One of the first questions that many people ask me about a hypnotic approach is whether they will be under my control when they are in a hypnotic trance. This is perfectly understandable, The spectre of the “good” individual who is being controlled by the “bad” person and built to do things that they don’t need to do has been generally popular in both films and books for several decades.
In the world of movie theatre, a hypnotic approach has most commonly been associated with Dracula and vampires; from the earliest horror films of the 1930s starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Also the main topic of funny, again dating back to the 1930s in Practitioner Training films such as Carefree, starring James Astaire and Ginger Rogers; frequently used as a device in Sci-Fi and Thrillers and intensely popular in “Adult” films, a hypnotic approach has had a fairly bad rep.
If you then think about how a hypnotic approach is used in popular culture in the form of entertainment in hotels and holiday camps and even on Television shows, most people appear to have witnessed someone standing on a stage getting a few more other people to do something like chickens or some such nonsense, it’s hardly surprising that people are anxious as to what I might be going to do to them if they let me put them into a hypnotic trance.
Ironically, it’s the previous few words of these phrase that are key to understanding a hypnotic approach. They have to let me put them into a hypnotic trance. I can’t hypnotise anyone who doesn’t want to be hypnotised. Not because I’m not a good hypnotherapist, but because the truth is that all a hypnotic approach only occurs if the subject is happy to allow it to needlessly happen. It is not possible to hypnotise someone against their will. Likewise, once hypnotised, no one can come in to do something that violates their own meaning or honourable beliefs.
It’s usually at this point in my conversation that people say similar to “Yes, but I saw my sibling in law, when she was hypnotised at Butlins and she was playing around the stage pretending to take her clothes off, and she’s a really quiet person normally. inch A large couple of points in that phrase that are actually very important permit us to make sense of this apparent proof of the hypnotist’s control over the sibling in law.
One is that whatever she might be like “normally”, it doesn’t mean that deep down inside she might have an unmet desire to take hub stage every here and there. A hypnotic approach gives her that opportunity precisely because people do believe that she’s not performing in that way through her own choice but because she is being controlled by someone else. This permits her to shed her inhibitions without any anxiety about being judged as a “show off” or whatever phrase she carries around in her head that has been keeping her so quiet normally. The second is that she is only “pretending” to take her clothes off when the striptease music starts, she’s not actually getting nude up there on the stage. There are some inhibitions too deeply held to be overcome by a bit of a hypnotic approach and no intelligent hypnotherapist would ask people on stage to essentially take their clothes off, unless they had carefully vetted their moral/ethical views on the idea first.
So, having established what it is not, what is a hypnotic approach then? Basically, it is a state of deep mental and physical relaxation, when the mind is relaxed and focused and open to receive suggestion. You are not in bed, despite what it looks like, you are awaken and you can hear what is being asked you. If you have an itch you can scratch it, if you want to move you can, you can speak if you want and most important of all, if you don’t like what you are hearing you can get up and walk straight out of the room.
The key to the success of a hypnotic approach lies in trust between the hypnotherapist and the client. If you don’t trust the hypnotherapist, you will not accept their suggestions, it’s that simple. As i say to all my clients, why would you want to pay someone you don’t trust to do something that you are scared of to you? However, once you understand that all the control lies with you, the client; then a hypnotic approach becomes something that can be very useful in assisting you to challenge all those negative messages that you aren’t even aware of, enabling you to advance from your location now, to where you want to be.