Let’s just briefly discuss some relevant quotes that help us begin to understand how the lay public and hypnotists can often have the wrong idea about hypnosis.
One of the things that is mentioned is that there is no evidence into hypnosis; this really is untrue, if you take a few minutes to research on Google Scholar, or pick up academic papers on psychology/neuroscience/medicine you will regularly find research into hypnosis cited and treated as very serious.
What we express in this book is somewhat the opinions of ourselves but where necessary research will be cited that
provides more information to what other people knowledgeable on the subject of hypnotism think.
It’s the common impression of the public that hypnosis is like sleep, and that the hypnotist has an ability to put subjects under… and then have them do whatever they want. This impression is inaccurate because there has been research carried out now using MRI scanners and other ways of looking at someone’s brain while they get hypnotized and researchers have struggled to find any significant physiological changes in other words nothing physiologically different seems to be happening in a hypnotized subject compared to a person who a person who is fully awake and normal. Egner et al (2005) stated that the only difference in a hypnotic subject compared to a normal wakeful person is the feeling of being
hypnotized. He references that the only change that has been found in neuro-imagining studies into hypnosis is that there seems to sometimes be a spontaneous disconnect between conflict monitoring and cognitive control systems;
which fits in with Hilgard’s neo-dissociation theory.
(Hilgard, 1979, 1986)
This spontaneous disconnect has been the subject of interest for a line of thought in hypnosis research for the past 20-30 years called the neo dissociation theory.
It believes that the way a subject monitors a task, and the way a subject carries out a task can be done by the same attention capacity of working memory but that during
hypnosis the hypnotist can cause the attention to be divided and split, so half of the subjects attention carries out a task of organising or performing a behaviour, and the other half focuses on what it’s like to watch that behaviour happen in the third person.
It’s important to point out that to further show the
misconception that subjects are asleep we can look back at research by academics as early as (1933, Hull) he showed that hypnotic induction only produced small gains in hypnotic responding.
He famously said that “no phenomenon whatever can be produced in hypnosis that cannot be produced to lesser degrees by suggestions given in the normal waking condition”.
I.e. he believed that just by talking to a subject, in a normal suggestive manner; was separate from the actual
procedures and formalisations of hypnosis and was sufficient enough alone to have a subject act, and feel hypnotized.
Now because of this one might be tempted to claim that all hypnotic subjects are merely just acting. This is a
perspective that is sometimes brought up in the social-cognitive theories in academia of explaining
hypnotisability.
The problem is that subjects self-report, i.e. claim that they are compelled to perform the hypnotists suggestions and
they seem, and announce they are absolutely convinced that their hypnotic experiences are real. (Barnier, Dienes, Mitchell: 2008)
They can experience all kinds of phenomena such as have hallucinations, negative hallucinations (not seeing or hearing a stimulus that is present), and clinically significant degrees of pain reduction. They display selective amnesia, and partial paralyses (Hilgard, 1965).
And for these things they have “THEY experienced involuntariness bordering on compulsion” & “conviction bordering on delusion” (Kihlstrom1985)
A subject isn’t hypnotized as a constant consistent feeling of being out of control, sometimes they purposely don’t check to see if the result you’ve asked of them has worked, other times they check before you ask them to have the phenomena occur so what they do is they end up
interrupting you mid-suggestion to lift their hand off the table, which you can only think to respond with “not yet, I didn’t mean now” and they feel all proud of themselves that they are not hypnotized.
I mentioned earlier what most laypeople believe the definition of hypnosis is, and that’s they believe that the moment you start talking to them they will fall asleep and follow exactly what you tell them to do and that they will be unable to resist.
The other opposite misconception a stranger might have is that all hypnotic subjects are acting, and if you ask them to
participate in getting hypnotized then you are essentially asking them to act for the purposes of demonstrating to their friends, or your friends or an audience; and the subject is there ‘helping you out’ because they like you.
I’ll point out for the sake of saying that I will never allow either of those two misconceptions to play out with a subject. There is a very important stage working with a hypnotic subject, perhaps more important than even the words – the suggestions – you use when you hypnotize someone.
That important stage is the pre-talk; before you hypnotize someone you have a responsibility to explain to them what hypnosis is and isn’t so when you ask them to be
hypnotized they know what they are signing up to, and therefore are better able to judge it, to know what and what not to do.
If you attempt to hypnotize someone who hasn’t had a proper pre-talk they will usually inaccurately follow the hypnosis process, either because they believe you want them to follow you inaccurately – because they believe their role is to resist – or perhaps because they don’t know if they are required to discover the feelings of hypnosis in their own way – because they are naturally resistant people and find it hard to concentrate on the things you say. Or because they believe that you’re so good at
hypnotizing them that they can use this as an opportunity to day dream, or sleep in their mind and while you’re
talking to them they don’t need to participate, that they can just take a little rest in their brain.
Any of the above mentioned isn’t going to be conducive to the person your speaking to getting hypnotized. I want to point out that you can carry any part of the procedure of hypnotizing someone, including the pre-talk without mentioning you’re a hypnotist. But the pre-talk is even more essential if you’re not announcing you’re a hypnotist when you hypnotize someone.
The reason it’s more important when you’re not
announcing you’re a hypnotist to use a pre talk, is that the subject has no reason to listen to you, as you’re not doing anything particularly special, you’ve not said “we’re doing this now” and asked the person to pay any special
concentration… Therefore you need a discussion that somehow insists upon that or at least allows you
opportunity to assess whether the person you’re speaking to is capable of listening before you proceed to work with them.
I want to make the point that I don’t attempt to go beyond this stage with anyone who doesn’t meet my requirements, if I don’t feel like a subject is listening to me then I won’t proceed to hypnotize them, or perform an experiment or magic trick that results in them achieving a hypnotic phenomenon with or without their consent.
And you shouldn’t try and hypnotize someone who doesn’t meet these requirements either, because you
should see the pre-talk as an essential part of your hypnotic process and if you haven’t engaged the intellectual, learning, concentrative, and emotional faculties of the person your speaking to, then you’re not doing your job as a hypnotist and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to proceed to the next stage of hypnotizing them anyway.
Further in the book we are going to discuss various routines that allow you to see that the subject is
responding to suggestions accordingly. But the advice of this section is to let you know that you shouldn’t attempt to do any of these routines until your subject is able to follow your basic instructions.
When you ask a subject to carry out a basic task such as
“put your hands out in front of you” or “just focus on the things I say” or “you know when you feel happy and you feel a smile creep across your face” and then if they don’t respond you say “just smile” and they don’t smile.
Then you need to wonder why your subject can’t hear you when you command, state, say, or ask “just smile” or “just put your hands out in front of you”
These are basic tasks and you should expect anyone with a reasonable intelligence to be able to follow such a simple set of instructions.
If you have to explain to a subject “When I ask you to smile, it’s a request, I’m asking you to smile” you need to
seriously wonder why you’re making all this effort to speak with someone who you clearly aren’t having a good time speaking with.
The basic approach for knowing who is a good person to speak to is to think “Who do I see something of myself in, or who reminds me of someone I know who I like” and then to approach that person, if your speaking to someone and you don’t feel like they are listening to you, if they are almost angry with you but not saying it, then its best you just leave the interaction and find someone who takes a bit more of a liking to you - or at least can follow basic
instructions.
The most important thing to say before you begin to hypnotize someone is the phrase “Hypnosis is about using your imagination and concentration” the person who really made me like this phrase was Hypnotist Amit Badiani; when he said it I felt like subjects understood what was required of them; even though I really think the words themselves don’t provide a lot of meaning.
I think the important thing is the emphasis on the fact that the subject can’t just sit there, and they can’t do the
opposite and resist everything you say – purposely disengage with you, walk away from you, or just listen to the music they were listening to earlier but in their
imagination while you speak to them.
All of these tasks are not good things to be doing while I’m attempting to get some communication over to you. Other
things you need to deal with as part of pre talk is people’s opinions about hypnosis.
Now obviously you’re going to get some really bad reactions to using the word hypnosis – I mean in certain parts of the world you will be seen as a sort of witchdoctor that works with dark magic.
Even with many Roman Catholics, Muslims, or in countries where there is a great deal of those religious influences over the culture, just mentioning hypnosis can bring up negative associations… I’ve hypnotized plenty of people who believe that I’m performing voodoo, and they aren’t saying that as a joke, they think I’m doing a form of dark magic.
Actually I’ll briefly mention a recent time of this, I was hypnotizing a guy in New York in a really bad
neighbourhood; around that time of day, in that area large groups of men would gather and usually just pick pocket, rob people.. But that’s it really. At least to my notice. But anyway this guy I was telling him to press his hands together and I told him that as he presses his hands together they will keep on squeezing and it will be like they press, and they keep on pressing by themselves. But nothing I was saying was making his hands become stuck together – it was taking like 40 seconds, when usually I can do this in about 20 seconds… and I was still seeing no responsiveness from him.
Then I looked at the guy and thought about him and I said to him “you know like when you’re crushing someone’s neck, like you’re strangling them” instantly his arms ceased up and his hands were stuck together.
Later he said “yeah it really felt like I was strangling someone… your voodoo really works”. He didn’t seem to understand that I wasn’t doing voodoo, or that strangling people isn’t a good thing.
You see he clearly had a lot of experience in strangling people that his muscle response suddenly kicks upon mentioning of the phrase, thus causing his hands to cease up, hypnotists tend to use metaphors to help explain to the subject the response expected from them.
As a general rule, the more precisely you explain to your subject what is required of them, the better the hypnotic response. However the double edged sword to this is that, if a subject knows what you want – expect out of them then they are likely to resist you, or feel like you’re asking them a favour to achieve that for you and thus don’t experience being hypnotized – as they purely feel like they are acting and have just done what you told them to do.
So this leads on to the definition of hypnosis. I will
mention a definition here… that “A person is by definition hypnotized when they’ve received a suggestion for a result but simultaneously have a suggestion for the opposite and carry both out without knowing they are”
For example I could make someone’s hand just heavy alone and it would just feel heavy… but the subject might not realize that their hand is so heavy that they would be unable to lift that hand. So because they’ve never checked whether they’re hand is so stuck they can’t lift it, then you couldn’t possibly claim their hand was stuck down…
The only way to know is when you ask the subject to go against you, to resist your suggest to have it heavy, and instead try to do the opposite – to lift it.
If the subject accurately does both simultaneously – lifts, but is unable, then they are hypnotized.
There’s a variety of good things to say when you do a pre-talk on someone, I will go into detail with some of the things that I consider important.
One of the most important things to consider is how you look when you agree to hypnotize someone; for example it might be that they ask you to hypnotize them and you didn’t expect to be asked, you were caught off guard, you were just buying a drink, you were just talking to a friend – you weren’t ready to hypnotize someone because you were thinking about something else, and suddenly don’t know anything about how to approach this situation.
What you shouldn’t do is: look indecisive, nervous, and unsure about hypnotizing the subject. As this implies that you’re not actual a hypnotist and that it’s not actually worth the subjects time for them to be hypnotized by you, they will now temporarily regret asking you and double
question their thoughts as to why they asked you in the first place and whether they were being silly, wasting their own time, etc.
Suppose you walk up to a group of strangers and you mention hypnosis but you get some disagreements and arguments from the group about whether hypnosis exists, you shouldn’t get into a long heated debate about the in’s and outs of hypnosis now. It’s now a good opportunity and it will just cause the participants to further dig in their heels and become more rooted into their personal opinions and therefore not be as willing to play along with yours.
One of the good things about meeting people who are indecisive about things is that they are open minded towards it, they are able to give it a try and see how it goes – although you might not be sure for what length of time they are willing to give something a try and to what extent they are willing to invest their energy into it.
If you walk over to a group after being rejected from another group, you shouldn’t seem too surprised when suddenly someone says that they would like you to hypnotize them. Because this might come across as you lacking experience, the most important thing is not to give the impression that you believe the hypnotic subject your speaking to is a bad subject.
You should never make a decision about how likely you are to hypnotize someone until you have already
hypnotized them; because your likely just to be wrong
about people, don’t be too quick to judge a book by its cover; there’s plenty of people out there, and the majority of time when I’m teaching courses I’m mainly telling my students that they need to approach more people and not be so closed minded to only type to this tiny type of people.
All of the opportunities in life lie outside of what you currently have, and are in places that are different to yourself, it’s how we learn new things. The people who find you interesting are the people who don’t know you yet, so make sure that your different to them and then you’re able to provide them valuable insights which will allow them to learn from you and provide them good reason to spend their time listening to you, and ultimately listen long enough for you to stand a chance at
hypnotizing them.
Remember it’s not what you do, it’s the subject’s impressions of hypnosis that are the first problem, you could be the best at language patterns in the world but if you don’t use the responses in front of you then you don’t have anything to work with.
Now I’ve already mentioned that my shortest version of a pre-talk is “hypnosis uses your imagination and
concentration” but if I was going to say that I would also be checking how responsive i.e. how much the subject listens and follows my instructions before I say that, and when I begin to demonstrate the first routine with the
subject. The slightly longer version of my pre-talk goes
“hypnosis uses your imagination and concentration; it’s about getting an idea in your head and just going with that idea as if it just happens all by itself”.
Now I mentioned that I want the subject to listen in a very particular way when I hypnotize them, for this reason I personally deliver stories and metaphors about
concentration at this point in the interaction… I could tell
concentration at this point in the interaction… I could tell