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Hypnosis.
The word evokes provocative images. Swinging watches, droning monotones, drooping eyelids, swooning subjects, vivid recollections of the past, long forgotten. To most, it's esoteric stuff. But there’s real science behind it.
In my psychotherapy practice, I've used hypnosis many times. Of course, most shrinks call it "hypnotherapy.” That's to distinguish themselves from the circus act stage hypnotists who get participants to squawk like chickens and go stiff as boards.
My training in hypnotherapy began when I was a novice shrink. A psychiatrist who utilized it extensively took me on as an apprentice. The first time he hypnotized me, I would have sworn my legs were over my head, not under it.
Pretty Weird?
Wow, that's pretty weird, I thought, and my fascination with the weirdness hooked me from there.
Years of formal training followed, some from reputable practitioners and some from wooden nickel charlatans. One of the latter suggested that, with a sufficiently intense level of trance, someone could walk through walls.
I left his workshop early . . . through a door.
Hypnosis is like that. It’s a bonafide therapeutic tool in the right hands and unadulterated snake oil in the wrong ones.
Channel of Communication
Anyway, hypnotherapy gets used for lots of things these days — smoking cessation, the recall of repressed memories, weight control, pain management, relaxation training, invoking the placebo effect and a host of others. In highly hypnotizable persons, it can used in place of anesthesia for minor surgery.
Most often, I use hypnosis as a way to establish a channel of communication with a person's inner wisdom. What is commonly called "the subconscious mind." I figure the subconscious knows more about what that person needs than I do, so I spend a lot of time asking it what to do, rather than trying to tell it.
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Not surprisingly, subconscious minds are pretty good at providing suggestions for how to help the people they inhabit. Often, much better than conscious minds. As I see it, the latter is a bit like a computer; good at processing information but often lousy at knowing the best use for it.
Consequently, I don't use hypnosis to "program" the subconscious mind, to tell it what to do and how to do it. Instead, I use it to put the conscious self in touch with the indwelling organismic wisdom of the body and the intuitive knowledge of the deep mind.
Weight Loss?
A good example was a woman who asked me to hypnotize her to help her lose weight. She wanted me to put her in a trance and provide post-hypnotic suggestions that she eat less, exercise more, make better food choices, etc. In other words, she wanted to use the trance state to order herself around.
Instead, after I induced her trance, I asked her subconscious mind what needed to happen for her to lose weight. After exiting the trance, she immediately began talking about several episodes of sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager.
Unaware of the connection, being overweight was supposed to make her an unappealing target for sexual predators. Given the persistent cultural bias against overweight people, she subconsciously reasoned being large would keep nasties away, which is not always the case. Anyway, we worked on healing those traumatic wounds and building in other kinds of protection, such as assertiveness, self-defense training, situational awareness, etc.
Then the weight gradually came off. There was no magic in the hypnosis. It was simply a communication pathway that tapped into her inner wisdom.
Sure, there are highly suggestible folks who will respond to most hypnotic suggestions. Stage hypnotists know how to pick these people out of a crowd and use them for impressive demonstrations of the "power of hypnosis."
But the power is not in the trance, the hypnotist, the suggestions or any of the rest of the bells and whistles. It's in you.
Now, repeat after me. It's in you, it's in you, it's in you . . .
For more, visit philipchard.com.
