Self Hypnosis. Valerie Austin

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СКАЧАТЬ yourself, with full concentration, to pass exams or a driving test. Whatever you’d like to achieve hypnosis can help.

      WHAT IS HYPNOSIS?

      Everyone can be hypnotized. In fact, everyone goes into hypnosis every day of their lives. Every time you day-dream you are in a form of hypnosis. You can put yourself in hypnosis now. Just close your eyes and imagine yourself the last time you were eating a meal in a restaurant or in someone’s home. See what details you can bring forward. The decor of the room in which you were eating, whom you were with, what kind of atmosphere was present. See if you can remember the conversation—then open your eyes. What you experienced was a very light form of hypnosis. If you were to be put into a deeper state your vision would be more focused and accurate, for the more you practise hypnosis the more you develop your imagination.

       Are You Visual?

      To check whether you are a visual person or not (for the purpose of hypnosis) you can do a simple test. Close your eyes and think of a chair—any chair. When you have it in your thoughts, ‘see’ what colour it is, then open your eyes. Ask yourself if you actually ‘saw’ the chair in your imagination or just ‘knew’ what it looked like. There is a difference, if you think about it. If you saw it, then you are considered a visual person.

      Freud’s research showed that two-thirds of the population were visual. I decided to make my own study on well over a thousand clients and the results more or less substantiated this figure. This was important to me because I am one of the non-visual people, that small segment of the population who have trouble visualizing. We can imagine what it is like to be visual, but it is impossible for a visual person to understand how someone can imagine without actually seeing. If you have a hypnotherapist who is visual and you are not, there will definitely be communication problems. This distinction has in the past caused a multitude of problems. It has resulted in there being many inexperienced hypnotherapists who have believed their clients awkward and ‘hard to hypnotize’. This is how the myth grew that not everyone can be hypnotized. A proficient hypnotherapist knows that everyone can be hypnotized. Of course degrees of susceptibility vary, but it only takes less susceptible people a little longer to be able to build their belief structure.

      The simple ‘visual/non-visual’ test above solves the problem. Try it out on your friends as practice. If someone says he cannot ‘see’ the chair but just knows what it looks like, explain that this is not unusual. A third of the population does not visualize. For these people a hypnotherapist must abandon the words ‘visualize’ or ‘see’ which might otherwise be used, and instead use the word ‘imagine’—in the way you did with the chair. I was told by three hypnotherapists I was difficult to hypnotize. This could not have been further from the truth.

       Hypnosis Is Not Sleep!

      Hypnosis is a heightened state of awareness. While in hypnosis you are aware of everything that is happening around you. Conversations, the telephone ringing, any noise that occurs. It is the same as if you were day-dreaming. When you are guided into a relaxed state your imagination is more focused because your conscious is occupied. In order to protect your ‘occupied consciousness’ another facility, which we call the subconscious, comes forward. If anything untoward happens, the subconscious immediately alerts your conscious and you terminate the day-dream.

      Imagine you are driving along a motorway and you start day-dreaming about what you will be doing when you arrive at your destination. If you get sufficiently involved in this day-dream you go into a sort of auto-pilot to drive your car. You know there is traffic about but you are not fully conscious of it. Then, after a few miles, you suddenly come out of the day-dream and realize you have not noticed the scenery and the traffic. You probably think to yourself that you might well have had an accident if you had continued in this state. The truth of the matter is that if the car in front of you had put its brake lights on suddenly, your subconscious mind would have come forward during your day-dream to protect you. It would bring your conscious back in a split second to deal with the emergency. As soon as your conscious mind becomes occupied, your subconscious always comes forward to protect you. All your senses link up with it and even become more aware at that level. Say there was a smell of rubber in the car. Your subconscious would alert your conscious and bring you out of the day-dream to attend to it. Or if there was an unfamiliar sound in the engine, the same instant awareness would come into operation.

      Another example: allow yourself to imagine you are on a tube or train. You have quite a long way to go, so you are day-dreaming. In fact, you are oblivious to what is going on around you. If suddenly there was an odd sound alongside you, you would immediately become aware of it and respond accordingly. Therefore, if the sound was threatening, within a split second your conscious would be fully alert and ready to ‘fight or flee.’ That is the term psychologists use to describe our pre-historic instinct for survival. If the sound is not threatening, then you would just carry on in your day-dream trance state. You are always protected, even though you may not have been aware of such sophisticated processes going on in your mind.

      This, then, is the difference between hypnosis and sleep. When you are asleep you are not protected in this way. But your subconscious is using this very valuable time for ‘internal affairs’, sorting out the new information to be filed away, etc. When you are anaesthetized or have certain drugs, your memory can bring forward incidents that have occurred while you were in this state. Medical staff in hospitals are careful what they say during operations, due to fairly recent findings proving that patients have subconsciously heard what has been said when anaesthetized and have later suffered irrational behaviour as a direct result.

      A hypnotherapist is a person who uses therapy while his or her client is in the relaxed state of hypnosis. Good hypnosis is important to good therapy. The reason hypnosis is used in therapy is to relax the mind; in so doing the subconscious comes forward. When your conscious is relaxed, new information has more chance of being accepted, which is why at this point the subconscious can be accessed and behaviour reprogrammed. You are aware of what is going on the whole time and you are being guided by the therapist, not unlike a computer expert showing you how to work a computer.

      In hypnosis you cannot be made to do anything you do not want to do! You have a failsafe survival trigger mechanism that protects you at all times.

      WHO IS SUSCEPTIBLE TO HYPNOSIS?

      This question conjures up an amazing and controversial set of opinions, based on various people’s belief structures. I can tell you what I understand, in the knowledge that my reasoning will probably be severely attacked by some. Nevertheless, my opinions are based on my experiences in working with well over 2,000 clients.

      Everyone is susceptible to hypnosis to differing degrees. If, however you want to break the question down and ask who is susceptible to going into hypnosis immediately, then the answer is completely different. About a third of a group of people at any one time are likely to be susceptible to being put instantly into hypnosis. That is why the stage hypnotist can feel secure that there will always be a good percentage of his audience he will be able to work with, ensuring a fast-moving show. A brief explanation of the nature of stage hypnosis may help you to understand a little more.

      First, the hypnotist will do a quick suggestibility test to decide whom he is going to use in his act. Normally he chooses a simple task, such as instructing the audience to clasp their hands together. He suggests that their hands will literally stick together as if super-glued and that, whatever they do, they will not be able to unclasp them. The hypnotist uses confusing and repetitive instructions, then he asks the members of the audience to try and unclasp their hands. Those who do unclasp their hands are not used in the act. Of the members of the audience who still have their СКАЧАТЬ