Most of what you and I were brought up with as an idea about hypnosis or hypnotherapy is all myth.
Hypnosis is all around us ALL the time! Lovers, staring in each others eyes, people watching TV or at the movies......they are ALL trance states !
So when you are getting trained as a hypnotherapist, remember that what you are learning you ALREADY know.
So hypnosis, and using it, is about harnessing those natural states and knowing what conditions need to be present to perform hypnosis and get positive results.
What is Hypnosis?
Hypnosis could be considered a social interaction in which one person responds to suggestions given by another person (the hypnotist) for imaginative experiences involving changes in perception, memory, and the voluntary control of action
Can you be Hypnotised?
There are large individual differences in response to hypnosis. Hypnosis has little to do with the hypnotist's technique, and very much to do with the individual's capacity, or talent, for experiencing hypnosis. Most people are at least moderately hypnotisable. However, while relatively few people absolutely cannot be hypnotised, by the same token, relatively few people fall within the highest level of responsiveness (so-called hypnotic virtuosos). There is some controversy over whether hypnotisability can be modified. Some clinical practitioners believe that virtually everyone can be hypnotised, if only the hypnotist takes the right approach. However, there is little evidence favoring this point of view. Similarly, some researchers believe that developing positive attitudes, motivations, and expectancies concerning hypnosis can enhance hypnotisability. However, there is also evidence that such interventions may only affect behavioral compliance with suggestions, not the subjective experiences that lie at the core of hypnosis. As with any other skilled performance, hypnosis is probably a matter of both aptitude and attitude: negative attitudes, motivations, and expectancies can interfere with performance, but positive ones are not by themselves sufficient to create hypnotic virtuosity
Where does hypnosis come from?
The origins of hypnosis extend back to the ancient temples of Aesculapius, the Greek god of medicine, where advice and reassurance uttered by priests to sleeping patients was interpreted by the patients as the gods speaking to them in their dreams.
Mesmer
In more recent history of hypnosis begins with Franz Anton Mesmer, who theorized that disease was caused by imbalances of a physical force, called animal magnetism, which affects various parts of the body. Mesmer also believed that cures could be achieved by redistributing this magnetic fluid -- a procedure that typically resulted in pseudo epileptic seizures known as "crises". In 1784, a French royal commission chaired by Benjamin Franklin and including Lavoisier and Guillotin among its members concluded that the effects of mesmerism, while genuine in many cases, were achieved by means of imagination and not by any physical force. In the course of their proceedings, the commissioners conducted what may well be the first controlled psychological experiments.
Mesmer's theory was discredited, but his practices lived on. A major transition occurred when one of Mesmer's followers, the Marquis de Puysegur, magnetised Victor Race, a young shepherd on his estate. Instead of undergoing a magnetic crisis, Victor fell into a somnambulistic (sleep like) state in which he was responsive to instructions, and from which he awoke with an amnesia for what he had done. Later in the 19th century, John Elliotson and James Esdaile, among others, reported the successful use of mesmeric somnambulism as an anesthetic for surgery (although ether and chloroform soon proved to be more reliably effective).
James Braid, another British physician, speculated that somnambulism was caused by the paralysis of nerve centers induced by fixation of the eyes on an object. In order to eliminate the taint of mesmerism, Braid renamed the state "neurhypnotism" (nervous sleep); a term later shortened to hypnosis. Later, he concluded that hypnosis was due to the subject's concentration on a single thought (monoideism) rather than physiological fatigue.
What do our students say about Hypnosis?
" I loved the hypnosis part of the course. For a start, I hadn't expected to laugh quite so much or for so long, and had also not realized that hypnosis would go so far beyond my expectations. I found it to be an immensely powerful and very gentle treatment that makes profound change possible in a short time. And besides all of this, it also feels great to be hypnotized!"
Greg Southey, IT Business Consultant, Surrey.
Take a look at hypnosis further by clicking here
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