The simple ‘visual/non-visual’ test above solves the problem. Try it out on your friends as practice. If someone says he cannot ‘see’ the chair but just knows what it looks like, explain that this is not unusual. A third of the population does not visualize. For these people a hypnotherapist must abandon the words ‘visualize’ or ‘see’ which might otherwise be used, and instead use the word ‘imagine’—in the way you did with the chair. I was told by three hypnotherapists I was difficult to hypnotize. This could not have been further from the truth.
Hypnosis Is Not Sleep!
Hypnosis is a heightened state of awareness. While in hypnosis you are aware of everything that is happening around you. Conversations, the telephone ringing, any noise that occurs. It is the same as if you were day-dreaming. When you are guided into a relaxed state your imagination is more focused because your conscious is occupied. In order to protect your ‘occupied consciousness’ another facility, which we call the subconscious, comes forward. If anything untoward happens, the subconscious immediately alerts your conscious and you terminate the day-dream.
Imagine you are driving along a motorway and you start day-dreaming about what you will be doing when you arrive at your destination. If you get sufficiently involved in this day-dream you go into a sort of auto-pilot to drive your car. You know there is traffic about but you are not fully conscious of it. Then, after a few miles, you suddenly come out of the day-dream and realize you have not noticed the scenery and the traffic. You probably think to yourself that you might well have had an accident if you had continued in this state. The truth of the matter is that if the car in front of you had put its brake lights on suddenly, your subconscious mind would have come forward during your day-dream to protect you. It would bring your conscious back in a split second to deal with the emergency. As soon as your conscious mind becomes occupied, your subconscious always comes forward to protect you. All your senses link up with it and even become more aware at that level. Say there was a smell of rubber in the car. Your subconscious would alert your conscious and bring you out of the day-dream to attend to it. Or if there was an unfamiliar sound in the engine, the same instant awareness would come into operation.
Another example: allow yourself to imagine you are on a tube or train. You have quite a long way to go, so you are day-dreaming. In fact, you are oblivious to what is going on around you. If suddenly there was an odd sound alongside you, you would immediately become aware of it and respond accordingly. Therefore, if the sound was threatening, within a split second your conscious would be fully alert and ready to ‘fight or flee.’ That is the term psychologists use to describe our pre-historic instinct for survival. If the sound is not threatening, then you would just carry on in your day-dream trance state. You are always protected, even though you may not have been aware of such sophisticated processes going on in your mind.
This, then, is the difference between hypnosis and sleep. When you are asleep you are not protected in this way. But your subconscious is using this very valuable time for ‘internal affairs’, sorting out the new information to be filed away, etc. When you are anaesthetized or have certain drugs, your memory can bring forward incidents that have occurred while you were in this state. Medical staff in hospitals are careful what they say during operations, due to fairly recent findings proving that patients have subconsciously heard what has been said when anaesthetized and have later suffered irrational behaviour as a direct result.
A hypnotherapist is a person who uses therapy while his or her client is in the relaxed state of hypnosis. Good hypnosis is important to good therapy. The reason hypnosis is used in therapy is to relax the mind; in so doing the subconscious comes forward. When your conscious is relaxed, new information has more chance of being accepted, which is why at this point the subconscious can be accessed and behaviour reprogrammed. You are aware of what is going on the whole time and you are being guided by the therapist, not unlike a computer expert showing you how to work a computer.
In hypnosis you cannot be made to do anything you do not want to do! You have a failsafe survival trigger mechanism that protects you at all times.
WHO IS SUSCEPTIBLE TO HYPNOSIS?
This question conjures up an amazing and controversial set of opinions, based on various people’s belief structures. I can tell you what I understand, in the knowledge that my reasoning will probably be severely attacked by some. Nevertheless, my opinions are based on my experiences in working with well over 2,000 clients.
Everyone is susceptible to hypnosis to differing degrees. If, however you want to break the question down and ask who is susceptible to going into hypnosis immediately, then the answer is completely different. About a third of a group of people at any one time are likely to be susceptible to being put instantly into hypnosis. That is why the stage hypnotist can feel secure that there will always be a good percentage of his audience he will be able to work with, ensuring a fast-moving show. A brief explanation of the nature of stage hypnosis may help you to understand a little more.
First, the hypnotist will do a quick suggestibility test to decide whom he is going to use in his act. Normally he chooses a simple task, such as instructing the audience to clasp their hands together. He suggests that their hands will literally stick together as if super-glued and that, whatever they do, they will not be able to unclasp them. The hypnotist uses confusing and repetitive instructions, then he asks the members of the audience to try and unclasp their hands. Those who do unclasp their hands are not used in the act. Of the members of the audience who still have their hands clasped together, he will ascertain whether they are pretending or whether they really are in hypnosis. His experience weeds out the odd cheat. Those few who are left are considered to be in hypnosis and, therefore, susceptible.
Susceptibility in hypnosis has nothing to do with intelligence or trying too hard either way. The more someone is hypnotized, the more susceptible he or she becomes. Very susceptible people in hypnosis will still refrain from doing something that they find unacceptable. The grey area is that in hypnosis people may not have as many inhibitions as they would normally and may, therefore, be more daring.
WHY HYPNOSIS IS SO EASY TO LEARN
(Only fools laugh at what they do not understand!) To learn hypnosis takes only a few minutes. To understand why and how it works will take rather longer. If the basics are taught correctly, the learning is quick and easy because everything about the subject is fascinating. It is far simpler to learn than operating a computer. If you have any experience of computers, you will remember how difficult the manuals were to understand at first. That was not because the computer itself was difficult but because the manual’s explanations were at fault. A good basic training in any subject saves you hours of unnecessary hard work. Take away the unnecessarily difficult words that confuse the brain, interfering with retention and concentration, replace them with simple instructions, and you have a quick and easy new skill at your fingertips.
Hypnosis is a very easy subject to understand. Anyone with normal intelligence can be taught how to hypnotize or be hypnotized. Of course some hypnotherapy courses can be padded out to two years in length if they include study of psychology and the history of the subject, including its early masters such as Freud and Jung. Although this added information is quite fascinating it can end up being a bit too much, reminiscent of the old saying about ‘not being able to see the wood for the trees’.
Hypnotherapy can be split up into two basic categories: suggestion therapy, which is what is being taught in this book, and what I shall call advanced hypnotherapy, which is actually accessing the subconscious in therapy and communicating with it.
The techniques and methods can be taught in one to three weeks, depending on