Hypnosis

Self Hypnosis

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Well, its about time I wrote a new article on this Hypnosis page, so I thought it would be of great interest to those interested in using self hypnosis to relax and improve their mental as well as physical health.

Self hypnosis, like hypnosis itself is shrouded in mystery for many people making it seem like some kind of mystical, magical or even paranormal phenomenon. Some unenlightened people even link it with some kind of occult practice, which is of course nonsense.

Self hypnosis is a perfectly normal state of consciousness that everybody without exception can and does enter several times a day, every day!

If that statement has you throwing your arms up in the air in exasperation, then you probably don’t need to read any further, as nothing will convince you otherwise. If, however you are of a more enlightened and open minded disposition, then please read on…

The first thing you need to understand about hypnosis in general, is that it is a perfectly natural state. The term hypnosis is, if anything misleading, as it implies some form of artificially induced sleep or trance state, which it is not. Hypnosis is as normal as a daydream, and in fact a daydream is a form of hypnosis! That’s right, a daydream is quite simply a mental state where you are thinking of something and at the same time not aware of your physical surroundings. The moment you become aware of your surroundings, you have stopped daydreaming and are fully conscious again!

Try it - it is actually impossible to daydream and carry out any normal conscious function without terminating the daydream!

So is a daydream a form of self hypnosis too?

Yes it is. Totally 100%. In order to enter the state of a daydream, you don’t need to do anything. It just seems to happen, right? Of course! It’s called a daydream because you are essentially in a dreamlike state, mentally. Its as if you are off somewhere else while still appearing to be fully awake.

What is happening when you daydream is that your body’s natural daily rhythm has decided that it’s time to take a short break, so as long as you are in a situation where you are not consciously concentrating on anything, like doing a mental calculation, or doing something physically demanding, like running up stairs, or carrying something heavy, or working hard physically, then as long as you are relaxed enough, then you can start daydreaming. While you are daydreaming your thoughts drift off to another place, or situation, or time and you stop being aware of your surroundings. The second something requires your attention, you simply “snap out of it” and get on with what you need to do.

Self hypnosis is exactly the same thing.

In fact, self hypnosis has many names and is known by many forms. Meditation, daydreaming as we have already touched on, altered consciousness, deep relaxation are all forms of hypnosis and therefore all forms of self hypnosis.

Self hypnosis is simply hypnosis that is self-induced.

So how do you self induce hypnosis?

Well, the same way you would self induce relaxation. You need somewhere relatively quiet (although there are exceptions) where you are not likely to be interrupted by other people or pets or telephones etc. A comfortable place to sit or lay down are preferable but not essential.

Before you begin, it will be useful to note the time and to affirm to yourself that you will only remain in self hypnosis for a certain time, say 30 minutes, or however long you have to spare. This will ensure that you will come round no later than that amount of time has elapsed.

Different people will respond better to different self hypnosis induction techniques, but easily the best and most universal is to employ deep breathing exercises at the outset. The most simple way to do that is to relax yourself in to the position you are most comfortable. Close your eyes and then start by taking three very slow, very deep breaths. Be conscious of those breaths and as you breathe in, imagine a feeling of calmness drifting over you. As you breath slowly out, mentally say the word relax, but draw the word out for the while length of the exhalation of the breath.

Each breath you take will relax you more than the previous one.

After those three breaths, take several more less deep breaths, but all the while continue imagining the feeling of calmness flowing through you from the top of your head to the tips of your toes and also continue mentally subvocalising the word “relax” as you slowly exhale. All the while be aware of the fact that each breath you take is relaxing you more than the previous breath.

Before you know it you will “snap out of it” and not feel like you ever entered the state of hypnosis and that you had only been doing those deep breaths for a couple of minutes. A quick check on the time, however will tell you a different story.

It’s quite normal to have been in a hypnotic state for several minutes or more and not realized.

There is no “hypnotic feeling” as such and you don’t go to sleep, but on the contrary remain fully aware of your surroundings, which is why many people believe they cannot be hypnotized, or they have seen a hypnotist who couldn’t “get them under.”

Well, I’m sorry to dispel that myth, but if you saw a hypnotist who “couldn’t get you under,” then you saw a novice hypnotist who didn’t know enough about hypnosis that he claimed to be able to practice to be able to inform you that the most common “hypnotic feeling” is no feeling at all. He should have explained the hypnotic state to you before commencing the induction and you should have been fuly aware that whilst in the hypnotic state, you’ll hear every word that the hypnotist says, you’ll hear every car that passes, every bird that sings outside - everything. That’s because your senses are actually heightened whilst in the state of hypnosis!

With hypnosis, as with meditation, you are unaware that you have entered an altered state of mental consciousness. To you, your conscious state will appear normal. All you will feel is pleasantly relaxed and nothing more. The only true indicator of having been in the state of hypnosis at all is the dilation of your perception of time elapsed. It is most common to believe only one or two minutes have passed, when actually several minutes or more will have passed while you were in the hypnotic state.

That’s how you know.

So feel free to safely practice self hypnosis. The house won’t burn down while you are deep in some kind of magical trance! Your heightened senses will alert you to any impending danger long before you would have noticed in the normal conscious state!

Terry Didcott
Hypnosis

Happy Christmas

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Well, of all my blogs, this one has been neglected for the longest - over two months have slipped by without a single post. For visitors that might be wondering what’s going on here, I can only offer my apologies. I’ve been so busy with so many other projects that I simply have not had the time to sit down and write a post in here. I suppose a lot of it stems from the fact that posts here are rather long and involved and I simply haven’t been able to psyche myself up to writing another one with so much else competing for my online time.

In the new year, I expect I’ll be able to get back to posting more regularly in all of my alternative health and lifestyle blogs, of which I have several and all have seen a reduction in the frequency of my posts.

The most important factor has been my need to make enough money online to keep all this going so I don’t have to go out and do a regular job - perish the thought! So obviously my first priority is the bank balance - the niceties of writing in all my other blogs has to take second place until I’ve gotten to the point where some of my more active websites are pretty much on auto-pilot and are bringing in enough of the green stuff to keep the wolves from the door.

Anyway, aside from all that this post is a chance to wish everybody who comes in here a very happy Christmas and a prosperous 2008.

May everything only get better

Terry Didcott
Hypnosis

Transference Part 2

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In the last post, I explained as best I could in as concise a way as possible for this blog the basics of how transference works in a therapist/patient relationship. In this post, I’ll touch on how transference can lead to problems for both parties involved in therapy, ie the therapist and the patient.

In a normal (if anything to do with hypnotherapy can be labelled as such) therapy situation, transference is a good thing and is encouraged by the hypnotherapist as powerful means of completing a client’s analysis.

However, things rarely go so smoothly as the textbooks would have you believe.

In most hypno-analysis treatments, it is quite normal for a positive transference bond to form between a female client and myself - this is expected and not often a problem. What happens is that the client will form an attraction for the therapist especially where there are opposite genders involved, which is more often than not the case.

This is because it is common for a male client to favour therapy with a female therapist and a female client to favour therapy with a male therapist.

At first, you might feel that this is strange, especially as there has been rare occasions where a male therapist has been accused of molesting a female client. This is a worrying situation to occur and there’s no point trying to sweep it under the carpet, because is does happen from time to time - and not just with different forms of therapies. Doctors, dentists and even gynecologists have been accused of similar abuses of their trust. But I digress into territory that is not within the scope of this post.

Suffice it to say that despite any fears that a female client may have about seeing a male therapist (the opposite scenario rarely if ever has similar problems), in most therapies undertaken by clients the choice of an opposite sex therapist is the usual preference.

One such problem that I encountered first hand was that of an extremely strong transference with a female client.

On this particular occasion, the client felt that she had fallen completely in love with her therapist (me) and took it upon herself to exhibit an extreme form of jealousy at the fact that I was actually living with my partner at the time. It got so bad that she used turn up at my consulting rooms on days she was not scheduled to and often would wait outside in her car for me to finish my day’s work.

Therapy sessions became difficult, as you can imagine as she was often unwilling to leave at the end of the sessions. Luckily I managed to diffuse the problem professionally by using subtle suggestions to reduce the effect. That’s a technique that I had to master quickly and make sure I was very, very careful with my wording of such suggestions, because one false move could have had disastrous results.

That could have generated what is known as “negative transference” and I’ll cover that topic in a future post.

Terry Didcott
Hypnosis

Transference Part 1

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Transference can be described in brief terms as something resembling the doctor-patient relationship, only taken to a more intense level.

When a person comes into therapy with a hypno-analyst, the sessions can be numerous and often are booked once a week over a period of several months. In that time, it is natural that a bond begins to form between the patient and the therapist.

More so because the patient comes to trust the therapist to have their best interests at heart and they will in only a few sessions have formed a deep belief in the ability of the therapist to bring about relief from their particular problem.

So far, so good? Transference is quite normal and happens in most situations where a patient, or client comes to trust the therapist to help them. From the therapists standpoint, they also build a bond with their client or patient because this is normal when a facilitating personality, which most therapists naturally have, engages to help someone else.

But it goes several levels deeper than this and to explain it thoroughly would take a full sized volume or two to do it justice. In fact, one of the best and in-depth discussions and explanations of transference can be found in Carl Jung’s book, “The Psychology of the Transference”.

So here is a very abbreviated and abridged version.

Essentially, what occurs in therapy is that the patient will transfer the burden and the guilt and whatever other emotions are involved in their problem to the therapist. For the therapist’s part, they accept this transference of their patient’s problem and often become (in the patient’s unconscious beliefs) a facsimile of the original perpetrator of the traumatic even that has led to the patient’s psychological disorder or behavioural problem.

That might seem a lot to mentally digest. That’s because it takes something of a leap of faith to actually realise what is really going on in therapy at an unconscious level.

Transference is a good thing in therapy and is often encouraged by the therapist as an additional means of affecting a permanent cure for their patient’s problem.

With hypno-analysis in particular, when a patient has been in analysis for some time and has finally reached the point of catharsis (see my earlier posts on Phobias), this might to the casual observer appear to signal the end of therapy. But not quite.

As far as the patient’s visits to their therapist go, that session should be the final one, but what has not been finalised is the transference.

A well trained hypnotherapist will know that once the final session has been reached, they must discharge their patient and have no more contact with them whatsoever (for at least a period of six months or more).

The reason for this is that the patient must firstly learn to get on with their lives on their own without the crutch of their weekly visits to their therapist and secondly (and most importantly) the transference must be allowed to break, or dissolve on its own.

If the therapist and the patient continued to meet in whatever circumstances following therapy, the transference would never break because each meeting would only reinforce it.

It is also for this reason that well trained hypnotherapists know that they should not and cannot ever take a friend or family member into therapy. The transference would never have the chance to break and the patient would never be completely cured.

A therapist who ignores this extremely important point is doing their patient a grave injustice by not allowing them to ever heal fully. This would be tantamount to malpractice on the part of the therapist - every bit as unacceptable as a surgeon neglecting to sew his patient up after surgery. They wouldn’t be able to heal either!

So to hypnotherapy patients: Be careful to ensure that a therapist knows this and is prepared to release you from therapy when the catharsis is reached and to never see you again.

I’ll post some more on problems with transference in a later post.

Terry Didcott
Hypnosis

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Hypnosis and Phobias Part 3

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Symptom Substitution

This is a direct result of attempting to cure a person’s phobia by not addressing the cause, but rather treating only the symptom - the phobia itself. The phobia can be thought of as an emotional and even physical reaction to the as yet unknown cause of the behavioural problem.

Because the cause remains, locked deep inside the mind of the sufferer, treating the symptom by various means such as forcing the person to face their fear in the hope that it will diminish with familiarity will only force the emotion back inside, where it will fester and eventually find another avenue of escape.

It is quite common for a claustrophobic person to be freed of their fear of enclosed spaces only for the symptom to substitute for the opposite - fear of open spaces and the person develops agoraphobia instead.

Of course, in the eyes of the therapist and their client, the original problem has been cured!

But the sufferer now has another debilitating problem to overcome. For a therapist to try to cure a phobia in this way and not recognise that symptom substitution has manifest in their client, they should seek advice. Should they then attempt the same approach to curing the new problem, they should be severely questioned as to their motives. Are they really trying to help that person?

Or are they trying to rescue their reputation?

The underlying cause of any phobia must be investigated and investigated thoroughly. By using psychoanalytic techniques with hypnosis as the catalyst to assist in memory retention, there is a very good chance that the patient will remember the traumatic incident (or series of incidents) from their past that caused the emotion to become deeply buried by their subconscious.

Only by remembering, re-living and re-experiencing the event or events along with the flood of emotion that accompanied them at the time can that person hope to remove the cause. The experience is known as a catharsis, or release of the emotion and fear and anguish and guilt that accompanied the traumatic event that became repressed.

Once this release has occurred, then the healing process can begin properly. Time and a release from the transference that the client will have entered with the therapist throughout the therapy will see the problem truly diminish and fade. Of course, the memory of the traumatic even from the person’s past will stay with them, but the emotion and the guilt, having been released, cannot return to cause them any further emotionally generated behavioural problems.

Transference will be the next topic on the agenda.

Terry Didcott DHP
Hypnosis

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Hypnosis and Phobias Part 2

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Following on from the last article, I’d like to relate how hypnosis can be used in helping a phobia sufferer to overcome their fear and to rid them of their debilitating problem for good.

But first, before I even begin to plunge into very deep waters surrounding Freudian psychological theories, I should explain the most popularly understood use of hypnosis with phobias.

And why I believe it does NOT work!

The commonly accepted method of treating phobias is to get the person who is suffering from their unexplained fear to face that fear and to learn to deal with it. On the face of it, that would seem a logical way of dealing with something that has no logical explanation.

Let’s take a common example. Why would a perfectly healthy, fully grown man of sound mind and judgment and of average or above average intelligence be terrified of a tiny, harmless spider?

To someone who is not a sufferer of arachnophobia, this behaviour would seem absurd. But to the sufferer, it is not only a very real fear, but it would have the negative psychological effect of making him feel belittled and pathetic in front of his friends. To this man though, the fear is so real and tangible he cannot explain why he has it. After all, a tiny harmless spider could not threaten his safety in any way, so it cannot be explained away as an instinctive fear of being fatally stung by a venomous creature.

And there is that simple explanation as to what a phobia is. An unexplained fear of something that should not warrant being feared, yet no matter how illogical it may be, it is very real to the sufferer.

So the mainstream (if it can be called that) method of trying to help that man overcome his irrational fear of spiders is to bring him face to face with his greatest fear in the hope that familiarity will over time create an anaesthetizing effect when he comes into contact with a spider in the future.

Hypnosis is used to relax the man and allow the hypnotist to suggest to his subconscious that he is no longer afraid of spiders and that in fact he is quite comfortable when in the presence of a spider etc. Then the man is gradually introduced to a very large spider. First he will be placed in the same room as the spider in it’s glass tank. Then over a period of days, the spider in it’s tank will be placed closer and closer to the man until the day when he will be able to take the spider out of it’s tank and actually handle it without fear.

A fine and logical theory that does have some positive results. Not always, of course, but in some cases that does remove the fear of spiders.

But, what is not taken into consideration in that kind of therapy is the original psychological reason that man had the irrational fear, or phobia of spiders in the first place.

That is where Freudian psychotherapy theories and techniques come into play. Freud theorised that for a person to display an irrational fear of an everyday object or situation, which to the rest of us would seem perfectly safe and normal, there would have to have been an incident of sufficiently extreme emotional trauma early on in that person’s life to have left a permanent mark on that person’s psyche right into adulthood.

I’ll elaborate on that later, because it’s quite enough to take in at the moment.

So we’ll assume the arachnophobic man did indeed suffer an extremely traumatic event early on in his life. For whatever reason that event was buried deep in his subconscious mind because it was perhaps too terrible for his young, immature mind to deal with at the time. As an adult, that traumatic buried memory would begin to manifest in a way so as not to reveal it’s true nature, in order to preserve the person’s mental balance, or even his sanity.

But before I go on, I should explain a little about what is understood about the conscious and unconscious parts of the human mind.

The unconscious part of the mind, is not associated with having the power of rationality as does our consciousness, but is much more basic in that respect. The function of the conscious mind is to accomplish higher thoughts, rationalise situations, employ logic and reason to solve problems and make decisions. On a conscious level, we are actually able to perform one or two functions at the same time. Think about it. Can you add up a list of numbers while simultaneously working out how to program your DVD recorder at the same time as writing your shopping list? Not easily. Your conscious is very good at making decisions and rationalising, but it cannot perform many things at once.

On the other hand, the function of the subconscious (or unconscious) part of the mind is much more basic, but it is able to control the multitudinous bodily functions simultaneously. Think of it as controlling everything your body does, such as heartbeat, body temperature, breathing rate, digestion, elimination, cell creation and growth, organ functions, hormone production and release, healing, fighting infections and diseases… the list goes on. It’s ability to rationalise is therefore compromised by it’s being able to multi-function. However, it also controls things like memory storage and recall, protection of the “self” or self-preservation, tells you when you need to sleep and eat and if you need to escape from or face danger, otherwise known as the “fight or flight response”. On its most basic level therefore, your subconscious keeps you safe and alive.

Where am I leading with all of this?

Well, should a sufficiently traumatic even happen to you in your life that your subconscious deems to be potentially hazardous to your very safety, then it takes action to protect you. One way of doing this is by slamming the lid down on the memory of any traumatic event it deems to be so extreme as to be potentially threatening to your very sanity.

To give you an example of how this works, it quite often happens that road crash victims that survive often wake up in their hospital beds and cite having no memory of the actual crash. They may remember getting into the car and driving off down the road, then their next memory is of waking up in hospital. The part in between is suppressed from memory, because the subconscious has repressed it to protect the victim. Otherwise how would a person deal with the actual memory of the car colliding with, say a lamp post and they being hurled through the windscreen. How would their psyche deal with recalling how the actual physical sensation of glass ripping through their skin, their body thrown across the bonnet of the car and onto the road. So the subconscious represses that memory, so the person doesn’t have to deal with it while they get on with the more important job of healing.

So what does that all have to do with the arachnophobic?

Plenty. When a person has suffered an extreme trauma, be it physical or mental (as in the case of mental or sexual abuse in childhood), the memory of the actual event is repressed. As far as the person is concerned, the event never happened. But the subconscious knows it did happen and although it tries to keep it concealed from the conscious thoughts, certain events may trigger the release of a part of the emotion that was buried along with it’s associated memory of the trauma.

That emotion takes the form of an irrational fear of something that most people would take for granted.

The phobia!

So the reason why I don’t believe that facing your fear will necessarily cure it, is that if that fear, or phobia is caused by a deeply buried emotionally charged memory of an extreme traum, then by trying to remove the “symptom”, which is the best way to describe the phobia, the cause is still left where it is.

And it will simply find another avenue of escape.

By manifesting further down the line as another phobia, in what is known as “symptom substitution”.

And that is the subject of the next instalment.

Terry Didcott
Hypnosis

Hypnosis and Phobias

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This is potentially a huge subject that will undoubtedly spread over many posts, but I want to cover this subject in this blog because there are so many sufferers in this world that needn’t be.

That sounds like an almighty sweeping statement, but when I get to explaining what I mean, you might begin to understand what is happening and why I believe that phobias can be removed completely from people’s lives.

First of all, define phobia. Oh boy…

In its simplest definition, a phobia is a deep fear of a situation, object or experience that cannot be explained by the sufferer as to why they have it. Ok, that was very simple and there are varying degrees of fear and the associated suffering that goes with it.

I’ll give an example to clarify a little.

Claustrophobia is a well known fear of enclosed spaces. The sufferer may be perfectly fine in a small room as long as there are windows to look out of, or the door remains open so they are confident they can leave at any time. If there are no windows, the open door can often be enough to allay any fear. The moment that door is closed, however, the sufferer experiences several sensations associated with extreme fear, anxiety and terror of the unknown. Physical symptoms may appear in the form of sweating, body temperature rise, heart rate increase, dizziness, nausea - the list can be lengthy. These are associated with a sharp rise in adrenaline secretion and the body goes into fight or flight mode, causing immense stress. There is no explainable reason for these experiences for the sufferer, they just know they have them and that’s all there is to it.

Often psychologists can make educated guesses as to the cause of claustrophobia as being a deeply ingrained fear that all humans have of being restricted or unable to escape from predators dating back to our prehistoric ancestors - a sort of animal instinct. These fears are normally suppressed in modern humans, but can be brought out by certain terrifying experiences in childhood, such as being locked in a small dark cupboard as punishment for some unacceptable bahaviour as defined by parents or guardians at the time.

Ok, these theories may have some truth in them and are certainly logical probabilities in the case of claustrophobia. But there are other intangibles that are not taken into account that certain fields of psychology and psychiatry cannot explain. As advanced as humankind has become, our best minds still cannot with any certainty fathom the workings of a human mind, much less have an accurate set of definitions to explain how and why certain experiences affect one person and not another.

Sigmund Freud put forward his own theories as to the origins of phobias and associated psychological problems such as anxiety attacks and depression, lack of confidence, susceptibility to certain habitual practices etc. His attempts at early psychoanalysis and the subsequent explanations of the workings pf the psyche may have been closer to the truth than many people have given him credit for.

Psychoanalysis is again a huge subject and not one for fitting into a few blog posts - the collected works of Freud make lengthy and often difficult reading, but are necessary to even begin to understand what he had discovered. Unfortunately, his theories meet with disgust and often ridicule by those that like an easy road through life, the politically correct and liberal mind just won’t accept what he was trying to tell us.

So that makes what I intend to write about in a series of posts controversial even to this day. Difficult to comprehend and believe it all may be, but if you can get your head around the basics, then you might just, just see what his theories were all about.

As a professional, practicing hypnotherapist I saw far too many cases of phobias and anxiety attacks cured by psychoanalytic techniques combined with the relaxing and inhibition lifting power of hypnosis (known as hypno-analysis) to doubt the Freudian theories. What I saw with my own two eyes is pretty hard to ignore, much less to disregard just because it doesn’t fit in with a politically correct ideal.

So prepare to be amazed, left speechless, annoyed, dismayed or even downright angry at what I will impart in future posts. But whatever you feel, please keep an open mind and try not to judge based on your own beliefs, ideals and morals.

Closed minds and closed hearts are the defences of fear and ignorance which belong in the dark Ages, not in (supposedly) enlightened times such as these.

Terry Didcott
HYPNOSIS

Hypnosis and Stress

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Hypnosis is a great stress reliever. By it’s very nature, hypnosis places a person in a deeply relaxed state both in mind and body which enables the person to free themselves of the effects of the stress they were suffering.

Standard hypnotic techniques can be used by anyone in order to bring about a relaxed state of self-hypnosis which is, in many respects almost identical to that of a deep meditative state.

The employment of simple deep breathing exercises combined with a relaxed body position, either laying down or reclining in a comfortable chair, bring physical relaxation. Freedom from interruption and loud external noises and a willingness to let go of conscious worries and concerns are necessary for the beginnings of mental relaxation. Once the body and mind have relaxed, then its a case of focusing the mind on a single, bland point that cannot be mentally discussed or consciously reasoned and not allowing any further extraneous thoughts to enter the mind.

Before too long, the hypnotic state will be reached where the person will feel pleasantly relaxed but still conscious of their surroundings. This state can be remained in for as long as the person feels comfortable. Often, twenty minutes or more can pass without the person realising and they may return to normal consciousness unaware that so much time has actually passed.

This is a perfectly safe thing to practice and is good for both body and mind. Of course, more benefits can be obtained by the presence of a skilled hypnotherapist, who can assist the process of hypnosis and also give the person beneficial suggestions to enhance their experience and increase the “good” feeling upon regaining normal conscious awareness.

I don’t use the term awakening here, because a person in the hypnotic state is not asleep in the commonly understood way. They are simply very deeply relaxed and can get up and be completely conscious if they wanted to.

In any case, as I had been told on so many occasions by my own clients, upon sitting up in the chair they felt absolutely marvelous!

Terry Didcott
Hypnosis

Hypnosis as a Weapon?

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Hypnosis has long been misunderstood by many people who still hold this natural state of consciousness in awe. Far too many believe that anyone who possesses the ability to render another person “under their spell” must surely be possessed by demons and should not be allowed to practice such a dark art unless enlightened by the church.

If that sounds like the rantings of a bible-thumping zealot, you would be partially right - it is also the fear that far too many people have of hypnotists and practitioners of hypnotherapy.

The performances of stage hypnotists don’t do the profession a whole lot of good either, apart from advertising and raising the profile of hypnosis itself. And you know what they say - “There is no such thing as bad publicity, there is only publicity!”

Well, that may or may not be wholly true, but stage performers like Paul McKenna have actually done a lot of good for the practice of hypnotherapy. They treat their participants like dignified human beings and take great care that they are warned of what they might be asked to do in front of the audience and obtain their permission first.

Unfortunately there are also many unethical and egotistical stage performers who actually believe they have some kid of special power. They are the dangerous ones, who will feed their inflated egos by going further and further with each stage performance - belittling their victims and even causing some great distress and harm. These people should be arrested and charged with being in possession of a dangerous weapon, because they don’t seem to care whether they leave their victims with serious psychological problems after their often over-ambitious shows.

If ever the bible-thumpers want to turn their icy gaze on any group in particular, they should focus their attention on these egotistical, attention-hungry, power-crazy lunatics and leave the rest of us who use hypnosis for good and to actually help people to overcome their serious psychological and personal problems where mainstream psychiatric practices have failed them.

Let it not be said that all hypnotherapists are meek and mild!

Terry Didcott
Hypnosis

Hypnotherapy Notes #1

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The field of hypnotherapy is huge. It encompasses everything from helping people overcome serious and often deeply personal psychological problems, to helping other quit a bad habit like nail biting and just about everything you can think of in-between.

Many people become interested in the field of hypnotherapy for many different reasons and often embark on one of the expensive courses that they find advertised in national newspapers and magazines in the hope of becoming a hypnotherapist. While some of these courses are professional and well-informed and convey a wealth of knowledge and information, the vast majority are hastily put-together by amateurs who want to make some fast money.

Potential student beware!

Hypnotherapy, in similar fashion to many other complimentary therapies is unregulated by government recognised professional bodies such as the various medical councils that preside in most countries.

However, in the UK in particular, there are several professional non-status hypnotherapy governing bodies that are well established and do lend some measure of professionalism to hypnotherapists who have been accepted as members through their own hard work, diligence and accumulated knowledge and experience.

Before I left the UK in 2002, I was a member of two of the foremost professional hypnotherapy bodies, which were the National Council for Hypnotherapy (NCH) and the International Association of Hypno-Analysts (IAH). Their entry criteria is quite strict, so should you be about to embark on a course in Hypnotherapy you would be well advised to inquire of the course owners if their final examination certificate is recognised by either of these bodies and will it go some way to allowing them entry as a member of one or both.

There are other well respected associations in the UK as there are in the US, but as I have not dealt with others, I don’t feel qualified to comment on them.

That will put the cat amongst the pigeons and weed out the charlatans from the truly honest creators of courses in hypnotherapy.

Terry Didcott
Hypnosis

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