Hypnotherapy for Beginners:

Chapter 8

Bringing it all together

hypnosis_tools

The main lessons are summarized. And then the rest of the chapter is directed at giving you a variety of goals - changes that you might make in a subject - in order to practice and expand on what you have learned. Many of these are accompanied by hints on how to go about them. The advantages of writing out scripts for yourself at this stage are presented.

You should have discovered for yourself the following things, others.

1) It is possible to alter the way in which the brain and nervous system functions among temporarily, by deft use of the way one system of the brain can act on others to made them more or less active.

2) If you can inactivate - "switch off", "put to sleep" - a lot of the normally active systems then it is easier to change the way in which the remainder, which remain active, act. And you will have found different ways of achieving this focussing.

3) People respond differently, because of the fact that the natural operations of their brains are different.

4) Changes usually take time.

5) The visual imagination is a particularly useful system to activate both for exploring the depths of someone's mind but also for making changes to other parts.

6) One system that it is very important that you inactivate is that of resistance, otherwise you will find it hard to even get started.

If you have absorbed all these and especially if you have practised extensively, then you will have obtained a very good grounding in what hypnosis is all about.

In this chapter I am going to present you with a large number of simple goals from which to choose some on which to test out your skills. I am not going to be giving detailed scripts for you to use. The trouble with fixed scripts is that they either work or they don't, and you therefore have very limited scope for flexible adaptation or indeed of understanding what is good or bad about them.

It is FAR better if you write your own scripts. This is a very good way of seeing that you really understand what you are doing.

I would suggest that to design a script you work in the following way. Start in reverse.

3) Write down the goal you have chosen and what system of brain or body it is centred on.

2) Write down those other systems - imagination? verbal direction? sensation? - that you might actively use to act on that goal system.

1) Write down briefly the way in which you like to start - after reading this brief book you are likely to choose between a relaxation approach as in Chapter 2 or an eye-closure and fixation approach as in Chapter 5.

You now have a framework on which to construct your script. You have a starting point and a finishing point and a choice of intermediate steps. You can then write down a draft of your entire script in the proper order.

1) Your starting script - which will take perhaps five to ten minutes to read depending on your approach.

2) Then move on smoothly from there onto activating the one or more intermediate systems that you will be using.

3) Finally write down how that or those will work on the goal system.

Example: Suppose we want to produce an involuntary smile.

3) Goal: activation of the "smile" muscles of the face.

2) Intermediate systems:

a) Sense of those facial muscles.

and/or b) Visual imagination: to see a smiling face, aiming to arouse the imitative system that even a small baby has. (This is a two system process.)

and/or c) Emotional system: see if we can activate a feeling of amusement.

1) Starting point: a relaxation approach.

We could then start to write down a draft script.

Draft Script 1) The relaxation script can be based on Chapter 2, but because of our intermediate goals we would include rather more about sensations of relaxation and peace in the face, as opposed to other parts of the body, than we would for other goals. If we are using simple verbal direction to aid the relaxation then we will be using words like happy rather more than we would for other goals, because of 2c). And if we are using the visual imagination to aid the relaxation process we would be more likely to include in it images of smiling faces because of 2b). (Say 5 minutes' worth of ideas).

Draft Script 2) It is then easy to move smoothly into phase 2) in which you are working in a more specific way with the intermediate systems.

Examples of phrases you might use for goal of an involuntary smile in this phase are: "You may well sense that part of your face around your mouth and eyes beginning to move" or, "You can picture clearly in your mind's eye the face of someone smiling at you. Notice what happens to the mouth... and the eyes..." or "And you might be able to remember the feeling you get inside when you feel really happy. There can be a glow right down in the centre of your being."

At the same time you can also begin to prepare the way a little more explicitly for the final goal by introducing ideas like "so often it is impossible to prevent yourself smiling when something really nice or really amusing happens". (Some 5 minutes' worth of ideas.)

Draft Script 3) Finally you can write down some further script that should ideally be spoken after you have already seen the first signs of the desired response in phase 2). The script might contain things like: "Now your face is already beginning to smile. And it will go on getting happier and happier. The desire to smile and the feeling of smiling will become irresistible." (Jot down a few minutes script: a lot of this can be repeated over and over in the final form.)

Now as you write down your draft script you should find yourself wondering about what exactly is going on in the subject's head. In the above example you should realise that to begin with you have no idea what sort of things make this particular person smile. You might well enjoy a particularly normal or sophisticated form of humour, but there is no reason why the subject should be enlightened enough to share this! So why not find out what makes this person amused? Of course, if you know the person well, or have been observing carefully, then you may already know what things a smile to the face, but if not you can always ask. For example, "What are your favourite comedy shows in TV?" can give you a good idea.

Furthermore you may have had trouble deciding what intermediate systems to use. You could of course use as many as possible, or you might like to do a little preliminary enquiry to find out what is likely to be best with a given person. If you find that someone has a very poor visual imagination then you might well be advised NOT to bother to introduce visual imagery into your script, for example.

You can divide your questions into those that you could ask before starting and those that you plan to ask during the session. The answers to the first will be used to modify the draft script so that it fits the known personality of the subject better. The answers to the second will lead to your putting questions into your script so that you can KNOW how things are going.

Such answers can be verbal or non-verbal. You should already be used to using a nod or shake of head or the movement of a finger to signal yes or no answers, and so you can easily insert into your script things like, "Signal if there any tension left in your legs." "Let me know if you can picture that clearly." "Nod your head if you are feeling amused by that picture" and so on.

With these ideas of personalising the script you could then write down a final form, complete with details that relate only to that particular goal, that particular subject and with questions that determine how you will proceed bearing in mind the particular responses you get.

Thus for example you might have written a short paragraph of script on making a leg feel so relaxed that it cannot be moved. You could then write in:

• "I would now like you to test how well we are doing. Could you just try to lift your leg a little?" IF the leg moves say, "Yes, some progress, but I think we can do better than that" and repeat the paragraph again, while if it does NOT move then say, "That's very good. We will now move on to the other leg." (or whatever your next paragraph deals with).

I hope that this example of the involuntary smile makes the process of composing effective approaches far more understandable and efficient.

Please note that I am NOT saying that the use of ONE standard induction followed by a direct suggestion does not work. By now you will know enough to see that for some people it will be enough just to look at them and say, over and over, "You are going to smile!" (particularly if they can see the smile on your face, which will tend to activate the imitative system). Consequently we can expect that even more people will respond after any reasonably effective introduction that reduces resistance, increases focus and decreases distracting mental activity. So for many people you CAN use the same ONE standard induction followed by a simple suggestion and it WILL work.

The point however is that in hypnotherapy we need to produce the maximum effect in the greatest number of people, and I expect that you will find that tuning an approach to the goal in this systematic way greatly enhances your effectiveness. But you need not take my word for it: indeed you should not take my word for it. Just because I feel that I have got better results in this way does not mean that you will also. Feel free to try other ways as well!

Now some will feel that writing out scripts in this way is rather cumbersome, and of course it does take time, and of course I do NOT write them out myself! But that is because through experience I, like many other professionals, am thinking in the way I have outlined. As I am going through the process of asking a client questions about themselves and their problems I am consciously drafting possible approaches in my mind and looking for the kind of information I will need to optimise my approach. (I particularly enjoy the challenge of weaving a script which might link together two or more different problems and two or three key interests or characteristics of the client into one harmonious whole!) Also I will automatically be looking for feedback (slight physical signs such as almost imperceptible facial movements) and asking direct and indirect questions during the hypnotic process itself to verify that things are going pretty much as I expect and modify things if they are not.

So I do not expect you to write down scripts forever, but merely suggest that when you are learning it is both a useful way to get your thoughts into order and to aid your memory when it comes to the actual process itself. It is rather like giving a speech. If you have not had much practice then it is almost essential to write it down at first, but as you get more and more experienced you need to refer to your written speech less and less and need to write down less and less until in the end you can talk without any notes at all.

IMPORTANT PRELIMINARY

Next, before you start I would emphasise that you should ALWAYS say to your subject before you start that if they feel AT ALL UNCOMFORTABLE then they should stop and come back to normal.

The reason for this is that many people get very anxious when they feel that they are losing control or that something strange is happening to them: both of which are quite common characteristics of hypnotic phenomena. Another (rare) possibility is that you may accidentally inactivate an inhibiting system - one that has been very active keeping something else under control - and the controlled system may spontaneously start to act quite dramatically. Since at this stage you will not have the expertise to cope with such reactions it is better to let things go no further with that person, and instead practice with someone else. If, at the slightest sign of distress, they do not spontaneously return to normal you should say something like, "Now, remember what I said. You are feeling uncomfortable and so you are now going to come back to normal. Just come back to normal,. The feelings will fade. Come back to normal. The feelings will fade......"

I once saw an example of a spontaneous release happen in a display of "entertainment" or "stage" hypnosis: one woman started to weep dramatically for no obvious reason. The hypnotist did not have any attention to spare for her and just let her get on with it. As far as I know this did not do her any harm, but I felt uneasy about it.

If you are working under supervision - and I very much recommend that you do if at all possible - then the above rule may be relaxed a little, but I still think that it is a good one, and I always put in this preliminary instruction whenever I am doing hypnosis.

POSSIBLE GOALS.

Now I will give you a range of ideas to choose from for your continuing practice. Many of these are phenomena that are mentioned often in books on hypnosis, sometimes as parts of an initial induction, sometimes as "deepening techniques", sometimes as "tests of hypnotisability". Others of the phenomena I will mention have, as far as I know, never been attempted before! (Such as the involuntary smile.) That is not to say that they are particularly difficult, it is just that the systems approach to hypnosis in this course naturally suggests an enormous variety of different systems of the mind and body that can be changed, whereas in the absence of such a framework there is a tendency simply to repeat what has been learned from others.

What all the suggested goals have in common is that they involve changing the behaviour of some system or other of the mind or body. By now you should have learned that they all follow the pattern of being achievable, but usually only in time and with different ease in different people.

Involuntary movement of muscles.

You have already seen how easy it is to get a finger to move. It is usually quite easy to extend this and to get the hand and then the arm to lift into the air and perhaps rise as high as the face. Or even high into the air.

Hint: in many schools you have to hold your hand up to get the teacher's attention. You may be able to use the imagination to take your friend back to a memory of such a time and then suggest that he or she knows the answer to the teacher's question and the arm will lift to signal this.

For a more dynamic effect you can often get the arms to produce an involuntary rolling movement in which the hands rotate about each other in front of the subject in small circles, without any conscious effort and indeed (in time) with it being impossible for the subject to stop them..

Hint: with such physical responses it can often help first for you to move the limb(s) in the way in which you later want it (them) to move spontaneously. By so doing you are activating that part of the brain which monitors and "remembers" muscular movement (the cerebellum), which is therefore already primed with what is required, without it having to receive too much direction from another system.

If your subject is sitting comfortably then you could aim to get a leg to rise, and perhaps then let this lead to a regular rising and falling or even stamping of the feet on the ground, by analogy with the arm rolling above.

Or you could suggest movement of the neck muscles, perhaps aiming at a particular movement of the head to right, left, up or down. (This can be a useful preamble if you want the head to indicate 'yes' or 'no' responses with nods and shakes.)

Or there are the eye muscles: again you could try to achieve an involuntary movement of the eyes to right or left, up or down.

Or you can suggest movement of the jaw muscles. Your goal might be an involuntary opening and closing of the mouth

You may also note that the tongue is a muscle and, although this may be more difficult since you will have to inactivate that system which is alert to looking foolish, you might well be able to get the tongue to stick out.

The facial muscles are used to form expressions such as the smile we have mentioned above, but also frowns , looks of surprise, and so on.

As a general rule, although it may take quite a lot of time to get the first system to produce a change on the suggested lines, you can expect that subsequent changes will come about more and more quickly.

Rigidity of muscles (catatonia)

In rather a different vein you may aim not for a comparatively mild activation of a group of muscles to produce a movement but for total rigidity (catatonia) of a set of muscles, to the point where the subject is unable to release them. Stage hypnotists often use a form of this as a test. They ask everyone in the audience to clasp their hands together firmly, then suggest that they will be unable to unclasp them. Those that can't do so are rather more likely to respond to other suggestions.

You might make the hands lock rigidly, or make the fingers of a hand so rigid that they will not bend, an arm totally rigid to that it cannot be unstraightened, or the back muscles so that it is impossible to bend, or the neck muscles so that it is impossible to turn the head, or the leg muscles so that it is impossible to bend them, or the jaw muscles so that the mouth cannot be opened and so on. In each case you are strongly activating the muscles, but inactivating the conscious pathways of control of those muscles.

Hint: here the common practice is first to direct the muscles consciously to tense as hard as possible. For example, "Please hold your arm out straight as a rod. Hold it VERY straight. It will now become like a steel rod. As rigid as a rod. As rigid as a rod. It will feel so inflexible that it will soon be impossible to bend it. As rigid as a rod. As rigid as a rod. You can begin to feel that the elbow joint just will not work. Rigid as a rod." You will see that in this the hypnotist gets the subject to do the harder work: of getting the muscles activated to their limit, while most of the suggestions are aiming at implanting the idea that it is impossible to bend the arm.

Total inactivity (atonia).

At the other extreme you can aim at total inactivity of the muscles combined with the impossibility of voluntary motion. This goes well with a relaxation approach. You aim to make it impossible for the subject to be able to use a given muscle or set of muscles. A simple example that you have met previously is involved in eye closure: you are making the muscles that lift the eyelids feel so tired that it becomes possible for the subject to lift them to keep the eyes open. In the same area you could aim instead for full eye fixation: making the muscles that control the movement of the eyeballs totally inactive and make their conscious control impossible. The subject may well then look a little like the popular cartoon representation of a hypnotised person: staring fixedly forward. You may combine this with an inactivation of the blinking reflex so that the gaze is steady and unblinking.

But you can get the same effect - of relaxation combined with loss of conscious control - in any other muscle or group of muscles so that it becomes impossible for example to lift a leg, or move an arm or even a finger, to be unable to close an open mouth, or turn the head. In each case you are inactivating the muscles and also the conscious pathways of control of those muscles.

Hint. Here it is common practice to build up the effect stage by stage, starting with those movements that come least easily, and giving little time for the action to be attempted. Suppose, for example, you have a subject with a hand laid flat and relaxed on the knee and say, "Now your fingers are going to become more and more relaxed. As they do so they will become harder and harder to move. At this very moment your fingers are so relaxed that you will find it hard to move just one of them. (Speaking quickly) Just try to lift the ring finger on your left hand: No! you can't! Now try the middle finger on the right! No! You can't! And all the fingers are the same, and so are your feet: more and more relaxed."

Now in fact it is NOT that easy, even if you are on the ball, to switch attention to rather an unusual action: moving only a ring finger, and getting it to move in a second. And the hypnotist is taking advantage of that, by swiftly moving on to another muscle. Now after a few steps like that he will be managing nicely to reduce any resistance because the evidence of the subject's own experience seems to show that what the hypnotist says is true: and that the muscles cannot actual be moved. After that it gets easier and easier to make the subject believe that there is no way in which he or she CAN move.

Building up from simple muscular systems to act on higher order systems.

Automatic writing

All the above are working with rather lower level aspects of the muscular system. But you can use these as a foundation on which to build up to higher level systems. As an example of this you might set the goal of automatic writing in which you will build on the fact that you can get a finger to make small involuntary movements up to the point at which it is, equally involuntarily, forming entire sentences on paper.

In doing this I would like you to remember that you have already done something like this with the easier visual system: you have encouraged the spontaneous emergence of seemingly meaningful scenarios which were not consciously determined. The only difference here is that the output is to the hand and not to the visual pathways in the brain.

Hint: You should again aim to build up to this in stages. First get some finger movement, as you have done before. Then let the subject be in a comfortable position and holding a pencil or pen on some paper, then you can suggest that the pen will move randomly - perhaps smoothly and perhaps jerkily; then, once this is happening, you build up to suggesting that it will create doodles. (Reflect that most of us will make doodles with no conscious input when we are listening on the phone. So this is no great thing.) Then, when the doodles are being produced smoothly you can suggest that some of the doodles look like an "e" or an "l" and suggest the formation of simple words - "eel" for example. Then you can suggest that other words will come, i.e. you are starting to activate that part of the brain that is involved in the production of words. Then, when a few random words are coming quite easily you aim to activate a higher part still of the verbal system and suggest that whole sentences will now come. The result, although a lot slower and less informative than the equivalent production of stories by the visual system, has a kind of dramatic quality since everyone can see the result.

Notice the feedback loop involved in which you are patiently using a small involuntary change in one part of the system to build up to expectation of an involuntary change in a related system, a change which therefore is more likely to arise, and then is in turn used to build up the expectation of change in yet another related system, and so on. In general you should allow more time for all this, as you work from system to system. But of course, as always, the changes will come more quickly in some people than others, and you may be lucky enough to come across some people who can go almost at once to full automatic writing.

Involuntary activation of the vocal system

At the lowest level of the vocal system we simply have the muscles controlling the vocal chords. Why not see if you can produce an involuntary activation of these?

Hint: Focus attention on breathing; then on the sound of the out breath, then suggest a slight sighing might develop, then increase its intensity - probably some sound like "aah". (A feedback loop, as usual, in which a slight change leads to expectation of a greater change which leads to more change, and so on.)

Once you have achieved this (which is the equivalent of an involuntary movement of a finger) you might start to look for the involuntary activation of the verbal system.

Hint: Start with the simple sound that you have obtained. And then suggest that there will be some involuntary motion of the lips or tongue which will change the sound. (You might then get a "ma" or "aa-oo-aa".) Then after a while you might introduce something like the following into your script, "Now that your mouth can form all sort of sounds, it can also form words. I wonder what words will come? Do not control them. Just let a word come with each breath." And in this way you can gradually get the sounds to form words.

The formation of sentences and verbalising of meaning involves a higher order system again, but you might like to aim for that. It is the verbal equivalent of the creativity of the visual imagination that you have already explored. Or it is the equivalent of automatic writing, as above. You might just say, "Now those words are the building blocks of phrases. Just let them come more and more freely. There will be no meaning at first, but they will gradually, of their own accord, start to come together to make more and more sense. You can listen to them with interest, as if someone else is talking. Do not try to change them yourself, though."

Occasionally these methods of opening up channels of communication which are not under conscious control will give access to some high level system in the mind which has not been in communication with the conscious centres for some reason. This can be of great importance in a therapeutic context, but you would be best to avoid such things if you are not working under supervision.

Sensory systems

At the lowest level you will be simply aiming to increase or decrease the activity of the wide range of sensory systems that the body is provided with. (Try to forget the phrase "the five senses" - it involves only a rough categorisation)

You have already done this at a simple level: you have for example aroused a sensation of touch - of a slight tickle, when there is nothing there, and in relaxing a hand or arm you will probably have reached a point where it is unable to feel whatever it is that it is resting on. In that way you will have on the one hand made the system so inactive that it is signalling nothing, or so active that it is signalling something that is not really there.

Here are just a few ideas of other goals you might have, working simply with the palm or back of a hand, with the eyes closed. Aim at getting the subject to feel the sensation of something moving on the hand. Then of fur or silk or leather or paper or metal. Then of a glove on the hand. Then heat or cold. Then pain or numbness. Strictly speaking the sensors from touch are different from those for temperature and those for pain, so you are really working with three distinct senses here, united by all relating to the hand.