In hypnosis, an ‘abreaction’ is what I was taught to call the spontaneous muscle spasm jerks that the subject (person being hypnotized) sometimes would display — these can be anywhere in the body, but usually occur solar plexus or lower. The idea is that when this happened, it was a subconscious “rejection” of the information that was being processed at that moment. You’ve heard the slang phrase “a knee-jerk reaction” — yes. Basically that sums it up.

In psychology official, abreaction is “the release of emotional tension achieved through recalling a repressed traumatic experience.” Its definition indirectly or directly implies that this recall is via ‘words, behavior, or imagination’. Nowhere does it suggest that “spontaneous muscle spasms” qualify for the term, though I suppose they do. For whatever reason, the MDs and PhDs that ran one of the places where I studied hypnosis used that term for that effect.

Abreactions were not uncommon, in fact they were pretty much the norm. Where, how often, how extreme, etc. they might be depended not just on the person but on the subject matter, and I assumed, the degree of belief system issues they were having with absorbing suggestions directly. If one line of suggestion was meeting regular abreactions, the result wasn’t likely to be good; best to take a different tact.

At one point, I started studying people around me whom I was not hypnotizing, and came to the interesting conclusion that perhaps many people abreact quite a lot in