For emotionally disturbed persons, relaxation training techniques are useful primarily as an adjunct to psychotherapy or drug therapy and can be helpful in reducing tension and anxiety. They are ways of treating _symptoms_; they can help you continue to cope with stressful situations. It is another question whether it is in your best interest to _continue_ in a situation that causes you enough stress that relaxation training becomes a needed crutch. Sometimes it is wiser to change an unsatisfactory situation or to attempt to change your attitudes, values, or behavior {217} than it is to learn skills so that you can keep doing the same stressful and perhaps unsatisfying thing day after day. Relaxation training is a _coping strategy_. By itself, it cannot resolve the fundamental question: whether it is better to learn how to numb yourself to an unhappy situation, to leave it, or to face the possibility that your stress is caused by inner conflicts and unrealistic attitudes rather than external factors. If you cannot or do not want to leave a stressful environment, techniques of relaxation training may benefit you. If you feel the main problems are within you, then psychotherapy may be the best alternative. And sometimes, throwing in the towel, deciding in favor of a change of career, marriage, place to live, or way of life may be most therapeutic and personally fulfilling. It can often be hard to know which alternative is best. Counseling may help. Talking with good friends may help. Letting time pass may help. Usually, ignoring discomfort will _not_ help; stress has a way of compounding and wearing you down. Waiting too long, usually out of fear of facing a need for some form of change, is itself a source of internal stress--of worry and anxiety that will not go away until you do something to put a stop to doing nothing. HYPNOSIS _An approach to therapy that can have far-reaching beneficial effects for people with many different kinds of problems, especially useful for persons who are strongly motivated to change and can feel a deep sense of confidence in the humanity and competence of their therapist._ Hypnosis is very old. Ancient Egyptian records indicate that priests maintained temples of sleep devoted to healing the ill and troubled. The priests are thought to have used hypnotic induction of sleep and to have offered assurance that patients would get well. Many centuries later, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) developed a method for inducing a hypnotic trance state (he associated it with sleepwalking) and claimed that therapy often {218} was more effective when patients were in a trance. Hypnosis was later used by Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) at the Paris Hospital of Salpêtrière; Charcot was one of Freud's teachers. During World War II, hypnosis was used to treat soldiers with amnesia, paralysis, and pain. Since then, it has been used frequently by clinical psychologists and psychotherapists.