Hypnosis

What is Hypnosis? There are so many opinions and ideas floating around. Is it an exact science? Is there an absolute definition? How does it work? Does it work?

Hypnosis, in the past, has taken a bad rap. For many years it was clothed in mystery, something from the dark ages. Wizards, witches, sorcerers supposedly used it in practices of the occult and black magic. Today, there are those who still have a dark ages mentality and fear hypnosis. They believe that in Hypnosis your mind is being controlled. Is Hypnosis mind control?

Before we address that, let us look at some of the history of hypnosis. We don’t know the its exact beginning; however, I tend to think that when God put Adam into a sort of "sleep", took a rib and made Eve, that was probably the first instance that mankind experienced hypnosis. We’ve heard stories of the sleep temples of ancient Greeks and Egyptians where people were put to sleep and told they would awaken cured and they often were.

In the 18th century in France, Anton Mesmer appeared on the scene and helped a lot of people with his "animal magnetism". It appeared to be primarily suggestion. After a while, envious physicians instituted an investigation and he was exiled. By now, you have probably realized where the term,"mesmerized"originated.

It wasn’t long after that James Braid, an English physician decided to check into this phenomena. He discovered that eye fixation resulted in a hypnotic state. The term "suggestion" and most noteworthy, "Hypnosis" was coined by him. Hypnosis actually means sleep. He would tell his patients, "You are getting very sleepy", and when it was time -"awaken". The term "Hypnosis" stuck, even though he discovered later that it was a misnomer. .

During this period in history, the church taught that suffering and pain was noble. Imagine that! At this time, Dr. Braid’s friend, Dr. James Esdaile, while serving in India did major research in hypnotic anesthesia and lowered the mortality dramatically. Esdaile wrote a paper on this and submitted it to the British Medical Society. He was scorned by his fellow physicians (notice a pattern here?) and his findings not accepted. Why would the Indian people accept Hypnosis and the British not? Could it be that their society was already into altered states of consciousness; the idea of the"higher self"? Finally, isn’t it amazing that today, their concepts have finally found an amazing acceptance in our highly advanced and cultured society? But, for that time, Hypnosis remained in the area of the occult and black magic.

"Everyday, in every way, I am getting better and better"----sound familiar? Emile Coue’, a French pharmacist, created this statement in the 1900’s, as well as the discovery that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. Voila! Autosuggestion. He brought his ideas to the United States, only to be ridiculed. It was Hypnosis back to the land of mysticism.

Hypnosis and Suggestibility was published in l933 by an American psychologist, Clark Hull. A strong interest began to develop in the United States. In 1937, Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill, a book that many are familiar with, was written. It used autosuggestion and visualization (hypnosis) and has been read by millions. People learned that Andrew Carnigie and other wealthy, famous men used this technique. I believe it is and will always be a great book. But Hypnois wasn’t out of the woods yet. A young psychiatrist, Milton Erickson, developed a technique we today refer to as "conversational hypnosis". He was really good at it. He worked with seriously ill patients and had fantastic results. But since the American Medical Association decided that Hypnosis was bad for you and didn’t exist, they took a dim view of Erickson’s claims and tried to take his license to practice –twice. Erickson fought to bring Hypnosis out of mysticism and into the medical arena, and respectability. He devoted his life to it. In 1958, the Medical Association finally decided that Hypnosis was a viable form of treatment, and if it wasn’t, it couldn’t hurt you. By the time Erickson died, in 1980, not only was Hypnosis accepted, but Erickson was viewed with an almost reverence and studied by psychologists, and the medical community alike.

Now for an aside (not really) Have you ever on your drive home suddenly realized you were in your driveway and didn't remember getting there? Read a book and got so involved that you totally identified with a/the characters? Tried to talk to someone involved with television? This is an altered state, going inside, a trance. We spend our lives moving from one trance to another to another. So one can decide to choose better trances, right? Can it be that simple? How can we use that ability in a positive way on purpose? To create change in our lives? To improve ourselves?

Today, we realize that hypnosis is mind control—that is, controlling your own mind. The hypnotist is only a tour guide. Hypnosis is a state of relaxation and a heightened sense of awareness. Each of us is a great hypnotist. We have come to believe that most change takes place on an unconscious level, otherwise why can we not consciously decide to change something and do it? Milton Erickson once indicated that patients will be patients as long as their conscious and unconscious are not in rapport. Why do many people see Hypnotists to help them stop smoking, lose weight, for goal-setting and many more changes?? Firstly, because it is most valuable to have an objective person to work with on this. It is because Hypnosis allows you to give your "unconscious", some refer to it as "sub-conscious" and a much better description is Dr. Dave Dobson's description, Other Than Conscious your desired suggestions, while the conscious relaxes. It can resolve the conflicts between each of both of your minds. A lot of thinking goes on outside of our conscious awareness and guides our judgments and actions. Information collected and processed in the unconscious influences (out of our awareness) our first impressions. The "ah ha!" phenomena and our intuitive decisions are drawn from the massive amount of information stored in the unconscious. We do not always know why we are doing certain things because we are influenced by feelings, memories, experiences and other information of which we are unaware. We can view the other than conscious as a vast database to draw upon. The conscious mind can learn how to tap into this resource to support our whole person. This can be done through Hypnosis.

In our Hypnosis certification course, we teach you how to communicate with the unconscious mind on multi levels, as well as many different methods for trance induction.

We know from our experience in our trainings, as well as in private practice that Hypnosis does work. Whether you, the reader choose to believe it or not, is of course your decision. We offer this information for what it is, only information. I wonder how soon or when you will fully realize that if you want to, you can learn to go into a trance deeply or just to communicate with the unconscious portions of yourself for the purpose of learning and change the things you want to change in ways that will surprise and delight yourself. When you want to learn more in hypnosis and/or NLP™ now or sometime soon in the near future, you can learn more about our trainings on NLP™ and Hypnosis when you see our schedule now.

Barbara J. Stepp
Trainer