter how old I look.
Maybe there is another way?
Thanks to the early influence of advertising, my brain fires a slogan.
Attention, #Boomercringe - ashamed of my memories: »Merz special coated tablets - natural beauty comes from within«.
I don't really want to eat this stuff now, but I like the thought that I could radiate more from the inside than any scalpel on my skull.
But how do I manage to achieve a kind of inner freedom from wrinkles?
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Back when I made the film, I let myself be hypnotized for research reasons, purely professional interest!
I actually managed to fall into a trance and suddenly I was a hummingbird.
So light that I could fly - and completely wrinkle-free.
It is actually fascinating how the human brain is designed.
Every memory, even severe trauma, can be overwritten like on a hard drive.
But the wrinkles that weigh on the soul often look more like scars.
My age is estimated to have met at least 500, sorry, assholes.
So inside I look more like Jürgen Prochnow (without a beard).
As a young person, it is definitely easier to believe in what is good.
So it is a matter of retrieving this innocence from memory and securing it like the gold reserves of Fort Knox.
Every morning self-hypnosis, you take a favorite song as a trigger and repeat: "Deep inside I am wrinkle-free!" Just as I have had some nice drinks, I see a younger version of myself in the mirror after 500 repetitions.
Truly amazing!
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