Self Hypnosis

The vulnerability of hypnosis is that it does not have a 100 per cent success rate, therefore it is very easy to claim to disprove it scientifically. In Western society we demand proof for everything. Homoeopathy cannot be ‘proved’. The fact that it works does not seem to interest the sceptics, however, who demand proof according to their rules. Since you cannot prove the existence of the subconscious—let alone what its function is—according to some people’s criteria of proof, hypnotherapy is nothing less than quackery. However, we must bear in mind that science itself is not infallible. At one time it was ‘scientifically proven’ that the bumble bee could not fly—and, indeed, that the earth was flat.

Because of the lack of finance for research, hypnosis is still fighting to gain the recognition it deserves. Only as recently as mid-1992 has there been acceptable scientific proof that hypnosis does work, published in the New Scientist (June 1993). Having undertaken one of the largest surveys ever recorded of stopping smoking methods, spanning several continents, the New Scientist came out with the verdict: ‘Hypnosis is proven to work.’ Indeed, hypnosis was found to be streets ahead of anything else on the market when it came to helping people to stop smoking. Hypnosis is as natural as time itself and a gift to us all, once we know of its existence.

Although hypnosis has been practised, albeit under different names virtually since the beginning of human existence, it came to the attention of Western civilization with Maximilian Hell, a monk who introduced it to Franz Mesmer, the Austrian physician, in the 1700s. Mesmer treated patients with what he regarded as an ‘animal magnetism’ that pervaded the whole universe. His name and methods passed into everyday usage in the words mesmerize and mesmerism. Many years later, James Braid renamed this magnetism hypnosis, after the Greek word for sleep. This was actually a very unfortunate choice which has caused major misunderstandings of hypnotism ever since. For, although the hypnotized are not asleep, they give the impression that they are, which is very misleading.

The history of hypnosis is as chequered as that of some of its practitioners, and trying to outlaw it is as difficult as trying to stop video piracy. Some hypnotists have not exactly been the best advertisements themselves for the profession. When therapists put enough energy into promoting themselves and then revel in the publicity gained from evaluations of their supposedly ‘miraculous’ treatments, the result usually is that they find their egos expanding out of all proportion to their skills. Success can be its own worst enemy! Forgotten is the main rule: that they are only the experts guiding their clients to make the change. It is the clients who actually make the change in themselves, not the therapist.

Real hypnosis has many celebrated professionals. Of the many fascinating workshops I attended in the US, the one that most took my attention for its historical grounding was a session at which the speaker was Morgan Eaglebear, great-great grandson of the legendary Native American chief, Geronimo. Eaglebear is a practising hypnotherapist and healer. He explained how this form of natural healing had been used for generations among Native American tribes. They did not call it hypnosis but it was the same thing. A young tribal member would be chosen to learn the history of the tribe, which was never written down but just passed on by word of mouth. To ensure that the history was sound and the memory of the initiate was not impaired, the chosen one had to go through tests of bravery to prove his fitness. He was then strung up by his skin, while in a trance state. In this trance form, he felt no pain and each elder of the tribe would visit him and relay a part of the history. This went on for many days.

One test to tell if you are in a deep form of hypnosis is to check for anaesthesia. If you feel no pain, then you are in a deep trance. I suppose these Native Americans were unwilling, given that the passing on of tribal knowledge was so important, to take the chance that the chosen initiate was merely feigning a trancelike state. By hanging him up by his skin they could be sure he was definitely in a deep hypnotic trance. The famous film that depicts this particular practice, A Man Called Horse (1969), starred Richard Harris and showed this test of bravery using the most sophisticated cinema effects of the day. Of course, there was no mention of the trance state in the film.

To get back to the workshop, there in front of me was Eaglebear, this marvellously built and very charismatic man who wore his hair long and dressed as a brave, a living embodiment of Native American history. He lifted his shirt to show me the scars proving he had undergone the great test of bravery. I spoke to him after the lecture and he told me that the old Native American tribes used hypnosis on the newborn. Facing the danger of the campsite being attacked in the middle of the night, the tribal members had to ensure that no baby would cry and give the campsite’s location away. Mothers would therefore train their babies to go into a trance, talking soothingly to them and gently brushing the flat of their hands past their babies’ eyes, gently closing them. This was a practice that was passed from generation to generation. Whenever the mother’s hand passed over her child’s eyes in this fashion, the child would become silent. He also explained that the women, when giving birth, did not know it was supposed to be painful and so, not expecting pain, did not experience any. It seemed to me that there was so much that we of the so-called technologically advanced societies could learn from these ancient wisdoms.

WHAT WILL HYPNOSIS DO FOR YOU?

Let us now turn to the real purpose of this book—showing you how you can use hypnosis to improve your own life or to help others to solve their problems. This book is written to present the power that you possess to change your attitudes, which in turn changes your behaviour so that you can achieve exactly what you want. You can choose your own personality and begin to programme it into your mind. Your mind will follow the instructions you give it—as long as these instructions do not go against your interests for survival.

Hypnosis is the gateway to reprogramming an old or unwanted behaviour pattern or creating a new, positive one. It allows you to accept certain thoughts, which in turn change your attitude, so that you can do the things you want to do—or not do the things you do not want to do but cannot seem to stop doing. You may want to stop smoking, lose weight, or treat a phobia—for example fear of success, snakes or spiders. You may want to increase your productivity, improve your love life, bring back the love into your marriage, speed read, fly a plane, be more confident and outgoing or enable yourself, with full concentration, to pass exams or a driving test. Whatever you’d like to achieve hypnosis can help.

WHAT IS HYPNOSIS?

Everyone can be hypnotized. In fact, everyone goes into hypnosis every day of their lives. Every time you day-dream you are in a form of hypnosis. You can put yourself in hypnosis now. Just close your eyes and imagine yourself the last time you were eating a meal in a restaurant or in someone’s home. See what details you can bring forward. The decor of the room in which you were eating, whom you were with, what kind of atmosphere was present. See if you can remember the conversation—then open your eyes. What you experienced was a very light form of hypnosis. If you were to be put into a deeper state your vision would be more focused and accurate, for the more you practise hypnosis the more you develop your imagination.

Are You Visual?

To check whether you are a visual person or not (for the purpose of hypnosis) you can do a simple test. Close your eyes and think of a chair—any chair. When you have it in your thoughts, ‘see’ what colour it is, then open your eyes. Ask yourself if you actually ‘saw’ the chair in your imagination or just ‘knew’ what it looked like. There is a difference, if you think about it. If you saw it, then you are considered a visual person.

Freud’s research showed that two-thirds of the population were visual. I decided to make my own study on well over a thousand clients and the results more or less substantiated this figure. This was important to me because I am one of the non-visual people, that small segment of the population who have trouble visualizing. We can imagine what it is like to be visual, but it is impossible for a visual person to understand how someone can imagine without actually seeing. If you have a hypnotherapist who is visual and you are not, there will definitely be communication problems. This distinction has in the past caused a multitude of problems. It has resulted in there being many inexperienced hypnotherapists who have believed their clients awkward and ‘hard to hypnotize’. This is how the myth grew that not everyone can be hypnotized. A proficient hypnotherapist knows that everyone can be hypnotized. Of course degrees of susceptibility vary, but it only takes less susceptible people a little longer to be able to build their belief structure.

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 the degree of advancement. Any other length of time would only be necessary to show different techniques to come to the same conclusion. I have found that a 50-hour practical course is sufficient. If you want a comparison, this about the same amount of time necessary to qualify for a private pilot’s licence.

IS HYPNOSIS DANGEROUS?

This is the most common belief of all—and the greatest fallacy.

You cannot be hypnotized against your will! You have to agree to it. But you can be caught off-guard. If any unacceptable suggestions were then made, you would nevertheless have the choice of either terminating the voluntary trance state or continuing with it. You can be persuaded or told to do something but you still are able to reason and you can still say ‘No.’ You are, after all, still awake, as mentioned earlier.

Unfortunately many books on the subject, and even some courses, may lead us to believe that hypnosis is not only complicated but dangerous. If this were true there would surely have been some legislation by now to weed out the unsavoury charactors who were abusing this most natural healing gift. The fact is, the only danger is that, if done incorrectly, hypnosis just will not work.

Many people have been mislead into thinking of hypnosis as ‘brainwashing’. The simple fact is that people who are being hypnotized just will not accept a suggestion in hypnosis that is damaging to them. In order to be brainwashed you need three vital ingredients: pain, drugs and hypnosis. Those who say they were made to do something by a hypnotist or hypnotherapist against their will, then they should eliminate the word ‘made’ and replace it with ‘conned’—and you do not need to be hypnotized to be conned. You always have a choice as to whether you are going to do what the hypnotist says or not.

Do not be persuaded into thinking hypnosis is dangerous, because it is not. A lot of the misapprehensions about hypnosis stem from ignorance, while some of them, it must be said, are spread by practitioners of hypnotism themselves. They fear that too many people will realize how natural a healing process hypnosis is, thereby taking away their importance as ‘miracle workers’—whether on stage or in healing. Although the hypnotist is well aware that it is the person in hypnosis who is accomplishing any act or change, unfortunately the hypnotist’s ego sometimes intervenes and halts the otherwise natural progress by shrouding in mystery the most natural self-healing gift known to humanity.

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THE SUBCONSCIOUS

In order to have a good, working understanding of hypnosis it is helpful to have an insight into how the mind works in general. This can be explained very simply. You do not need to know about the elaborate, sophisticated workings of the mind; a basic explanation will be sufficient.

The mind is made up of two parts: the subconscious and the conscious. The subconscious part of the mind functions automatically. It is not the thinking part, it is the doer. Before the age of approximately five years old, our ability to learn is at its peak. All the information passed on to us from our parents, teachers, etc. goes directly to the subconscious, which files it away immediately. This is why if you tell a toddler that a wall is black when it is white the child will just accept this, where an older child would challenge you. As the child progresses another facility comes into operation: the conscious.

The conscious part of the mind acts like an editor of a newspaper, who chooses which stories will be carried in each edition, which will be filed away to use another day, and which can be discarded. There is only a certain amount of knowledge that can be held at any one time in the forefront of the mind to which the conscious has immediate access. When this forefront is fully occupied, any additional information coming through is stored away in the mind’s ‘filing system’. Just like the busy editor who has an assistant in charge of the filing, the conscious passes over control of the sophisticated filing system to the subconscious. And just as when the editor’s assistant is absent the editor may have problems finding a file, the conscious has no idea how to work the unfamiliar, complicated controls of the subconscious filing system.

Everything we have ever done, said, heard, smelled or seen is stored away, in fact. In hypnosis the subconscious can be easily accessed and the memories of an incident retrieved and looked at in detail. The police find this particularly useful in uncovering information—such as the record of a numberplate or the description of the face of an attacker—when victims’ or witnesses’ immediate, conscious memory has been erased by shock.

In my practice in Harley Street I often take clients back in regression (a term used to describe taking someone back in hypnosis to an earlier memory) to the time when they first walked as a child. They can see what they wore (sometimes just a nappy), what their parents were like and how they looked, even to describing their hairstyles and what they were saying. This shows how fantastic a system the brain is and how easy it is to retrieve information.

There are many obstacles preventing certain information being directly available to the conscious mind. Accessing the subconscious overcomes these obstacles immediately. Remember, the subconscious is the automatic part of the mind and will take orders. If you ask for a certain memory to be brought forward, it retrieves the required information as instructed. If the memory is attached to a trauma, the whole package comes forward.

By accessing data straight from the subconscious the information is not edited and, consequently, you may touch on a particularly distressing incident. This unhappy memory may cause the person in hypnosis to undergo what is called an abreaction. This means that he or she is in the middle of the emotion and may burst into tears. This outburst can sometimes be very exaggerated, due to the trance and the lifting of inhibitions. To the untrained it can be quite frightening and is another reason why hypnosis has for so long been rumoured to cause people actual mental or psychological harm.