What Is Hypnosis? My Own Journey Of Discovery.
When I was managing cinemas in London I became interested in communication. I had a busy venue to run and around 40 members of staff. The challenges of being supportive and authoritative, to gain and maintain respect and popularity while still enforcing some unpopular decisions, to be clear in my instructions, to train efficiently with maximum retention. All these things and more were challenges that no one taught me as I had come up through the ranks. And so at that time, in order to be the best manager that I could be, I started looking at courses in communication which introduced me to NLP.
On these courses I met my mind, and life has not been the same since.
NLP taught me to appreciate how I think and how I feel. I started to understand myself better, and in understanding myself I came to understand others better which set me on the path to setting up as a therapeutic hypnotist in Worthing.
What is hypnosis – Initial Training
During my initial hypnotherapy training I was taught that hypnosis was the process of relaxing the conscious mind so much that you can sneak new learnings past it and straight into the subconscious. I was taught that hypnosis was all about relaxation and the use of metaphor to bypass conscious critical thinking.
What is hypnosis – my journey
When I finished my hypnotherapy training I was feeling good about the therapy, but did not feel I had been taught enough about the 'hypno' part of my coveted job title. I was still asking what is hypnosis? And so I took to YouTube to find some further people to train with. That is where I learned actual hypnosis.
Hypnosis then became 'taking the lead of someone's ability to experience the imagined as real' by engaging their subconscious mind in imaginative tasks. I was taught that it will work on some people and it won't on others. At that point I offered free consultations – if someone responded well to my hypnotic party tricks I would work with them, but if they did not respond well to these tricks then I told them I could not help them.
Then I had a consultation with someone who was quite desperate. They did not respond at all to hypnotic party tricks, but asked me to work with them anyway. Bout three minutes later he was in a deep trance and about twenty minutes later he felt like '20 years of crap' had completely disappeared. I realised then that I still did not fully understand what hypnosis is.
That session and a little more research and training taught me to understand the subconscious mind differently. I came to understand that the subconscious mind is your imagination, emotions and past experiences. I learned that by narrowing someone's focus on one of these things puts them into a trance which made them suggestible. That is hypnosis. Even if someone did not respond to some hypnotic party tricks using imagination, I could usually hypnotise them by focussing them on an emotion or a memory. This was great as it meant I was able to start helping more people.
My evolution did not stop there though. As the years went on and my experience grew, I became less sure that there is such a thing as the conscious and subconscious mind. It is a great model of the mind of course, but I started seeing things that I did not feel were supported by it.
What is hypnosis – current day
I am seeing things much more in terms of mind/body system these days. Your emotions are a combination of thought and feeling. Your thinking is a combination of thought and feeling. Mind and body. If your body reacts to words or images in your mind then those words or images seem real – you experience your imagination as real. If your body does not respond to words or images in your mind then you barely take any notice of those thoughts. You do not experience the imagined as real.
By this logic all thinking is self-hypnosis.
It is therefore my job as a therapeutic hypnotist to help you see your detrimental thought processes as just thinking so that your body no longer reacts to that negative thinking, therefore giving you the opportunity to experience better thoughts as real instead.
If all thinking is self-hypnosis then I see myself more as an un-hypnotist these days – 'waking people up' from their detrimental emotional trance states . How do I go about that? I find myself back at the beginning of my quest and using good, clear and creative communication to help people experience something different.
Hypnosis is...or isn't
From the subject's point of view – all your thinking is hypnosis. There's no need to 'go under' although some people do. There is no need for deep trance although some people do. Relaxation is not important, although it is a common by-product. The hypnotic experience varies from one person to the next.
From the hypnotist's point of view – hypnosis is just an awesome style of communication with which to guide someone through or out of their own self-hypnosis.
To learn more about how I work please take a look at the video here.