Hypnosis: Part 3 of 3
A Brief Review of the Process
The Steps to Hypnosis
Step 1: The Position
Find a comfortable chair. Settle into the chair. If the chair has arms, rest your arms on the arms of the chair, palms turned down. Your feet, ideally should be flat on the floor. If the chair has no arms, place your forearms on your thighs, cross your legs in the chair as is seen in a Yoga exercise.
Step 2: The pre-induction state, conditioning.
In pre-induction, you wants to (1) establish a comfortable, but alert state, (2) generate some fatigue in your eyes (eye lids, eyeballs, etc). Get comfortable being relaxed with your eyes open and closed, (3) tune into the hypnotists voice, inflections, and cadence or flow of speech. (4) Anticipate that you will be hypnotizeable. Most people are, some are what I call “superhypnotizeable” (about 5% of the adult population). If you are superhypnotizeable you don’t need these steps, you can go into a trance state on a demand by a single word or thought.
Pre-induction state, exercises
This is one of my favorite Tik Tok videos. It is the best demonstration I have ever found. It’s a long video, but so engaging as it steps you through how the mind can take over and alter your standing state of consciousness that you almost can’t stop watching it. This, in my opinion, highlights the elements of the mind that get activated in hypnosis. If you aren’t sure you are hypnotizeable, you will be a believer after you watch this video. In a larger sense, this is the internal human capability that moves into the foreground when you are in a hypnotic trance. These kinds of illusions are doable with all five senses (vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch). This Tik Tok focuses on visual imagery, but hypnosis is more wholistic than this. Hypnosis, in a simple sense, engulfs all five of your senses in a synergy which is a Hypnotic Trance
Here is what most people know about hypnosis. There are many, many pre-induction exercises. There are so many, that they literally fill the pages of books or are the entire basis of webpages, illusions, etc. They are perhaps the funnest part of hypnosis.
One I will describe quickly is that I call the “magnetic fingers” exercise. To do this, have the person in the chair clasp her or his hands, but forefingers remain out.
Hold the two forefingers apart. Suggest to the subject that his or her fingers are attracted to each other with magnets. That a band has been wrapped around the two fingers and that you are tightening the band. You can also encourage the subject to relax her or his fingers. The fingers will drift together giving the impression that they are doing so based on the hypnotists suggestion. Here, you are building confidence in the subject that the subjects hands, feet, and body will act based on the suggestion of the hypnotist.
Step 3: Hypnotic Induction
Start with the eyes. When we sleep, during REM sleep it is typical for the eyes to roll up in our head especially when we are accessing a dream. Involuntary eye rolls are referred to as nystagmus. There are many, many meanings for this. From inactivated muscles to certain states of pleasure, but regardless, eye rolls also fatigue the eyeball and the muscles. In hypnosis, this seems to be a major factor in creating a trance state, fatigue-generated relaxed state.
Encourage the subject to roll their eyes up in their head. Then point their eyes straight at you. Repeat this activity until you sense fatigue is setting in. This could be three times or ten times. Again, when the eyelids are closed, the eyes roll back to normal. During the process of hypnosis mention to the subject that they don’t need to hold their eyes up. Just let the eyes relax when the lids are closed.
Below, I’ve recorded a simple hypnotic induction in my own voice. I’ve done this for two reasons. 1. So that you can hear and get comfortable listening to me because I will record more audio excerpts, particularly when I’m interviewing guests with special expertise. 2. To give you the feel and cadence of an hypnotic induction to test yourself and discover whether this kind of technique is helpful, relaxing and to find out whether you can engage in an hypnotic trance.
Step 5: Hypnotic Techniques
Following this pre-induction exercise, you then can have the subject repeat several of the pre-induction activities, but with the the words “deeper and deeper.” You begin to subtly cue the person to feel that they are going “deeper” or “further” into the hypnotic state. As the person is in this state, they will show signs of being in a trance. Here are some of the signs below:
Eyelids Fluttering
Physical Relaxation
Pulse Rate Changes
Breathing Rate Changes
Subtle Twitching
Eyes Watering
Catalepsy (he inability to voluntary move the body or parts such as a hand or leg)
Altered Senses (report that your voice sounds wavy)
As the person goes deeper and deeper into the hypnotic trance, then you can engage in a number of exercises. Some of the ones I highlight below are more common than others. Memory regression is a valuable technique in psychotherapy in that through hypnosis the person has an opportunity to reveal facts and details that were, before, hidden from the subject (and the therapist) through active personal defense mechanisms.
Post-Hypnotic Suggestions (Cigarette Taste will turn awful)
Memory Regression (Think back to when you were 10 years old)
Selective Attention (You will be able to hear my voice, but not see me)
Past Lives Regression (engagement in fantasy of what it would have been like to have lived before)
Slowing autonomic processes (blood flow or blood pressure decline)
Altered physical perception (everything will look blue)
Altered taste perception (this water will taste and feel like lemon juice)
Altered emotional reponses (imagine you have no clothes on and your in a crowded room)
Selective Forgetting (I know longer want you to remember this person)
These are just a few of the exercises that have been generated through using the hypnotic trance.
There is still a lot we don’t know about hypnosis, it’s brain-behavior connection. The more science experiments, (through its reductionistic paradigm) the more we learn about the anatomy of the body and brain under hypnotic trance.
But, hypnosis is more than human physiology. It is likely tapping aspects of our mind or soul that are not easily studied by science. Todays Healers improve the lives of others by tapping into the mystic or spiritual aspects of personhood. This area is easy to discount because it is not a simple “cause-and-effect” paradigm. But, there seems to be a case for it.
For example, Did we really have a previous life we lived? or is this entirely in the realm of our imagination and fantasy. Can we do unusual things under the spell of a hypnotic trance that captures a “sixth sense” or an other-worldly feature of our exists.
WHO KNOWS?
Suffice it to say. It’s the psychologist’s job to remain open minded especially to the client’s inner experiences and understanding. A competent therapist never discounts someone’s self-report just because they don’t have hard factual data to back it up or because it may be confusing and sound idiosyncratic.
I recall a client who believe that her dreams could portend the future. She was traumatized by this phenomenon because every time she had a dream, she knew that whatever it was that she remembered, it would eventually come true. Sure, she had dreams about her past and present and these dreams fit into the standard paradigm of “a mind at rest.” But, these prophetic dreams, which were primarily focused on her future life, were so disruptive to her that she feared sleeping. She came to me for help, through hypnosis, to blot out these future dreams. We worked on this for several years, and she gave me example after example of things that would come true. Even writing down events that she dreamed and then cataloging when they transpired in the future.
Was she delusional? She didn’t have symptoms of delusion. Was she paranoid. I would have to say “no.” Was her life in disarray, I would so no. In fact she was quite wealthy having made some purchases in stocks based on dreams she had and these stocks ultimately sky-rocketed. This was in the late1980s, I was a Stanford student and living in Palo Alto at the time, and she had a dream that Apple (which at the time was just a fledgling company) would become a world-dominating industry. She mortgaged her home to buy Apple Stock which at the time was not being touted as a great stock to buy. This is when the early founders Steven Wozniak and Steven Jobs were at the helm. Sure, she bet on a long-shot at the time. I wasn’t seeing her when this stock took off, then split, then took off again, but she is probably a mega-millionaire by now. We were not successful during our sessions (with hypnosis) blotting out her future-telling dreams, but maybe it was to her benefit.
Since then, I’ve had people come in for hypnosis treatment to deal with cigarette smoking, alcohol abuse, unhappiness of all sorts, to control pornography obsessions, to help improve relationship dynamics, and simply for clearer and more productive thinking. Sometimes the trance state has worked to the persons satisfaction, sometimes it has not. But, it has always been an illuminating experience, especially when the person is one of those “super-hypnotizeable” individuals.
In Part III of this blog entry I will take the reader into this realm of mysticism (the Occult, Tarot, Hypnosis, Divination, Auras, and the like. The realm of the psychic (I like to call it the realm of the mind), the sensory unknown, the place where we all want to see and understand, but which eludes our traditional senses of vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch.