Hypnosis . . . nature of the beastie . . .

Recent discussions at the Hypnosis Technique Exchange regarding waking suggestion for pain control has led into some interesting tangents on the nature of trance, the experience of hypnosis, and whether or not hypnosis is about control or manipulation or free will.

Those who regularly read my writing, know that I don’t define hypnosis in the way that one might hear it described in a late night movie on mind control and the like . . . nor do I confine it to a narrow area of trance phenomenon . . . I consider it to be part and parcel to the intensification of the imaginative involvement in order to enhance expectation to bypass the critical factor of the mind and establish appropriate desirable selective thinking in any number of contexts.

This definition does not require formal induction. Nor does it require what many may expect hypnosis to be like because of improper education from old movies or bad books. Hypnosis is not mind control. It may have some markers in common with certain of the stereotypes, but it is also much more than that.

For instance, the idea that hypnosis is focused attention has been around for some time and it works very well for many effects.

Recently, in the discussion on waking suggestion or waking hypnosis to relieve kids of pain, one of our members felt that what folks were calling hypnosis isn’t hypnosis because it’s just focusing the kids on their breathing. This is true, and it’s also a form of hypnosis.

I get kids to stop crying simply by prepping them with an awareness of basic breathing techniques

This will work with adults as well. A very quick and easy way to lesson the experience of pain is to distract the person from the pain experience . . . to focus on something else.

If a person has been hurt, a simple method is to have them focus on other parts of the body . . . tell the person you’re doing an inventory to make certain everything else is okay too just to be sure nothing else was hurt then start focusing on other body parts.

If there is bleeding . . . DON’T FREAK OUT . . . simply say something along the lines of “oh, that’s natural and the bleeding will slow down in a moment” and it often does (particularly in scalp cuts or scrapes) for some wounds it is appropriate to say something along the lines of “oh, that’s natural, the bleeding is cleaning the wound and will slow down and stop in a moment.”

NEVER FREAK OUT.

Don’t clear an area because a person needs air to breathe but to clear out the idiots freaking out around the person who are giving the suggestion it’s awful. Stay focused and get the person to focus.

(not that they don’t already know them; they merely need to be made aware of what i am asking when i demand that they take “deep breaths”), coupled with talking to them. No specialized theory or vocabulary is needed. “Take deep breaths. Slowly, now. Deeper. Now — what’s the problem? What happened?”

That’s an induction. Once they focus on the breathing, they’re distracted from the pain and begin going into a dissociated state. That’s hypnosis. Natural breathing and focus . . . yes . . . hypnosis . . . yes, that too. 🙂 Formal induction, no, but a form of suggestion, definitely.

The specialized theory or vocabulary is for us to discuss what’s going on, it’s not for use with the kids. With the kids, just tell ’em to breathe or focus or imagine or whatever. The variations are to increase the toolset so we can adapt to kids who aren’t responsive to the standard techniques.

Kids need to be taught, not hypnotized.

Kids are already hypnotized. If hypnosis is – as I believe it is – the intensification of imaginative involvement to bypass the critical factor of the conscious mind in order to establish desired selective thinking . . . . kids are pretty much in hypnosis all the time . . . they don’t have as highly developed critical factor (that comes with age and experience and education) . . . the younger the child, the less a critical factor and the more effective simple waking suggestion (let me kiss the booboo away and the like).

I’ve done formal and informal inductions with kids . . . they’re almost always highly responsive.

Moreover, i as a teacher — in this situation — never had any measure of “control” or “command” over the child, except insofar as i could win his or her trust and convince them that talking to me was a much better thing than suffering through whatever sobs were tormenting them. If i had demanded in an authoritarian voice “Quit crying or i’ll punish you!” i would certainly have been disciplined, if not fired; of course, that’s not hypnosis, but my point is that there was never, ever any perception of me “controlling” the child in the sense of subjecting the kid to my will.

And there is the crux of the confusion, or, rather the points where we may be speaking about the same thing but we’re not talking on the same page . . . hypnosis is NOT exerting one’s will over another. There are certainly directed or authoritarian hypnosis models that may appear that way from the outside . . . I use directed hypnosis all the time . . . but the hypnosis is NOT exerting one’s will or command over another. You might take a look at a few other models of hypnosis, such as the indirect and Ericksonian schools . . . the permissive schools of hypnosis rather than the authoritarian ones. They’re permissive but they’re still hypnosis.

Hypnosis is more focused concentration . . . or, more correctly, intensification of imaginative involvement to bypass the critical factor of the conscious mind to establish desirable selective thinking. It’s not loss of will or control or any such thing. Now, in different contexts, it may be experienced differently . . . perhaps that loopy trancey floaty feeling or perhaps autonomic response to suggestions in full-on physical or mental affect . . . but those are in a great deal of the experience, part of the context . . . it can also be as simple as having someone focus on breathing while to an extent that they no longer are aware of the pain they had been feeling elsewhere.

It was merely me, talking to a kid who trusted me, and persuading them that there was a better way to deal with the situation.

Ba da boom. Rapport is the feeling that you can trust the person who is guiding your experience to do so with your best interests in mind . . . a feeling of trust or even friendliness (but not always the same). Automatic response to your suggestion and accepting that what you say is in fact the appropriate way to respond is bypass of the critical factor. No arm waving, no mesmerism, no ritual, simple influence . . . which . . . in many contexts is indeed equivalent to hypnosis. I like ritualized hypnosis . . . you’ve seen that . . . but that isn’t only what hypnosis can be. 🙂

Because of these social strictures on my position, it cannot be said that i was ever “manipulating” or distracting the kids;

Yes it can be said. We manipulate and influence people all the time. It’s what humans do. It’s natural. Now whether we are aware of it or if we are congruent in that process is important.

to the contrary, i was asking them to concentrate even more certainly on their bodily processes and workings, which included the pain as well. I wanted them to get familiar with it, and understand it’s limits.

Concentrating on the pain in and of itself will tend to increase it. Concentrating on systems that demonstrate that the pain can become stronger or lighter is helpful but often this is best done through simple system checks that show the entire body is not experiencing the pain or that the pain can indeed be controlled.

Instead of *me* going through the bodily check, i would ask *them* to do the check: “Move your arm. Does it still work? See?!? No problem!”

This is essentially what I mean when I say do a body or system check. We guide the person but the person has to do the check . . . my suggestion is to focus on other parts first to help lower pain sensations then work on the rest.

There was no “dissociation”, since the child was never being introduced to an objectified internal fantasy nor any sort of alternative “I”

I did not mean to imply an identity dissociation but one of the experience of the pain, that is getting out of the associated experience of fully being within a pain set into one that shows the pain is not the identity and can be lessened or non-associated to. The use of the term dissociation here means to non-associate to the pain. It is not identity fantasy.

it is important to remember that there was never any element of phantasy, dissociation or idealization being used. Their perception of self and its realio, trulio sensual and intellectual horizons was the focus of each exchange.

I was not using the word dissociation in strictly that way. I was using the broader meaning on non-association or to no longer experience the pain as the primary now. Different use of vocabulary in context.

This was no “trance state” as i understand such a thing, and there was no “control” that i exercised over the kids beyond just being their friend/mentor and showing them that their pain — or more properly, their reaction to it — was something that *they* could control and disregard.

Your understanding of trance state is classic. Contemporary understanding among hypnotists and the like actually encompasses a lot more than exertion of will (will of the hypnotist has little to do with successful hypnosis) and is more readily achieved within the context of exactly what you’re describing in the paragraph above.

That seems to be the antithesis of the “therapeutic” ideology (where the practitioner is the “expert” — a technician, or manipulator — and the patient is the object of his or her art), and indeed the absolute diametric of the rhetoric of hypnosis, where the practitioner is openly asserted as having “control” of the subject and generally avails him/herself of every opportunity to reinforce the perception throughout the experience. respectfully —

I strongly suggest you take a look at some of the permissive hypnosis work out there or even the better directive hypnosis folks and you will find that manipulator or puppetmaster is no longer the accepted model for what hypnosis is . . . in fact, despite how things may appear when watching a good hypnotist work the magick, it is the will of the hypnotizee that is more important than that of the hypnotist. A hypnotist is a facilitator, a guide, he knows what to say to maximize a client’s experience but it is the client who does the actual trancework. All hypnosis is NOT self-hypnosis as some folks will claim but all hypnosis is subjective.

Of course, a good hypnotist will learn as many different models and approaches to trance and hypnosis and changework and use whatever tools are appropriate for the client’s context at that time . . . if a client needs me to zap ’em and boss ’em around, I’m more than happy to do so . . . get a bit of a kick out of that sort of consensual reality illusion . . . but if they need a more permissive conversational approach or even simple waking suggestion . . . I will oblige there as well. A hypnotist must be adaptive, if anything. 🙂

Automatic response to your suggestion and accepting that what you say is in fact the appropriate way to respond is bypass of the critical factor. i’m not of the opinion that the fundamental critical mechanisms of the mind are, in any real sense, bypassable.

Well, it looks like this discussion has finally independently come to the technique exchange. Perhaps the folks who’ve been explaining and discussing and debating this aspect of hypnosis for the past month on Marknosis, HypnoMasterMind, and the LA Sleepwalkers list would care to post their summaries to put folks here up to speed. 🙂

The Critical Factor is that part of the conscious mind that rests at the cusp of the conscious and subconscious and basically acts as the filter for incoming suggestions. These are checked against past experience or belief and those that do not fit with a person’s “personal reality” are rejected while those that do are accepted. Bypass is the ability to send suggestions directly into the subconscious (MRI scans have shown that certain parts of the brain usually associated with critical judgment are indeed suppressed during classic trance while those parts associated with emotional or physical response are still quite active – often to the same or stronger degree that they are given real physical stimuli rather than simple imaginary stimulation – the work on pain filters or color are best known for this phenomena). However, the Critical Factor is not completely removed per se, it still exists. Hull’s “Hidden Observer” is an example. Basically, while a person may set aside their CF and allow suggestions to come through unfiltered in a compliance set, the Hidden Observer still checks those for seeming intention . . . so, if you give a suggestion that makes a person uncomfortable or goes against the grain – without preamble or consent – such as “you will stand up, take all your clothes off, and become my happy little sex slave slut” then in all likelihood they’ll pop out of trance, be extremely pissed off at you, and basically you will have destroyed your rapport with that person to the degree that any future trancework is very unlikely (albeit, there is a small percentage of folks who would still comply to that suggestion rather happily but that goes to their fantasy of what should happen and other factors so it’s probably wise to screen for those folks within a consensual set in the first place if that’s the sort of thing you’re going to be doing). Bypass of the Critical Factor is the mechanism for hypnosis but it is NOT removal of the critical faculties or the self-protective filters, these are always in place (the Hidden Observer phenomenon already well-documented).

this group of statements seem contradictory to me, though it may be semantics, what you call “subjective” i call “self hypnosis” i cannot “make” anyone angry. they can choose to respond with anger. i am not inside their being. as far as i am aware, only one person is inside the client, them. (pace to purveyors of “entities). even when using methods that “bypass” conscious knowledge and/or resistance, i still do not create their internal events, so i still look on it as self hypnosis, in the sense that they are responsible for whatever reponse they produce to my efforts.

Yes. I agree. I would say that some hypnosis is NOT self-hypnosis only in so far as to distinguish guided or facilitated hypnosis from strict autohypnosis. I have found that when a guide is present, folks TEND to respond more powerfully. Most who respond “deeply” or powerfully in pure self-hypnosis tend to have had an experience with a hypnotist who has taught them to reach that level of imaginative involvement. Very few folks, other than the natural extremely high responders, tend to have high success with pure self-hypnosis. However, once someone has been guided into state they can learn to replicate those results easily.

The subjective nature of hypnosis is just that. While three or fifty people may all follow the same induction set with the same hypnotist, each and every one of them will feel the experience differently. As a hypnotist, I may elicit the same responses, but those responses will still be contextualized differently for each and every one of the responders. Not everyone feels “floaty” but some do, not everyone feels “heightened awareness” but some do, etc.

Trance experience is subjective in that the guide may provide the appropriate sequence of guideposts to facilitate trance but the hypnotizee experiences it in a deeply personal and unique subjective way.

Given that, there are still quality indicators for deep trance or somnambulism that the hypnotist can watch for and use to good advantage but even so the experience is subjective to the hypnotizee rather than as an objective cookie-cutter or cardboard cutout. All three or fifty folks may “respond” exactly the same in so far as outward observation goes, but each and every one of them will have a unique and powerful and special experience. The guide or hypnotist may have guided that experience but the response is wholly that of the person going into trance.

Having said that, I still firmly believe based upon my experience and understanding that the subjective experience of trance states tends to be much much more powerful for folks who are working with a hypnotist or trance guide than for those who are running the process themselves. It’s a lot easier to enjoy the ride when we allow someone else to have the wheel for awhile.

Is that a bit clearer? As mud?

All the best,
Brian
http://www.briandavidphillips.com