Hypnosis

I'm a certified hypnotist as of very recently, but I got into the field after being fascinated with it for most of my life. I've always wondered what exactly our minds can do for us and this has led me on many a happy daydream about the possibilities that are opened up through the use of hypnosis as a tool.

First things first. I'm not talking about psychic powers here. At least I don't think I am. That myth of humans only using 10% of our brain is totally false. Hollywood loves to quote it over and over ad nauseum though and it irritates me almost as much as really loud engine sounds in space. Anyway, that's not the point.

The point here is to give anyone who cares to read this the same sort of fascination with our uniquely human brains as I have. I'll start with some of the things I've been taught about how hypnosis works and then I'll be taking several of those to new levels of awesomeness I hope.

Firstly, hypnosis lets us communicate directly with the unconscious mind. Now, that may sound pretty esoteric, but really it isn't. You must admit that there is probably a lot more that your mind must be doing besides sorting out what you are reading right now. Somewhere in there it is running amazing calculations on just how far to release and contract dozens of eye muscles so you can follow along with the text in a strait line. Meanwhile it is processing frequencies of light waves and assigning them values and organizing those values to give you a concept of words on a screen, the words themselves are related to thousands of other thoughts and memories that you use to give them meaning. While doing all that it is telling your lungs to expand and contract, your heart to beat, receiving signals from your skin to tell you how that chair under you feels.... and lots more besides. That's some pretty impressive stuff going on right there, and 90% of that is so automatic that you didn't even think of it until you read it just now. That's probably where the 10% myth comes in. We are only consciously aware of about 10% of what we're doing. All that gray matter is there for a reason though and it is doing something all the time. It isn't there to allow you to lift cars without using any law of physics.

How about this. We can attach any emotion to any action we ever do, forever. That sounds scary, cool, and illusionary all at once. Like, you could easily say that attaching the feeling of love to the sight of a person you didn't even like before would make it fake. There may be some truth to that, but if the mind accepts that suggestion and the feeling of love is produced... ta-da it isn't fake anymore. The brain chemicals are there just as they would be if you had fallen in love with that really dumb, abusive person with the hot bod that may destroy your life in the future if you pursue it.

This is a concept that I find difficult to get across when I have these conversations.

There is no distinction between true and false if both are believed to be true. That doesn't mean that absolutely believing that gravity doesn't exist will let you fly, but it may very well make you try to. Then you will learn that your belief was wrong and your brain will adjust to that new information and change your belief.

Believing you are in love, doesn't have the same falsifiability factor however. If you believe you are in love, or that you feel any other emotion, then you do. Who can argue with you about that? Does the emotion have to make sense? Of course it doesn't. Have you ever loved or loathed someone with no reason that you could explain to your friends and against all arguements that you were wrong for doing so?

I'm a little off track here. I'm not trying to say you should use hypnosis to make people love you, or to make you love people that are good for you rather than good looking, but you could. What I'm trying to get across is that we can, using hypnosis create real emotions and in so doing create real changes in our lives.

We can very easily create that same feeling of enjoyment, or calmness or comraderie we get from smoking a cigarette but attach it to a healthy activity like drinking a small glass of water. We could even attach it to a neutral activity like looking at the palm of your right hand when you would otherwise have a smoke. Some of these connections may work better than others of course. It's all in the mind of the subject.

You could create the same sensation of taste you get from your favorite ice cream and instead make a carrot taste just like that while ice cream tastes like carrots. The actual flavor doesn't change, the molecular cues are the same, but the brain can file the memory for that taste differently and give you that sweet creamy goodness memory from snacking on a carrot. It can even tell you that you are tasting ice cream. The color blue is only called that because we all agree that a particular frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum is named blue. Similarly we agree that ice cream tastes sweet and creamy and carrots, not so much. If you disagree though, then your reality is just different and nobody can argue with you about it. So you can go grab a nice sweet, creamy carrot at midnight when you have a craving for something decadent. And watch those extra ice cream pounds dissolve away.

The mind is even in control of how we perceive the world. We can detect two kinds of frequencies with various organs of our bodies, but they aren't necessarily what we think they are. Your ears basically convert the millions of pings of air particles on your eardrums into a solid, cohesive, sensory input we call sound. Your eyes convert trillions of pings of photons into a solid, cohesive, sensory input we call sight. The difference between these, other than the speed of the particles and the number and frequency of them is pretty much all in our minds.

There are many many people in which these two senses bleed together and get jumbled. For these people, certain frequencies of sound have particular colors and certain objects or colors have a particular sound and they are very consistently so. Some people even report these sorts of sensations during the use of hallucinogenic drugs. It is called synesthesia and it can be reproduced with hypnotic suggestion.

The uses may be limited, but imagine a perfect tonal eye. You could hear a frequency of sound and match it by matching a frequency of color it produced in your mind. Or write music in your own crayon language. These are probably just party tricks though. Other kinds of synesthesia also exist, such and smell/sound, smell/sight, touch/sight, even number/shape connections and several kinds of color/sound relationships with numbers letters and other things. The point is our minds are capable of virtually anything we can imagine them being capable of in the way we perceive our world.

Back to emotions, and this is something I've been doing with some students I've worked with. Attach the emotion of enjoyment, accomplishment and fun to good study habits like taking notes, or listening in class.

Have you ever suddenly gotten in a mood of strong motivation completely at random while doing something you've never really wanted to do and would put off at any chance you get. This happens to me when I'm cleaning house sometimes. Your mind creates the idea that you are enjoying yourself because that is a lot easier than hating the task you have to do anyway. Imagine how much easier it would be to start that task if you felt that motivation beforehand.

Here's another fun and expandable idea adding to the sensory manipulation from earlier. We can create a sense of touch or the corresponding feeling it would produce completely within the mind. You can feel the soothing pressure of a deep tissue massage without anyone touching you, or get the best part of a sexual experience just by thinking about it, over and over, whenever you want. Alternately those same sensations could be attached to an unrelated sensation such as rubbing the palm of the hand. The unconscious mind can just tell you that you are getting those signals from a different nerve path and that will be easier to believe if your eyes are closed and you have somebody else rubbing your hand. This is the kind of suggestion I would use for couples having sexual issues.

I'll probably be writing more on hypnotic possibilities in the near future, so please leave some comments on ideas you'd like me to explore, or for any other reason. I'd like to know how many other people out there are as fascinated by this subject as I am.

I've done a little searching around here and I'm sad to see that most of the lenses on hypnosis I've seen in the first couple dozen listings are actively furthering the myth of hypnosis being mind control.

This is so inaccurate. The only way it works at all is with the consent of the subject. The conscious mind is right there the whole time ready and able to step in and end the trance as soon as something goes past the comfort zone. A hypnotist of any skill whatever knows this and is careful to remain well within the pre-established parameters of the session. There's a whole preparation that needs to be done beforehand to give the subject a good idea of what to expect and to keep them comfortable.

Stage hypnosis can be a bit more flexible because people usually understand what happens in that sort of setting. So the people who respond to suggestions well in the pre-talk of the stage show will be the ones who are more comfortable with the possibility that they may be brought up on stage. I have seen many stage shows where at a certain point some of the subjects will begin to reject further suggestions as they reach the limits of their comfort zones and the hypnotist will bring those people back to wakefulness and send them back into the audience. The shows are set up this way on purpose, to slowly progress to deeper and deeper states of trance and also to get more and more awkward. That way the audience who for a while may think everyone is being paid off or faking it will begin to see things happen that no normal person picked at random would do in front of other people.

The best part is they don't do it like trained actors. Its rough and terrible acting, but the subjects on stage are completely there in their minds, and embarrassment is not an issue in trance. A person can be more comfortable with themselves because they are separated from the conscious ideas that cause embarrassment which is that other people may be thinking something or other about what they are seeing you do. We all know at some level that this probably isn't true, but the idea of it maybe being true prevent us from being so outgoing in normal everyday activity.

This is the snag most people encounter that may keep them from easily going into the hypnotic state. It is a simple thing to get past however. It only takes a bit of knowledge. This is what I do during my consultations in my practice. I find it to be a necessary step if I'm to achieve any results with a total stranger.

Here's the lowdown. When asked for an ideomotor response like letting the arm lift as slowly as humanly possible or something to that effect a lot of subjects in an effort to be helpful will just lift the arm consciously. The only conscious effort that may actually be required however is to get the motion started. After that point the most amazing thing will happen. That arm will move ever so slowly by itself even when you are actively not trying to move it. That response is a good sign that the unconscious mind is listening and following directions. Maybe even more interesting is the fact that this response can be achieved while completely awake. It seems as if the arm alone is hypnotized and it's pretty fun to experience.

Another problem I've run into is that the subjects will begin to doubt whether or not they are "doing it right". They may believe that they are not experiencing something that they should and so pull themselves back up in an effort to correct it. The best thing for the subject to do in this instance is trust that the hypnotist can read the signs of trance and has a pretty good idea of where you're at. If the hypnotist is skilled enough he can jump beyond those nagging doubts and get you to a state that is more convincing. For the hypnotist, the best thing to do is to add suggestions during induction to allow for taking the subject back into trance very quickly if they do rouse themselves.

A mistake I've made a couple of times is thinking that the subject may not be in a comfortable position for trance and suggesting that she reposition such as leaning the head back in the chair. That particular position I've found tends to put strain on the facial muscles and wants to pull the eyes open again. Allowing the subject to remain in whatever position they relax into is perfectly ok, even if it looks terribly uncomfortable. As waking up with a terrible crick in the neck may tell you, the unconscious mind has completely different ideas of comfort.