BECOMING A COMPETENT HYPNOTIST is an important skill to develop. Whether you call it “hypnosis,” “meditation,” or “altered state” doesn’t really matter. The important part is that you learn to control your state of consciousness—and the states of those people who come to you for help—so you can apply a powerful tool to harness the ability to learn.
We have the power to develop our skills. The better we learn to use our hands, for example, the more exquisite things we can create. Some artists have such precise control they can carve entire scenes on the head of a pin. I can’t do that, because I haven’t developed that particular degree of control. There are musicians who have extraordinary control over their fingers on the keyboard. I can play to a certain degree, and if I paid more attention to doing scales and practicing, I would be a better musician.
The same thing is true about your state of consciousness. Being able to put yourself into a state of relaxation, a state of deep meditation, should become a skill as natural as breathing.
People are sometimes confused about the difference between hypnosis and meditation. I would say they are very similar states, the exception being that hypnosis has a direction to it, an outcome you have decided before you begin, while meditation is more formless. Speaking personally, when I go into an altered state I want to do something. I want to know when I’m going in, when I’m coming out, and I want to know what I’m doing while I’m there. Meditation, for me, is not directed enough—but it really is a matter of individual taste.
If you want to achieve anything with self-hypnosis, you plan it out before you begin. When you’re hypnotizing other people—in fact, whenever you’re communicating with someone else, even if you’re simply trying to share a good memory—you’re trying to induce in them a specific state. You’re using images and feelings and word pictures, and, if you’re sufficiently effective as a communicator, you induce an altered state in them. Knowing exactly how that’s done and doing it with precision is what makes someone a good hypnotist.
Of course, not all people who set themselves up as hypnotists are necessarily good at hypnosis. That’s one of the first things I learned when I set out to study the field.
For example, I came across that item I mentioned called a “hypnosis susceptibility scale,” which was designed to measure how “hypnotizable” someone is. In my opinion, it functions as a measure of the hypnotist’s incompetence, rather than the susceptibility of the person one is trying to hypnotize.
I went to Ernest Hilgard’s laboratory years ago, and I was told that some people could score a zero, meaning they were totally unhypnotizable, while others could score really high, which meant they could do positive hallucinations and other “advanced” hypnotic phenomena.
We know that all the so-called hypnotic phenomena—amnesia, anesthesia, arm catalepsy, positive and negative hallucination, and so on—can be seen in the normal waking state, so that makes nonsense out of that criterion. Think about how many times you’ve negatively hallucinated your car keys; you left them on the table, but they just weren’t there when you went to find them—until someone else pointed to them in plain sight.
The hypnosis tests themselves went something like this: the researchers played a tape recording while people sat there and listened. The degree to which they could go into an apparently altered state and do hypnotic phenomena became the measure of their susceptibility.
The problem was, it wasn’t even a good hypnotic induction on the tape. It was monotonous and uncreative, and the way I saw it, it proved only that a certain minority of people could escape into trance out of sheer boredom.
I was able to put a hypnotic induction on the same tape recorder and hypnotize many more people—and yet, officially, the Hilgard Scale is still given considerable credence as scientifically valid.
The belief that you need to speak in a monotone to put someone in trance is central to this approach to hypnosis. The researchers thought of this as congruent with inducing an altered state—but the truth is, you speak in a monotone if you’re going to speak incongruently. If you speak congruently and slowly and inflect your voice downward where you give commands, people will respond much more intensely.
Those kinds of beliefs have created a situation in which a limited number of people were believed to be capable of achieving a limited number of things. That’s why hypnosis was primarily used for simple things, such as getting people to lose weight and quit smoking. Therapists really didn’t have tools for more complex problems.
In contrast, if you trained as a psychiatrist, you learned how to give drugs to deal with emotional problems. If you were a psychologist, you might have learned a little about conditioning or aversion therapy, so that you could expose your clients to cigarettes and give them electric shocks in an effort to get them to stop smoking. You might have been trained in getting people to challenge their thinking to change their behavior.
The problem was, you simply weren’t taught how to actually help your clients to think differently, change the way they felt, get over physiological addictions, or to do really practical things, such as developing amnesia for traumatic experiences so they didn’t have to keep reliving the past, over and over again, until they became functionally disabled. Psychologists were never even taught that these things were possible.
Since the model didn’t exist, I had to develop tools from scratch to accomplish this. I did it by the simple and logical process of finding people who had already done what I wanted to study. I found people who had “spontaneously” recovered from certain bad experiences and then looked carefully at what they had done that was different from those who hadn’t overcome their traumas.
Hypnosis turned out to be a useful tool. As I developed newer and better strategies, it turned out to be a good idea to induce hypnosis and then install these strategies in an altered state. The fact is, we learn better when we’re in an altered state than we do when we’re in our normal state of consciousness. If that weren’t true, we’d all be learning to solve our problems all the time simply by thinking about them.
Hypnosis, therefore, can be thought of as a learning state in which we can optimize our thinking and refine our strategies. Of course, that sometimes happens automatically. Many people have found that brilliant ideas and solutions to problems came to them when they were asleep, or when they drifted into deep states of relaxation or meditation.
Albert Einstein, for one, did thought experiments—simply another way of describing hallucination. He went into deeply altered states and imagined riding on a photon of light. That’s not the normal waking state. Linus Pauling described riding around on the inside of molecules and won a Nobel Prize. That’s not the normal waking state. Quite clearly, we have the potential to enter profoundly altered states of great creativity. These are simply alternative ways of thinking from our default “normal” waking state.
Despite the possibilities this approach suggests, and the hundreds of years of experience we’ve had actually applying the technology of trance, many people are still deeply fearful of hypnosis.
One reason is that an unfortunate number of incompetent people are practicing it. Another is that sometimes people don’t carry out the suggestions you give them when they are in hypnosis. Most people in the therapy business don’t like the idea that they can fail. If you just have people free associate, and every time they say something you say, “And how do you feel about that?” you don’t run that risk.
The problem with that approach is that you also don’t help people change. It’s an amorphous approach; it’s long-winded and doesn’t have any outcome orientation.
Some of us who are openly and deeply committed to using hypnosis, on the other hand, are prepared to accept the risks. We actually want to get people to lose weight or quit smoking, to be unafraid to cross the bridge or get in the plane. We’re less interested in problems and more interested in new ways of behaving.
Some therapists are widening their horizons. The better ones, at least, are prepared to try out new tools, because they’re starting to think of the end result.
Even the word “hypnosis” still causes some mainstream “experts” great anxiety, which is an unfortunate and wasteful response. I believe it’s time for us to stop looking at the bugaboo about hypnosis. This is a new millennium, and people are smarter than ever before. They’re developing new ways of doing things better, growing up using computers and playing video games that are impossible to play in a normal waking state. These games create powerful altered states in which people are able to change even their relationship with space and time. To play, they have to become adept at the incredibly advanced hypnotic skill of time distortion just to be able to keep up with the speed of the game.
This makes for greater motor-eye coordination. But even more significantly, these games are based on technology that is going to be used to make us smarter and faster, whether by teaching people how to do microsurgery or fly the space shuttle. Our electronic tools are literally changing the way we think.
One of the major steps forward in hypnosis was the field of Design Human Engineering (DHE). When I developed this, I began to take machines that existed on the outside and put them on the inside, getting them to function with equal precision and effectiveness. So if, for example, you had a particularly accurate measuring tool that existed in the outside world and learned how to build one exactly like it on the inside, you could dramatically improve your abilities. If I have a synthesizer that can create and record sixteen tracks of music, there’s no reason that I can’t build the same machine inside my head. Then I can do the same thing mentally and, in a state of time distortion, “play” until I like what I’m hearing, then sit down with a real machine and record it externally.
Even though I have to travel thousands of miles by air for my work, I don’t particularly enjoy flying. So, the moment I board an airplane, I go into a deep trance, go inside, and play in the playground in my head.
This is a place that’s full of all the things I own on the outside world, as well as a lot more wonderful creations. For example, I have a TV set that lets me play back old programs when I feel like seeing those again. I have the world’s best stereo system inside my mind. I also have a spare orchestra and a choir, and I can have them sing and play anything I want.
I never used to have these things—or even imagined having them—until I learned to go into altered states and install strategies I learned from other people.
It’s sad, then, that hypnosis is regarded with suspicion by some people simply because of the unfounded belief that “it’s bad, and it doesn’t work.” Of course, those people don’t explain how anything can be bad if it doesn’t work, but that doesn’t stop them putting their objections across.
Milton Erickson fought for years trying to make hypnosis legitimate, and he believed the way to do this was to have it restricted to doctors and dentists.
Unfortunately, these aren’t the people who are necessarily in the best position to use it. They simply don’t have the time. I would prefer them to work with other people—experts in trance-induction—who prepare their patients for them, so they can get on with their work.
Some years ago, I taught a group of dental patients to be able to go into deep trance and get absolute control over pain and then sent them in to have molars pulled. On the basis of this alone, one official of the American Dental Association said at the time that the only effective approach available to deal with dental phobia was Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
Doctors can also learn a lot from NLP, because when hypnosis is looked at through the eyes of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, it becomes a powerful tool to achieve results impossible in an “ordinary” waking state. What makes NLP powerful is that it teaches people how to have more freedom, how to be smarter, how to be more talented.
It’s also about doing these things more easily, because you don’t have to go through hours and hours of preparation and hard work.
NLP developed out of our study of hypnosis, but while Erickson was prepared to take one thousand hours to get someone to make an effective change, I wanted to get the same results in much less time.
Now I can do that—and I can teach others to do it—because, having done hypnosis for so many years, I know exactly how to adjust my behavior to make it easy for the person I’m with to go into the appropriate state.
This is an important ability to develop: to get people to change, you have to be able to change your behavior. If you want someone to go into a different state—say, a state of trance—you must be able to go there first.
One of the ways people learn is by emulating others. We call this “entrainment.” There are certain distinct signs of developing trance that people unconsciously pick up on and follow, until they, too, go into trance.
So, before that is possible, it’s important for anyone who wants to become competent in NLP and hypnosis to become familiar with the hypnotic state themselves—and then learn to control it. Ideally, you want to be able to enter a trance state, but not lose yourself in it. When working with other people, you need to be leading by example, and you also need to be able to maintain contact with them.
When I first started to study hypnosis, I found there were entire courses on how to hypnotize people without going into trance yourself—and that’s just ridiculous. If it’s good enough for your client, it’s good enough for you. You just have to make sure when you learn to go into trance that you can still speak and see and hear and act and respond—and that only comes from practice.
In using hypnosis, it’s extremely important to keep your eye on what you want to achieve, which is to put people into wonderful, relaxed states, and then have them face their problems with all the resources they didn’t know they had. That way, you help them change their beliefs about what is possible.
Then, when you bring them back, the waking state will never be the same, and that’s what it’s all about. That’s called learning.
Later in this book, you will learn some powerful and sophisticated language patterns that effortlessly guide people into trance. I studied language patterns for many years. I wrote down hundreds of different versions of each pattern, so now I can automatically and unconsciously generate them. I don’t need to think about them any more, nor will you if you learn the language of persuasion, know what trance looks and feels like, and get your client looking and feeling just like that.
If you are new to hypnosis, it is important to gain the experience of going in and out of trance as soon as possible.
One possibility is to seek out a highly skilled, reputable hypnotist, and explain exactly what you want. Have him take you into trance and give you the posthypnotic suggestion that whenever you touch yourself on the back of the hand, in a particular way, in a specific place, you will go back into trance, easily and effortlessly. This is what we call “anchoring,” and it’s a core skill of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (see Resource File 1 [page 305]).
Practice touching the back of your other hand (firing the anchor) repeatedly, going in and coming out of trance until it is familiar and easy.
Once you are comfortable with the experience and the transitions are smooth, practice keeping your eyes open while remaining in trance. Then, sit down with another person, start to pace him by breathing at the same rate, and reenter trance by firing your anchor.
Continue talking to them as you do this, preferably about times and experiences of comfort, peace, and relaxation, noticing the changes that take place in both of you as you go into a shared trance.
Even as you go into trance, the quality of your voice changes. Your breathing changes, and you will display certain physical cues—the signs of developing trance—that, together, will powerfully influence the person you are with.
The more hypnosis you do, the more easily you will recognize the signs of developing trance. People look different when they’re in trance. It’s quite easy to see when people are relaxing. By further tuning yourself to the subtleties, you can increase your ability to deepen their trance states quite informally and conversationally.
Various experts have listed more than one hundred signs of trance, which is making things too complicated. You need focus on only a few of the more obvious ones.
Look out for:
Now notice what you can achieve when you apply these tools systematically.
Exercise: Using Signs of Developing Trance
- Sit opposite your partner, take a deep breath, let it out, and allow yourself to begin to relax. Watch your partner without speaking and with soft, slightly defocused vision.
- Each time you notice your partner developing a sign of developing trance, simply nod, amplify the signal you observe (feed it back in a slightly exaggerated form), then switch to another signal, noticing whether your partner copies the sign. For example, if your partner’s blink rate slows, slow your own blink rate and defocus your vision further.
- Repeat the steps until your partner naturally closes his or her eyes.
- When that happens, reinforce other signs of developing trance with gentle phrases such as “Very good” or “That’s right.”
- Allow your partner to rest comfortably in trance, and then suggest they return to waking consciousness, feeling relaxed and wide awake. Change places and repeat.
- If you have a third practice partner, have him or her sit and observe the responses of both hypnotist and subject. When each of you has had a turn, all three of you should then share your experiences.
Most commonly, the hypnotist and the subject both experience a shift in their consciousness. The observer will also often enter a trance state.
This is a powerful skill-building exercise, but also a strong indication of how easily we can entrain to another’s changing state of consciousness. Simply observing trance developing in one person is often enough to cause an observer to alter his state of consciousness to match.
Many people get their ideas about hypnosis from watching hypnotists on stage and television. There are both differences and similarities between what the stage hypnotist does and the actions of a person who wants to help other people optimize their minds and achieve their goals.
The first thing to notice is that most hypnotists start out with thirty or forty volunteers from the audience. You may not see this part on television, since some governing bodies ban showing actual inductions on screen. This is a joke, of course, because when you know what to look for, hypnosis is everywhere. The evangelical preacher urging viewers to send money to him to reserve their place in heaven, the late-night infomercial shows selling cheap jewelry to insomniacs, the politicians urging voters to action are all using hypnotic methods.
Like the compulsive late-night shopper, the people who volunteer to come up on to the hypnotist’s stage are already predisposed to having an “experience.” Some of them have even been hypnotized by that hypnotist at another time on another show. They want to be part of this group experience.
The hypnotist goes through a series of “tests”—commands to lift one arm, clasp the hands and be unable to pull them apart, and so on. This is not hypnosis. This is simply to see which people will follow orders.
One at a time, people are sent back to their seats, so the remaining volunteers are watching and learning at an unconscious level what is required of them. They are literally being conditioned. When a select few are left, the hypnotist can be sure that he will be working with people who want to cooperate and more or less know what is required of them. All the rest of his induction tends to be showmanship, since most of the work has already been done.
In the kind of hypnosis I do, expectation plays a part as well, but it is by no means everything. I have a letter framed and hanging on the wall of my office that says I’m “the best hypnotist in the world.” I don’t keep it there to feed my own ego; I know that every person who comes in to make some changes will read the letter. Some of them just sit down after that and go straight down into trance before I say anything.
One of the main differences between stage hypnosis and my kind of work is that stage hypnotists give credence to the idea that some people are not hypnotizable, whereas I have never met anyone who can’t be hypnotized—as long as I am prepared to take enough time, pay sufficient attention to their responses, and modify my own behavior accordingly.
Of course, you will always get people who go into deep, somnambulistic trance, then come out and say: “I wasn’t hypnotized. I could hear everything and think and feel things.” My reply is always that there is, indeed, a state of consciousness in which we hear and feel nothing. It’s called death, and it’s our job to avoid it as long as possible.