Hypnotherapy 101 (Part I)
We've covered lots of things that hypnosis can help heal. Some of you have even made your own hypnosis tapes to listen to at home with great results. Now, I'm going to teach you the fine tuning techniques. What type of words and phrases do people respond more easily to? What voice tones and music increase the hypnotic effect? Do the same techniques work for everyone? Be sure to ask your own questions if I don't cover them here, and we'll all learn together.
There is one book that I can recommend to help you get started. Hypnosis for Beginners by William W. Hewitt is excellent for those interested in learning self-hypnosis techniques. It has a series of scripts that can be labeled and put on index cards for easy script changes. I had a lot of fun with this book when I first started out, and I still refer to it on many occasions.
We will be using the term hypnosis to refer to all types of hypnosis, whether you are interested in self-hypnosis or hypnotizing other people. Why use the one term? Because all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. That's why I'm constantly saying no one can hypnotize you against your will or make you do something against your ethics and morals. If the subject does not cooperate in the session, they cannot be hypnotized. Even though the client may have a certified hypnotherapist guiding the session, the client is still hypnotizing himself by following the suggestions of the therapist.
We're not going to go into the full depth of the human brain, but we will discuss some of the details that make hypnosis work so that we can better understand what is happening to us while we're in trance. We all know that different people think with different sides of their brain, i.e., left - conscious, right - subconscious. The left brain is very analytical, discriminating and deductive in its thinking. The right-brained thinker is emotional, noncritical, creative. The right side of the brain also controls the physical body and the memory and is inductive in its thinking. So, when we explore what type of techniques to use to get a person, even ourselves, into hypnotic trance, we must get to know them enough to analyze whether they're a right-brainer or a left-brainer. A person who is very creative would not respond well to blackboard and alphabet imagery because they would be bored and not follow the directions of the therapist. A person who is very analytical would not pay attention to the therapist describing beautiful fields of flowers. The hypnosis session must be tailored to suit the individual.
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