The second tool I use during the intake and assessment process is the Styles of Learning form. Each one of us has a unique learning style: some of us are more auditory in orientation, others are more visual, and others are more kinesthetic. It is important to realize, however, that while we each may have a particular style of learning best suited to us, we all learn from all three orientations. No one is only auditory and never learns or adopts information from a kinesthetic or a visual perspective, and many clients may seem to share all three styles almost equally.
These things are not inflexible. They can all work together to complement one another, and people respond to different ideas at different times. I think if we assessed someone as visual, for example, and we create nothing for them other than visual scripts, we will not serve the client well, because most people can benefit across the board from all three learning styles.
You can find a Styles of Learning question sheet on the Internet, just do a search. The one I use is adopted from work Colin Rose did on the subject, and it asks about 10 questions which can help us determine whether our client is visual, auditory or kinesthetic/ tactile in orientation.
For example, the client may make five selections under visual, two under auditory, and three under tactile. What that tells me is this particular client is oriented towards the visual style of learning, but since there are some positive answers in other boxes, all styles of learning can be beneficial for that person, with an emphasis on the visual.
Now let us discuss how these three different learning styles relate to hypnosis. There are people who learn best through sound- related experiences, they respond very well to verbal or spoken instructions. This is the kind of person you can give verbal directions to just once - “Go down Main street, turn left at the third light, head down four blocks, turn right, and when you see the fork, yield to the left, it's the seventh house on the right” - and without a map they show up at your house 20 minutes later.
Other people are more visual in orientation. They respond best to what they see and read. These people generally make better witnesses, as they tend to absorb more visual details than auditory or kinesthetic learners. They respond very well to paper maps, but if I gave them the same verbal instructions as in the previous example, they probably couldn't find the location – unless they wrote it down and/or pulled the actual address up on MapQuest or Google Maps, printed off the route, and brought it with them.
Kinesthetic learning style folks respond to the physical sensations of life, to the experiences they have with movement, textures, touch. They learn best through doing, hands-on projects and participation. They likely have great hand-eye coordination, and most often remember things by recalling what they were doing, physically, at the time.
Several years back I had a traditional therapy client who was a heavy marijuana smoker. He was depressed and wasn’t doing too much with his life. His girlfriend dumped him because she didn’t want to be with someone who was not motivated to do, well, much of anything. He needed to set some goals. I do goal-setting assignments with a lot of my clients; we discuss their goals and then they write them down, outlining the objectives with a pencil and paper. But I knew this particular client was primarily kinesthetic in orientation and very low on auditory, so I had him do something different.
He was about 20 years old but still living at home, and I said, “Hey, does your mom have bunch of magazines lying around the house?”
He said, “Uhhh, yeah.”
I said, “I want you get some of those old magazines. Go through them, and I want you to cut out all the pictures you see that represent what you wish you had in life. For example, you said you were depressed. If you see a yellow smiley face in a Wal-Mart ad, cut it out. You mentioned that you car was a clunker. Let’s say you see an ad for a brand new car you wish had. Cut that out, too. Your girlfriend just dumped you? If you see a Viagra ad with a guy and a girl holding hands walking down the beach, cut that picture out. Not the Viagra, just the happy couple holding hands part. Then, arrange and glue all the pictures you cut out on a poster board.”
He did the assignment, created a poster board collage, and wow, it was really impressive – the kid had a lot of artistic talent. This is a very tactile learning exercise: cut, paste, stick, and move. It is also, obviously, very visual. I told him to take his collage and to tape it inside his bedroom door, because it's one of the first places he will look in the morning, and one of the last places he will see at the end of the day when he comes home to his room at mother’s house.
Remember, this was a goal-setting assignment, so I wanted him to aim for something. I suggested that in the mornings when he looks at the pictures before heading out the door, he should recognize that those images were the things he was going to be aiming for that day.
In a hypnotic process, these three learning styles should and can easily be incorporated into the suggestions that we use. For example, when providing hypnotic suggestions to an auditory learner we may say things like, “listen to these suggestions,” or, “this is what stillness sounds like.”
For the kinesthetic individual, we may suggest, “Pay attention to your heart rate, feel your heart beat becoming slower and slower as you breathe in, and out. Feel the oxygen fill your lungs.” These are the types things a kinesthetic learner responds to, because it puts movement, feeling and the physical nature of the body into a perspective that is easy for them to relate to and understand.
The visual learning style is easily incorporated into the hypnotic process by use of visual imagery suggestions. White puffy clouds, a staircase deepener, relaxing at the beach, a serene clearing by a mountain stream, and so forth, are particularly useful, because these clients can easily create those kinds of images in their mind.
Understanding learning styles is very important for the effectiveness of the hypnotic process. The more we understand and utilize related techniques, the better we can assist our clients with getting most out of their session with us.
Strengths and Resources
One of the most useful assessment tools that I use in my counseling practice is the NSRI: Nongard Strength and Resources Inventory. The NSRI is a simple 1-page assessment tool created by Paula Duncan Nongard to fill a real need in the assessment process. I have used it for years in my own practice, and have been licensing it to other mental health professionals since the mid 1990's. The positive feedback has been tremendous, and I think you'll easily understand the positive applications for hypnotherapy intake.
As previously mentioned, the most effective intervention ideas and suggestive scripts we can develop will come directly from the strengths and resources the client already possesses, and the NSRI is designed to help identify them. Like the Styles of Learning questionnaire, the NSRI is a self-report, meaning the client will check- mark the ideas listed that he or she relates to, and ignore those they do not.
Six sections cover different areas of life strengths, resources and abilities, from whether they have a job, to if they work well with others or alone, to their social supports and so forth. Sometimes I may know what is right about a client, but they have a hard time accepting my observations. Clients are often good at determining what is wrong with themselves, but not with seeing what is right. The items to choose from on the NSRI are simple and non-threatening, and can serve to build self-esteem once the page is covered in check-marks that they, themselves marked.
Resources are the things our clients have to help them solve their problems. For example if I were looking for a job, two resources would be a telephone and a car. So, if I am looking for a job, I have transportation and a way for a prospective employer to contact me and tell me if I am hired. Those are resources, examples of practical and useful things that exist in my life to help me solve problems.
The NSRI also measures the strengths of a person’s inter- actions with others. I am a firm believer that King Solomon was right when he said, “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” We need other people to help us solve problems. Being able to identify and integrate the client's strengths into their learning
processes can be particularly useful. In order to understand more about the strengths our client possesses, we must learn as much as we can about how they relate to others.
The third issue addressed is education and skills. I want my client to recognize that the education and skills they posses are useful to them for making positive changes. I want to be able to incorporate their existing skills, qualifications and background when I am coming up with suggestive therapy programs. If a client is stressed out and feels their life has become unmanageable, it may be helpful to point out the other things they have been able to accomplish in life because they do have management and organizational skills, to show that they also posses the ability to take back control of their current situations by using those same existing skills in other areas of life.
The NSRI also surveys personal attributes. This is where we find out if our clients perceive themselves as trustworthy, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent and suchlike. I want my client to identify the character strengths they possess, because those strengths are going to help compensate for their deficits. If they want to lose weight, and consider themselves to be loyal and thoughtful, we can incorporate those traits into suggestions, such as, “... just as you are loyal to your family when they need you, you are also loyal to yourself and your own health needs, choosing to eat only quality foods with positive nutritional value that will support your weight loss goals...”
We also want to know about their situational social supports, the people they interact with. Situational supports are absolutely essential. For example, when working with smokers, it can be helpful to use what we learn here to suggest that for the first week or so of their smoke-free lives, they spend most of their time associating with supportive non-smokers, be that their mother, sister, uncle or pastor. Helping the client identify these supports up front and incorporating their names into suggestions prepares them to get help from positive sources, should they need it.
All of these issue areas can be used to help come up with suggestive therapy ideas targeted at their particular point of need. Whether you use the NSRI or a similar form, perhaps of your own creation, or whether you simply incorporate the above elements into the intake interview, what you will learn from this process will be greatly important to the success of your sessions.