WITH ALL THE TOOLS AT your disposal now, hypnosis should be a rapid process. People are still teaching outdated methods, like progressive relaxation, or the Staircase Induction, in which the subject has first to be able to create an imaginary staircase, and then walk down it into trance. My feeling is, if they can hallucinate a staircase, they’re already in trance.
Nowadays, I don’t spend the hours and hours that I used to do inducing trance. I have discovered that most people are flipping in and out of altered states all the time, and if I can just observe them, catch them at the right time, and reinforce what they’re already doing, it’s the quick road there.
However, even though I no longer use protracted hypnotic inductions and would like you, the reader, to develop rapid methods, I believe spending time on the fundamentals, as outlined in this book, like the hours I spent experimenting when I started out, will pay dividends. The benefits to me include learning how to organize my language so that I can use ambiguity, creating multiple levels as I speak and talking to people consciously and unconsciously at the same time. Very importantly, I learned how to analog mark, so I can deliver direct orders without people detecting them. When they tell me they’re too nervous, and I say, “So what you’re telling me is you can’t…” [then I analog mark, by speaking slightly louder, and use the downward inflection of a command] “…relax and let go.” I repeat this pattern over and over, and by the time I get to the point of actually starting a hypnotic induction, people are typically already there.
Another extremely important quality of rapid hypnosis is timing—timing your words, the rhythm of your voice, which words you mark out. People typically don’t process grammar formally, especially when they’re moving into trance. That’s why I spend a lot of time focusing on the two-word utterances that are characteristic of early speech development. These patterns are still embedded in the nondominant hemisphere, and when you use them, you can elicit a very powerful response. Relax now. Feel good. Comfortable rest. Learn new. Feel safe…
I’ve already said that, simply by observing the client, you can see when he is moving into an altered state. However, this degree of observation takes practice and experience. This is why I used to place a lot of emphasis on verbal pacing, and I recommend that you become adept at pacing verbally before moving on to other ways of gaining access to the patient’s model of the world.
I tend to observe more now than I used to. I look at the client’s pupils, his lower lip, the tonic quality of his muscles, his skin coloration. I know how these things change as people go into trance. For example, as people begin to alter their state, their lower lips fill up with blood, the pores become smaller, and the pupils dilate.
I watch for these things, and I align myself with them. I begin to breathe at the same rate as the client, in through my mouth and slowly out through my nostrils, to begin to relax myself. Even though they’ll be breathing differently—perhaps through mouth and nostrils simultaneously—if I breathe in through my mouth and lean slightly forward and breathe out through my nose and lean back, pretty soon they’ll follow the pattern and start to relax, too. The more you can get them to follow you nonverbally, the better.
But this doesn’t mean I work entirely indirectly. The fact is, I give as many direct commands as are needed. This notion of nondirective hypnosis among Ericksonian hypnotists is not really accurate. He used a lot of ambiguity, and because other people, especially in his day, couldn’t follow him, they called it nondirective. It was only nondirective in the sense that he prompted transderivational searches in his clients—that is to say, he would tell them something unspecified was going to happen that would let them know they were relaxing, and leave them to decide what it was.
Of course, they would scan their bodies, and say, “Oh my God, I can feel something. It must be that.” He was unspecified, but in many ways Milton was one of the most directive hypnotists you would ever want to meet. He only had five goals for people to get well: get out of the hospital, get a job, get married, have children, and send him presents. That was his definition of a cure.
Mine is a little broader than that. Not everybody starts out in hospital. I don’t really want their presents, so we can scratch that one off. I don’t necessarily think they have to be married or have children. I think it is good for people to have work that satisfies them, to have relationships that make them happy, and I think it is important for them to have fun—and lots of it. The reason people get so miserable is because they spend so many hours doing it and they get to the point where they master being miserable. It’s beyond a habit; it’s become expert behavior.
Whether I go about this conversationally or not isn’t important. Either I embed the suggestions, or I look at them directly and say, “Relax.” Then, when they respond, I’ll say, “Relax more.” Then I’ll look even more deeply into their eyes, almost as if I’m looking through them, and say: “More…more…more…more,” leaning forward with each word, and ending each word with a downward inflection. If they’re responding, why make it more complicated than that?
I’ve become closely attuned to the way people blink. There’s a conscious blink and an unconscious blink. The eyelids close a little more slowly with an unconscious blink and stay closed just a little longer than a conscious blink. I know then that the subject’s attention is moving inward, and he’s starting to relax, so I’ll reinforce it, by nodding and saying, “That’s right.” Then I start to blink slowly in exactly the same way, and as the subject does the same thing, I’ll say, “Close your eyes.”
I watch as the eyelids come down. If he shuts his eyes too quickly, I’ll tell him to open them again, then close them again “only as you’re sleeping.” It’s a confusing statement to the conscious mind, but when the unconscious understands, the subject responds with fluttering, double blinks. When I see those double blinks I know my subject is headed toward trance, so I look closely and say reassuringly, “That’s right, that’s right,” lowering my tone and reinforcing any other signs of developing trance.
One of my more rapid and powerful inductions involves leaning over and taking hold of someone’s hand, with finger and thumb circling the wrist. If necessary, I turn the hand so the back of the wrist is uppermost, and I lift it to about shoulder-height and push it back slightly toward the subject’s body.
Now, if this were done very strongly, it would be a wristlock characteristic of some martial arts. The particular combination of moves makes the arm feel out of control, and by doing that, and pushing the arm back, it comes near to triggering catalepsy.
At that moment, I say, “Hold it for a minute,” but I’m ambiguous about what “it” really is. Is it the thought of relaxing he has to hold, or the arm itself? Is it the thought of
going really deep down and knowing that you don’t know where you’re going to go but it’s going to feel good. So the question is always: how much pleasure you can stand? Can you relax your forehead and your knee at the same time? Can you relax the front and the back of you at the same time? How about both ears and only one nostril? The truth is where we relax isn’t important, it’s only important that we do it…now…
Consciously, people are able to handle only a few suggestions at a time, so when you stack suggestions like that, it’s too much to process, so it passes into slipstream of unconscious communication for processing. Since their hand is up, and I’ve let go, and it stays there, it’s already cataleptic. There is no need for lengthy suggestions to get the arm up in the air and have it become cataleptic. Because it’s a lot harder to lift your hand than it is to put it down, I lift it for them—then tell them to “let it come down only at the same rate that they relax and go into a deep trance…” Notice the dissociative effect of the words. The presupposition is that they’re no longer in control of the arm, so, therefore, something else must be: their “unconscious.”
As an alternative to lifting the arm, I’ll sometimes grab the wrist, shake the hand, feeling for whether their muscles are relaxed, then throw the arm down as I tell them to “drop your consciousness and your arm.” The effect is almost instantaneous, and people relax all at once.
One way of explaining these phenomena is by the principle of leveraging. People in our society have certain ideas about what marks real hypnosis. Arm catalepsy—sitting motionless with one arm extended—is one such marker. It’s not something people do in their normal waking state. So, once it occurs, it increases your credibility as a hypnotist.
But since no particularly useful purpose is served by having a subject sitting for an entire session with a cataleptic arm, we can use leveraging to deepen the trance even more. Simply tell the person: “And your hand can begin to go down, in honest unconscious movements…but no more quickly that you are ready to…go even deeper into trance…”
Many newcomers to hypnosis worry unnecessarily about whether they can induce trances that are “deep enough.” Of course, the question then is, deep enough for what?
I don’t necessarily think that everybody needs to be in deep, somnambulistic states to make changes. In fact, often I find it’s too dissociative, and people are inclined to forget what is required of them if they are now given proper posthypnotic suggestions.
I mostly put people into states that are altered just enough to allow them to engage in new behaviors that I can then reconnect with the conscious state.
I really want people to have control. Milton wanted them to just respond. If people were depressed he wanted them to go into a state where they were more optimistic. He didn’t really want them to have the conscious control.
I want them to be able to turn depression on and turn it off. I want them to be able to turn happiness on and turn it off. As Virginia said to me, “If people have choices, they’ll always make the best one.” Our job, as I see it, is to give them choices.
Deepening the hypnotic state just enough to be able to work effectively with it while maintaining control over how deep the subject goes is a relatively simple and easy matter with the technique known as “fractionation.”
This works by leading the subject into trance, then, just as he’s settling in, bringing him out again, and repeating the process. Each time you do this, he will lapse into a deeper trance.
Beware of doing this too much, however. If taken too far, the subject may respond by refusing to come out of trance, in which case you have lost your role as leader of the experience, and you will need to back up to regain rapport.
There are many different ways that trance can be induced and deepened, and we’re developing them all the time. The key point to remember is that the hypnotist functions as a feedback mechanism for the subject’s state, and as your abilities improve to demonstrate and reinforce trance nonverbally, you will introduce the subject to richer and more productive experiences.
Neural scanning lets us know that when people go into hypnotic trance, real changes take place in their brains. Brainwave entrainment technologies, such as the Mindspa, for which I’ve developed a number of programs, also allow us to induce specific altered states using lights and tones.
To realize that we’re only scratching the surface of what is possible is truly exciting. Even though I am best known for my work in NLP and hypnosis, I’ve never stopped being a physicist, and that allows me to look at even more advanced technologies than the ones we already have.
At the time of writing, I’m working with leading scientists to develop technologies that will profoundly increase our ability to see, measure, and change the way the brain works.
As technology and self-development come together, we will find new ways that will allow us to speed up our own evolution even more rapidly. But until this happens, the best means to accomplish all this is your sensory system—especially your ability to observe.
Even if you’ve never done hypnosis, that doesn’t mean you haven’t seen it before. Remember those times when people are standing in the elevator and the door opens and they don’t step out, or the times someone is at a stoplight and the light changes but she doesn’t move? Think of that expression on your child’s face when he’s being nagged, and his eyes begin to defocus and his skin becomes flaccid and he loses the swallow reflex. These are all mini trances, and the more you notice how people go quite naturally into these mini trances, the more familiar you’ll become with the signs, allowing you to set up a feedback loop to reinforce and direct their changing state.
The purpose of trance is to get people into a state where their brain is more flexible, more able to tolerate their problems and to develop solutions. All of our beliefs, all of our fears, all of our limitations reside in specific states of consciousness. You cannot be afraid if you’re genuinely amused; you cannot be anxious at the same time your muscles are relaxed or your breathing is slow and regular.
State-conditioned learning is something we’ve all experienced many times. For example, you might have studied hard at home, then taken a test at school or college and found you can’t remember anything, but when you get back to where you did the original studying, all the knowledge comes flooding back.
What this tells us is that we need to be in the right state to do the right thing. Many activities are conditioned this way. Athletes know this; often they’ll follow elaborate rituals to get into the right state, because they know from experience that their performance will be significantly better.
On the other hand, when people are agitated, they can’t perform optimally. If the level of stress is high enough, they can’t even add or subtract or read the safety instructions on the back of their hotel room doors in the event of fire.
This book has been designed to help you know how to shift the submodalities of your unwanted experience, to do Swish Patterns, to create new sequences so you have new strategies you can run at will. In short, you can optimize your performance as a human being.
Since we know that stress does not help one perform well, it follows that to be able to go into deep states of relaxation, to change our beliefs, to change how we look at things also changes our understanding, our feelings, and our behavior.
In even the oldest cultures in the world, it’s been known that people can enhance their performance and improve their quality of life—and the first step is always to be able to go into some kind of relaxed, altered state.
I’ve studied many different kinds of meditation in many different countries. I’ve been to hundreds of sacred temples and spoken to every guru I could find. Their methods might have differed, but they all said more or less the same thing: learn to meditate and practice it regularly and your problems would float away. You’d become more enlightened as a person, more functional as a businessperson. You’d be better for your family, a better spouse and parent, a better partner and friend.
I don’t think this is unrealistic, however far-fetched some people might think it is. People who meditate are simply more evenly balanced. Instead of letting the stress of everyday life snowball into chaos, they have a place to go that brings them peace, comfort, and regeneration.
People need these benefits as much today as they did in ancient India—even more, perhaps. But time is at a premium. Not everyone can go off and meditate for hours at a time. To help people experience and benefit from peace and comfort now, we need to be able to induce deep trance quickly.
Where I used to spend an hour hypnotizing people, I now spend three minutes. That’s because I’ve become very familiar with the process. I don’t have that expectation of people just starting out, but I do have the expectation that they can learn to do the same, and I certainly have that expectation of people who have done hypnosis for a long time.
Unfortunately, many people in the field don’t have that expectation of themselves. They found a way that works for them and stayed with it, but if they are not prepared to challenge their own limitations, they will never improve beyond their present point.
The better you get at hypnosis, the faster you should be able to get people into trance. The faster you can do that, the more people you should be able to work with, and the greater the variety of difficulties you should be able to resolve.
These technologies are designed to help people to think more creatively and constructively, to have a greater depth of feeling, and to develop more flexibility in their behavior. Above all, they make it possible for people to learn faster than ever before.