What is Hypnosis and how does it work?

What is hypnosis?

Hypnosis is heightened state of awareness and relaxation, induced by suggestion. It is where you quiet the conscious mind to such a degree, that the hypnotist can communicate directly with the subconscious mind. Another description could be a trance-like state. Your brain will go in and out of trance periodically throughout the day. For example, when you catch yourself staring off into space or you veg-out in front of the TV.

Some common stereotypes of hypnosis are the unfortunate ‘victim’ who clucks around the stage, like a chicken or where a Victorian fiend dangles an old-fashioned watch in front of a damsel until she falls asleep. I hope that this post will dispel these myths.

The Word Hypnosis

The word Hypnosis comes from the Greek god Hypnos. Hypnos was the god of sleep who lived in a cave with his brother Thanatos, the God of death. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Hypnosis is not sleeping and you certainly won’t die. You are actually in a heightened sense of awareness. Your senses are acute; you can actually hear a lot more than normal for instance.

The first part of the job of a Hypnotist is to induce this trance like state of hypnosis. This is actually a simple process once you learn how to do it.
When you think about visiting a hypnotherapist for say, smoking cessation, a very small part of the process is actually inducing hypnosis, otherwise known as the Induction. A vast amount of skills, care and time, however, are required to deliver the actual therapy.

There are many types of therapy; Suggestion is the most common type. The suggestion can be negative and positive, so the therapist needs to exercise great skill and knowledge to get this part right. This is so that the therapy takes hold and the client gains the benefits.

Suggestion Therapy

To varying degrees, people are all open to receiving suggestions. We are often swayed by peoples’ opinions. These suggestions can also change our beliefs and therefore the results we get in our lives. Suggestion therapy is therefore one of the first things your hypnotherapist will learn, because they can affect real change in you, if they do it right.

The important thing to remember when using suggestion as therapy is that we do not use the unwanted feeling or condition. We always use the opposite positive suggestion. This is because of how the mind works. For instance “You will stop smoking” becomes “You will now return to being a non-smoker”.
When we hear language, the words are processed by our subconscious minds and associations are made, so that we can make sense of them. Properly formulated suggestions can therefore be accepted by the subconscious as fact and then become reality.

Direct and Indirect Suggestions

Suggestions can be either direct or indirect and both types are useful tools in the hypnotherapist’s armoury.

Direct Suggestions

Direct suggestions or commands like “You will now return to being a non-smoker”, are used on analytical types of people. They are to the point, abrupt and without any ambiguity. In a way, they are clear instructions for people. These are very useful for people who are used to taking orders or people in hierarchical working environments.
These would be used with armed service personnel or the emergency services.

Indirect Suggestions

Indirect suggestions can be used for creative types of people. These types of suggestions ‘go round the houses’. The therapist would ask politely for someone to do something. They are true suggestions.
These would be good for artists, dancers and designers.
An example of an indirect suggestion would be “…and you might find that you begin to enjoy the process of becoming your ideal size and shape…”.
If someone is not an obvious creative or analytical type, a good therapist would throw in a mixture of direct and indirect suggestions.

Contingent Suggestions

Contingent suggestions are those that involve the client’s current routines. For instance, let’s suppose you suffer from insomnia and you want to be able to drift off to sleep at a reasonable time. A contingent suggestion would use your current bedtime routine. For instance, the therapist might say, “As the music to News at Ten comes on the TV, you will find… then as you climb the stairs, you will become more relaxed and each step you take up the stairs you will feel more relaxed.”

The idea here is that you are making the situation safe and familiar to the subconscious mind and the amygdala, which don’t like change or threats. You are simply suggesting that the client feels a different way, when a familiar thing happens.

Embedded Suggestions

Embedded suggestions are commands can be used to prevent rejection of the suggestions.
Here the therapist would would give you lots of simple, true suggestions or truisms that the cannot reject. They would also add one embedded suggestion that they want you to take. For example:
“…you are feeling relaxed”
“… now you can relax ten times deeper…”
“…you can focus on the sound of my voice…”
EMBEDDED SUGGESTION – “…YOU WILL NOW RETURN TO BEING A NON SMOKER…”
“… now you are even more relaxed…”
“…the more you relax, the more your breathing slows down…”
“…you may feel the need to swallow, that’s ok…”

Post Hypnotic Suggestions

Post Hypnotic Suggestions are suggestions, which would be given during hypnosis, which your would carry out later.
To formulate Post Hypnotic Suggestions, they would use the formula – Stimulus X will result in Response Y. for example:
“… and when you hear the music you will…”
“…each and every time you have these unwanted feelings (X you will immediately take a deep breath. As you breath out your whole body will relax (Y).”

Trance

Once your are in trance, your conscious mind will not question any suggestions. The purpose of inducing trance is to bypass the preconscious part of the mind. This is the critical reasoning part of the mind that filters all the incoming sensory information. It will reject anything it deems a threat or is irrelevant.

Trance state allows the therapist to ‘bribe the guards’ so to speak. This will allow the suggestion to enter the subconscious. This is where all the skill and training of the therapist comes in to play. I could teach you to hypnotise someone in a few hours, however the process of therapy takes proper training and much practise to get right.

The Myths

One myth is that the hypnotist can make you do something that you wouldn’t normally do. This is preposterous. Your subconscious mind is powerful and will always protect you. So even though the suggestion bypasses the critical mind, the subconscious can still reject it.
Myth number two is that you can be hypnotised against your will. Again, this is nonsense. If the critical mind is still active, it could reject every single suggestion made. Trust is the key here. The client must trust the therapist or there will be no trance induction.

That said, be careful with this notion; you can be lulled into a state of trance just by watching the TV. You are then open to suggestion. Adverts are a prime example. In a later chapter, I will go into the tricks that advertisers use to ‘hypnotise you’ into buying their products.
Therapy won’t work unless you want it to. As I said before, you will resist any induction and suggestions if you don’t want to be there. This is often the case when a well-meaning relative cajoles someone into visiting the hypnotherapist to give up smoking, for instance.

The best patients are those who want to be there. The therapist can then use her skill to facilitate the changes in the client.
Remember that all hypnosis IS Self-hypnosis. The successful therapist is one who is adept at guiding the client to make the changes themselves. Self hypnosis is the subject of the next chapter.
If you think that hypnotherapy can help you, get in contact, I would be glad to help.

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Regression and Revivification

Does hypnosis work for anxiety and panic attacks? The short answer is yes, hypnosis does work for anxiety and panic attacks. There are many reasons for the anxiety and panic attacks and your therapist will need to know what they are before they can help you. Some common treatments for anxiety and panic attacks are the use of regression and revivification.

Regression and revivification

When you are in trance, you may go back to a time, in your mind. Are you actually experiencing the events or is it a memory? For example is it regression or revivification.

Regression

Regression occurs when you have disassociated memories of a past event. When you talk in trance, you are usually in the past tense. You will be unemotional.
Another way you can tell if you are in regression is that you will have the body language and tone of an adult.
Your therapist can intentionally use regression to get you to go back to a traumatic sensitising event, in a safe way.

Revivification

Revivification is when you remember an event but you are associated to it. That means that your experience is real to you. Your language will be in the present tense, as if the event is happening now. You may get emotional and your body language and tone may be that of the child you were at the time.
Some therapists may use revivification to get you right back to the sensitising event. I personally would not use this method with any of my clients because I cannot know exactly if this was the real event or not. It’s also not very kind on you.
During my Hypnotherapy training, I practised intentional revivification with a Brazilian chap. We knew he was in revivification because he was speaking Portuguese. He had obviously gone back to a time before he learned English.

Using The Bridge Method to explore the past event

A nicer way that I would use regression and revivification with you is to use the Bridge method.
Here I would suggest to you that you go back to a time just before the incident. It is important that you go back to a time of your choosing. I would then suggest that you move forward in time to the traumatic incident.
I will watch out closely to your body language or biofeedback, as you approach the event. Above all, I will make sure I use clean language. As soon as you reach the beginning of the sensitising event, I will suggest that you pause just before the event.
Then I would ask you to jump out and forward to just after the event. I will then ask you where you are and what is happening. I will ask you to look forward to the future to see your adult self. Next, I will ask you to ask your adult image to walk back towards your child image, just after the sensitizing event. I would then reframe the incident; Then I would get you to come back to the present by using the following script, or similar:
“All those symptoms are just coping strategies which have served you, but now you no longer need anymore”.
Finally, I would use the positive resources I had gained from the initial consultation.

Watkins Bridge

A slight variation of the Bridge method is when you experiences anxiety in the present, but you don’t know what causes it. It may have roots in a past event. For instance, a driving instructor gets anxious when he drives up a certain hill. There is no rational reason for this, but there may be something locked away in his past.
First under hypnosis, I would ask you to feel that same anxiety (see what you saw, feel what you felt and hear what you hear)… FOR THE LAST TIME.
I would then suggest that you then go back to a time when you first had those feelings. Where were you? What was happening? Eg, the driving instructor was a small child at the fun fair and he was scared of the big dipper. Then I would get you to go back, as your present self, to the event. Here I would reframe it then bring you forward and back. You would now be cured of the cause of that anxiety or panic attack.

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There are three secret laws of suggestion that I will reveal, which hypnotists learn, so that they can get people to change. If you learn and use these three simple laws, you can affect any change in your life. You will certainly be able to change it from positive to negative.

The Law of Concentrated Attention

The first law is the law of concentrated attention. What this law states is that whatever you concentrate your attention on will increase or become real. It is a law, which philosophers have known about for millennia. It is behind the epithet in the bible “As a man thinketh, so he is”.
This law is also behind the phenomenon of the Law of attraction. I have written extensively about this in a book on the Law of Attraction. It works in both positive and negative ways . If you concentrate on the negative aspects of your life, this will tend to increase. Remove as many negative influences from your life as you can, this will help you get your mind off the negative. This will begin to stem the negative thoughts you have.
Use the power of Gratitude to start to focus your mind on the positive. This is how you can use the Law of Concentrated Attention in a positive way. Fill your mind with as much positive stuff as you can and your mind will tend to become positive. Your mind will then notice more positive things in your life and tend to ignore the negative.
If you persist with this, quite soon your life will turn from negative to positive.

The Law of Dominant Effect

The second law, that you can use to your advantage is the Law of Dominant Effect. What this law states is that if a suggestion is linked to an emotion, this will override any other suggestion in your mind at the same time.
This often happens in life, when say a person has poor health habits. Perhaps they might smoke, overeat and drink too much. Life goes along pretty much ok. This person knows that their lifestyle is bad, but things are ok for now. Then something happens that puts the fear of God up them. Perhaps they are diagnosed with cancer, or they have a heart attack, but survive. The negative emotion linked to the doctor’s suggestions are such that they will actually listen to the suggestion now, whereas before they didn’t. This also how people turn their lives around after near death experiences or the death of a loved one. The emotions are enough to get them to change.

How to Use the Law of Dominant Effect

How can we use this law to change your life from negative to positive? By attaching as much positive emotions to the positive thoughts as possible. Affirmations and visualisation are a great start, but if you can get into feeling great about yourself, then this will have a massive effect. Here are some easy tips you can use straight away which will have an immediate effect:
Listen to uplifting, upbeat music especially in the morning when you read your goals to yourself.
Read the biographies of positive successful people, especially rags to riches stories. Stories are so powerful because we resonate emotionally with other human beings.
Instead of watching pap on TV, look for uplifting videos on YouTube – search google for uplifting Mind Movies. Here you have great music, pictures and positive messages.
Many of the detractors to the positive mental attitude movement, will say that this is transitory and temporary. Yes, you will feel good for a while but the effects wear off. Whilst this might be true, I would argue that you are creating new neuro-pathways that are linking feeling good, with positive messages. This in effect creates the habit of feeling positive, but just like any other habit, it does take time and persistence.
In the end, the results will become permanent. You will have over-ridden all the negative habitual thoughts with positive one.

The Law of Reverse Effort

“I’m gonna’ catch that horse if I can” – Chestnut Mare – The Byrds

This law really is the universe at its cruelest. It states that if you doubt your abilities, but you try hard anyway, the less you will be able to do it. To put it another way, the more you chase your goals in desperation, the more they will seem further away. Of course, it’s a psychological trick, it’s like when they say a watched kettle never boils, or time flies when you are having fun. When you are so attached to the outcome, the more it seems impossible. It’s just like that Chestnut Mare in The Byrds song. The more you chase her the faster she runs away.
How can you turn this to your advantage? Firstly whatever your goal is, fall in love with the process of achieving it so much, that you almost don’t care what the outcome is, because you are enjoying the work, so much. Think of anything in your life that you absolutely love to do just because of the passion and love for it. This is the intrinsic motivation it gives you. I don’t know anything about you, but in know that whatever this thing that you get lost in, that you excel at, I’m betting that it is no effort for you. Even obstacles and snags are overcome, perhaps you enjoy the challenges of overcoming them.
Whatever you are striving for, let it go. Fall in love with the process. Make the work your passion. Do what you love to do. As you pour your life into this work and become a part of it, rather than the goal, you will soon be amazed when the Chestnut Mare comes sidling up to you.

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