Exploring Trance | Adventures in hypnosis

We humans have a hunger for stories, whether they are epic novels, TV dramas, or a piece of juicy gossip about Geoff the milkman. They’re in our nature. Throughout the history of civilization, stories have been an essential tool for passing on cultural wisdom, and for enriching our hearts and minds.

So it makes sense that stories can help you deal with personal problems, because a story can point you towards different, more helpful perspectives on life.

The brilliant, innovative hypnotist Milton Erickson M.D. was renowned for treating some of his clients purely through hypnotic metaphors, disguised as a series of apparently irrelevant anecdotes. After hearing his stories, Erickson’s patients would often notice changes in their thoughts and feelings happening “as if by magic”.

As an example of hypnotic metaphors in action, here’s a video clip from a workshop I taught in 2010. The student in the video was wanting to run her own trainings, but she was held back by an anxiety about public speaking.

(Unfortunately, the quality of the footage is far from perfect, but I hope you’ll still find it a valuable demonstration).

If you’re new to hypnosis, you may find it interesting to see how hypnotic suggestions can be conveyed indirectly simply through telling stories.

Notice that there is far more to hypnotherapy than the Hollywood cliché of putting someone into a mysterious, zombie-like state and then commanding them to do something. Hypnotherapy can, in fact, be a very respectful, creative, empathetic method of creating inner change.

If you’re studying hypnotherapy, or if you’ve trained in this field, I hope you’ll find some useful distinctions in the video too.

The primary technique I was demonstrating is “multiple embedded metaphors” (sometimes called “nested loops” in NLP).

If you pay attention to the order in which I tell the stories, you’ll notice that some of the ideas and metaphors are “sandwiched” within other ones.

This tends to make these central metaphors more difficult to consciously recall, which discourages over-analysis in the listener, and promotes direct emotional engagement with the stories.

Also, rather than using any lengthy, pre-planned metaphors, I was keen to demonstrate to the group that they could draw upon simple, everyday examples and anecdotes from their own lives to evoke therapeutic change.

With practice, you can do this completely on the fly, so that you find yourself effortlessly coming up with stories that fit the situation at hand. This gives you a very elegant way to communicate therapeutic ideas.

If you’d like to master this technique, I highly recommend the book “The Answer Within” by Lankton and Lankton. It’s available from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (US).

Here’s a new hypnosis video on my not-so-frequently-updated blog. It was filmed at an NLP Master Practitioner training I was teaching at, and a student asked me if I could quickly demonstrate “the handshake interrupt”.

The handshake interrupt is a rapid hypnosis induction created by Richard Bandler, the co-founder of NLP. The technique involves interrupting a normal handshake, and thereby inducing a moment of confusion in someone, so that they don’t quite know how to respond. You can then utilise this momentary “huh?” response to lead them into hypnosis.

However, because it’s such an odd, “martial arts-like” manoeuvre, I find students rarely put it to practical use outside of hypnosis seminars. After all, it’s pretty rude to suddenly grab a stranger’s arm when they’re just trying to say hello to you!

This video demonstrates a method I use to segue into this technique conversationally, which I find makes it much easier to use with clients, and anyone who wants to experience “instant hypnosis”.

If you’re new to hypnosis, just notice how “the magic” is not in the handshake interrupt itself, but in how I begin by building expectation in the student, and how I make use of her momentary confusion to create a full hypnotic response.

At the end of the clip, you can see from the student’s astonishment what an impact the arm levitation made on her. Evoking hypnotic phenomena is a great way to let people know that they are genuinely in an altered state of consciousness, and that they aren’t just pretending.

If you’re more experienced at inducing hypnosis, notice how I seed the idea of automatic, ideomotor movement before I begin the induction, and how I utilise the arm catalepsy by attaching it to feelings of enthusiasm.

Even though I am apparently only talking to the student, the suggestions for enthusiasm (e.g. “let’s do this”) are something I am indirectly communicating to everyone in the room, in preparation for the exercise they are about to do.

I hope you found some food for thought in all the above, and there’ll be more to come next week.

I am also the head scriptwriter for hypnosisdownloads.com, where you can find specific downloads to let you experience instant self-hypnosis and hypnotic phenomena like hand levitation, arm catalepsy and many more therapeutic topics.

I also spoke about hypnotic phenomena earlier in this blog.