Self-Talk and Self Hypnosis 12/25/2009
I’ve covered how hypnosis is a part of everyday reality. If you watch a movie it’s the equivalent of hypnosis as you are guided to experience the story. On the other hand if you are thinking a particular set of thoughts, such as angry or happy thoughts then you are doing self-hypnosis as your thoughts guide your emotional state. Now I’m going to focus on self-talk as self-hypnosis to put another perspective of how hypnosis works. In other words how you talk to yourself in your head – the thoughts you think – also create how you feel. In these instances you are doing self-hypnosis. If you do a lot of negative thinking then you will create a lot of negative feelings in yourself. If you do positive thinking then you will create positive feelings in yourself. You are basically doing self-hypnosis all the time. Suppose you encounter a problem and your thoughts are something like this: “Another problem! Why does this always happen to me. If people would just listen to me then these problems wouldn’t happen. It’s so irritating to have this problem interfering with my plans today” and so on. What you are doing in this case is negative self talk. In other words you are doing bad self-hypnosis. In the same way if a friend of yours is upset and tells you about their problem like this; “You know how when problems start and you feel helpless and you don’t know what to do and its as if everything is falling apart…” Then the friend’s negative conversation will create a negative effect on you (notice how saying ‘you know when’ makes you relate that other person’s negative experience to yourself). Of course it will only happen if you are following along and sympathizing with what you are being told. You will feel the negativity from your friend and you will feel bad. In the above situation your friend has unintentionally done bad or negative hypnosis on you. You probably get t he idea by now. Being in a negative environment, talking to yourself in negative terms (i.e. negative self talk) and having depressing conversation will all put you in a bad mood. In other words you become highly focused on a negative perspective. This is the same as being hypnotized in a negative manner. The reverse is also true. If you ever encounter a problem and think, “Oh a difficult situation! That’s OK. I can handle this like I’ve dealt with other negative situations in the past. I’ll just take a deep breath and imagine a peaceful scene, like a beautiful day at the beach. Now I am relaxed and ready to deal with the situation.” Notice how the focus of your mind is on a positive perspective. You become highly focused on a positive outlook to a problem you are faced with. In this case you are doing positive self-talk or positive self-hypnosis. Same applies to a conversation. If a person is upbeat and happy when talking to you and uses encouraging words, creating positive or empowering images – and you are following along. Then this conversation is effectively good hypnosis. Talking to a person is very similar to hypnosis. Some categorize it as conversational hypnosis. Learning how to talk in a way that both improves your own inner dialogue and how you talk with others makes you a good conversational hypnotist. If you are unaware of the power of words then you may do bad conversational hypnosis without even knowing it. Keeping all the ideas here in mind you realize how powerful your mind can be on your emotional states. Simply swithching the focus of your mind and your thoughts from negative to positive will change you entire outlook and thus your emotional state of being. In the last 2 articles I’ve shown you how hypnosis is simply a state of highly focused attention. Which is something we all experience in our everyday lives. The only difference is the words we use to describe our experiences. A hypnotist will use technical words that makes hypnosis sound mysterious and unusual. The history of hypnosis and the name of the system of therapy named after the Greek God of sleep also contributes to the image of hypnosis. With these concepts in mind we can begin to make an outline of our experience using the scientific terminology of hypnosis to take control of our minds so that we control our thoughts and emotional states. If we do this then we have more control over our lives and can be happier and more successful in our day to day live. When you have understood the processes of hypnosis and self-hypnosis and done some practice you will be able to do self-hypnosis anytime, anywhere providing you with greater control over your life and your interactions with others. I have covered what hypnosis is i.e. a state of highly focused attention. Today I am going to show that being in a state of focused attention (i.e. hypnosis) is a normal everyday experience for all human beings. To begin with in almost all activities that you engage in you have to be in a state of focused attention to accomplish that activity. When you drive a car you are in a state of focused attention (or you should be for safe driving). When you are reading a book you are in a state of focused attention. How involved you are in the book also indicates how –highly- focused your attention is. If the book is exciting or romantic and you are on the edge of your seat or feeling romantic then you are in a state of highly focused attention towards the book and your emotions are being guided by the words of the author who is acting as ‘hypnotist’. The same thing happens when you are involved in a movie (or TV show). You laugh, cry or get nervous and excited depending on what is going on in the movie. If you are bored with the movie then you won’t get involved with the story but if your attention is highly focused on the story (i.e. you are involved with the movie) then you will experience it as if it were real. In the language of hypnosis the extent to which you are focused indicates your ‘depth of trance’. If you are not involved in the book or movie then you don’t move emotionally with the story which means that you have a light state of trance. If you are heavily involved of focused on the book or movie you are in a deep state of trance. Calling a trance state ‘light’ of ‘deep’ is simply hypnosis lingo for how highly focused your state of mind is at your current activity. You can actually say that hypnosis is a state of mind that everyone goes in and out of throughout the day. A few more examples will make this clear. When you are daydreaming and therefore oblivious to what’s going on around you or even if someone called your name then you are highly focused on your imagination. That’s a hypnotic trance. When you are feeling love, such as when you are in love, then your mind is focused on romantic thoughts and you even feel love towards everyone you meet. You are in a hypnotic trance (highly focused attention). In the angry and loving examples your hypnotic trance is an emotional one based on a few thoughts that you are currently engaged in. In these cases your hypnotic trance is self-created – i.e. your thoughts guide you to feel what you do. While in the examples of the book and movie you are guided by the writer and actors to feel what you do. That is the difference between hypnosis and self-hypnosis. In self-hypnosis your focus is internal and you choose what to focus on and that creates your hypnotic trance. In hypnosis your focus is guided by a person (like a book or movie) and that external guidance creates your hypnotic trance. By these examples I have shown that being in states of highly focused attention is a normal part of everyday experience for all human beings. I’m sure you can think of many more examples of states of highly focused attention involving sports, work, learning or talking to friends all of which are different states of focused attention. All of these states are different types of hypnotic trances. In other words hypnosis is a part of everyday life. The only reason people think it is something different than what they experience everyday is the terminology (i.e. words used to describe the experiences). This terminology makes hypnosis seem like something mysterious. Hypnosis is not only not mysterious it is something that we are all masters of and experience everyday. What Is Hypnosis? Basic Myths of Hypnosis 12/16/2009
No pocket watches are involved and no one clucks like a chicken afterward. In fact hypnosis is a state of concentration and focused attention. With it the mind can be more powerful. You simply have slipped into your subconscious. In a hypnotherapist's office, you can learn self-hypnosis. Don't worry, you won't lose control. You won't do anything against your will. "No one takes away our choice under any conditions -- no one can make you do anything you wouldn't normally do," says Jane Ann Covington, a hypnotist in Atlanta and founder of the Hypnosis Institute International Center for Developing Mastery. In hypnosis, you don't even lose consciousness, Covington tells WebMD. From WebMD's article "Hypnosis Goes Mainstream" When most people think of hypnosis they think of a creepy old man controlling the mind of an innocent person to do horrible things. This is a stereotype promoted by Hollywood movies and it even makes for some scary scenes in a movie but it has nothing to do with the reality of hypnosis. The problem with the common perception of hypnosis has to do with it’s name, the opposition by the barbaric doctors of the 18th century, misconceptions created by stage hypnosis and inaccurate portrayals of hypnosis in movies. I am going to address each of these in turn so you get the full picture of what hypnosis really is and how it is different from mind control. First lets begin with it’s name. In mid 1800's Dr. James Braid was experimenting with the techniques of hypnosis and he noticed that after his subjects followed his instructions they would be in a very relaxed state with their eyes closed. Since his subjects appeared to be asleep he decided to name the method ‘hypnosis’ after the Greek God of sleep ‘Hypnos’. This name spread rapidly. Later after questioning his subjects he discovered that although they were relaxed and their eyes were closed they were far from being asleep. In fact they were very aware and highly focused on everything he said. With this realization he decided to change the name to ‘mono-ideaism’. Mono meaning one and ideaism referring to the idea or suggestion his subject was focusing on. This name more accurately reflected the reality of the hypnotic process of how the subjects focused on what the hypnotists was saying. Unfortunately the name hypnosis had stuck and with it the misconception that hypnosis has something to do with sleep. It doesn’t. This leads us to… Hypnosis Misconception #1: Hypnosis is a sleep like state. Reality is that hypnosis is a state of highly focused awareness. The hypnotic state is analogous to something called Dhayana which is the name of meditation in a system called Yoga. In the Yogic ‘Dhayanic Meditation’ the yogi focuses his or her mind entirely on an object or image. This exercise is meant to build concentration and still the thoughts of the mind. The Dhayanic meditation practice can be fairly hard for the novice practitioner as holding the mind still (on a single object/image) can be very difficult. The hypnotized person is in a very similar state to the Dhayanic meditative state in that the mind is focused in one direction. The difference is that in Dhayanic meditation the practitioner has to exert a personal force of will on holding the mind steady on an object or image while in hypnosis the person just has to follow what the hypnotists if saying and focus only on the words of the hypnotist. That means that the hypnotist acts as a guide. Another difference is that instead of focusing the mind on just one image the subject is guided to focus his or her mind on a series of suggestions, thoughts and visualizations which helps a person create change in themselves. Much like a Dhayanic meditation but in a more dynamic way. To restate this: In both Dhayanic meditation and hypnosis the person has a highly focused state of awareness. In Dhayanic meditation the awareness is focused on the chosen object/image. While in hypnosis awareness is focused on the words of the guide (hypnotist). In both cases the person has complete awareness, it’s just focused awareness. The next big setback for hypnosis also happened in the 1800’s. Dr. James Esdaile used hypnosis as preparation for his patients before surgery with a recovery rate that was unheard of in his time – and was comparable to recovery rates after the discovery of chloroform/ether. What he did was conduct surgeries on prisoners in India, documenting them carefully. He ended up performing over 3000 surgeries with recovery rates of 95% while similar surgeries in England had a recovery rate of about 50%. What he did was have a lackey pass a metal plate over the patients body for about 2 days till the boredom put the patient into a deep trance. Then he would perform the surgery (even stuff like amputations!). He found that not only did the recovery rate go up to over 95% but post operation shock went down considerable as did blood loss! (now we know that hypnosis reduces shock and bleeding but back then this was revolutionary). Dr. James Esdaile took his results back to England for review by his fellow doctors and was shocked by the feedback he got. Essentially the doctors in England formed a committee to analyze his results and decided that hypnosis shouldn’t be applied to English patients because, I quote ‘If God didn’t mean for people to suffer he wouldn’t have invented pain’. It’s possible that they were too lazy to do the methods of were just jealous of their colleagues results and didn’t want to give him any fame. Dr. James Esdaile, shocked and disappointed went back to India to carry on his work. Surprisingly a year later chloroform/ether was discovered that made a patient unconscious during the operation, reduced bleeding and improved recovery rate (comparable to Dr. James Esdaile's results). For some reason ether/chloroform was not ignored using the same logic that ‘God meant for people to suffer’ apparently God had changed his mind about patient suffering. This was a big setback for the development of hypnosis techniques and was the an example of doctors setting back medical development for personal reasons. After this setback hypnosis entered it’s dark ages. It was only the stage hypnotists that kept hypnosis alive over the next half century with their fancy and hyped up stage performances. In stage hypnosis it was discovered that with just a little encouragement many individuals would act incredibly silly thereby entertaining the entire crowd. This became a means of livelihood for several generations of stage hypnotists. Stage hypnosis may seem to be a situation in which several members of the audience come under mind control but that is not the actual situation. The whole performance is an elaborate and very effective setup. What happens is that the stage hypnotist determines which members of the audience are most ready to follow along with the instructions (with a relaxation exercise as well as ‘suggestibility tests’). The people selected tend to be those who are oppressed by their normal social roles and need a means of letting go. Just like people let go of their inhibitions when drunk (i.e. alcohol reduces inhibition and becomes an excuse to act silly) in the same way they let go and act silly on stage with the excuse of being hypnotized. It isn’t that simple but that is the basic idea of how stage hypnosis works. It’s an act and NOT mind control. To get the selected performers ready to follow the instructions of the stage hypnotist the individuals have to pass a series of tests. Relaxation, suggestibility and willingness to volunteer are a part of the process of selection –as well as creating an aura of expectation and convincing the stage performers that they are the ‘stars’ of the show. This increases the mental pressure (and willingness) on the volunteers to perform. The stage hypnosis performers are aware during the entire experience and can refuse any command that goes against their belief system. That is why a stage hypnotist will only ask the volunteers to do stuff that they would probably do if they were drunk anyways. And that’s how the whole stage hypnosis performance comes to be. More explanation of how stage hypnosis is done will come in another post. All of the above explanation is just to explain… Hypnosis Misconception #2: Hypnosis is mind control and stage hypnosis shows mind control in action. Truth: It’s a show based on a process with no mind control. Participants are aware throughout and can reject any suggestion that doesn’t fit their belief system. Finally, hypnosis is used in Hollywood movies as a method of mind control to create interesting stories. No one has ever been controlled with hypnosis so the stories in the movies are pure fantasy. However, images created by movies last – i.e. they create a strong impression – so many believe the movie hype even though there is nothing in the news media to corroborate such stories. In summary the myths of hypnosis are as follows;
Myths 1 and 2 required an explanation of why this misconception came to be which I have done. Myths 3 and 4 are also wrong. Since you are aware during the entire process of hypnosis there is no question of ‘not waking up’. Your attention is simply very focused. If the hypnotist stops talking you will notice and simply open your eyes to see what’s going on. Also, since you are aware you have complete control over your mind – that means you can easily lie while in the state of hypnosis if you want to. It also means that that hypnosis can’t be used to make criminals tell the truth. There is simply no mind control involved. |
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