Hypnotism.. what do you think of it..?

Anyone gone through a session of hypnosis… or are you a practitioner ??

Had Hypotherapy about 30 years ago in the UK and it helped me a lot, changed my life in fact.

Have occasional top-up sessions with an English practitioner who lives locally, he does Hypnotherapy and things like EMDR which can help a lot.

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I was selected ages ago, as a student (on the strength of being young, female and presumably suggestible) for a demonstration of hypnotism. Total utter dead loss, I am impervious. I was embarrassed for the poor hypnotist.

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:grinning::laughing::relaxed: you’re a tough one… bet the hypnotist was cursing :roll_eyes::zipper_mouth_face:

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Well, you’ve sent me straight to Google…EMDR… glad it works for you. :relaxed:

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Many moons ago when I was around 18/19 I did a course in hypnotherapy…part of it was an hours session with a local hypnotherapist…my interest at the time was past life regression which I don’t think was really part of what he did but he gave it a go…I went back in time to childhood…being born…the experience of being inside my mother…and suddenly I was in a wood watching people riding horses…a woman fell from a horse…the hour was up though and he had to bring me back to the present moment…not long after I left his studio I found out that a relative had fallen from her horse and broken her arm…so not a memory from my own past lives but it would seem I had a heightened sense of perception in a relaxed state…x :slight_smile:

I think perhaps it is time for another session… who knows what you may “recall”:relaxed:

It was appalling, I really wanted to be hypnotised but no and while I was very sorry for him, it didn’t work and I wasn’t so sorry for him that I was going to pretend it had.
It made me wonder if people do pretend and actually made me very sceptical, whereas I had been fairly pro before.

So now I have stopped smoking I would love a bit of reinforcement by hypnosis along the lines of no I don’t want to smoke, there’s someone who advertises in Bergerac, but I know it won’t work so it is back to will power.
(I stopped smoking at the beginning of August last year and have not smoked since).

Vero… if it doesn’t work… that’s an end of it. Re stopping smoking… you’ve taken the first step… well done… now keep up the good work.

And I do know how hard it can be to give up… I am a reformed smoker (nothing worse, so I am told)… it can be done, but the person concerned has to really want to stop… no use someone trying to force them… :relaxed::zipper_mouth_face:

Congratulations Vero. Hypno is certainly something I’ve thought about myself. I don’t smoke much so you’d think it would be easy!

There is a common misconception that, in order for hypnosis to “work”, the subject has to experience what he/she expects to be some kind of trance-state. I say misconception because hypnosis does not induce a trance state, rather it is conducive to an altered state of consciousness, which may or may not be discerned by the subject, especially if they have predetermined ideas of that form that altered state may take. I would be very sceptical about your claims to be impervious, Véro, as I would judge you on what little I know of you from your very Frank posts, to be very susceptible.

I am an accredited practitioner in Graafian holotropic psychotherapy using regressive techniques which have nothing to do with “past life/lives recovery” but a lot to do with prenatal (inter-uterine) and perinatal experience, and I have conducted co-operative experiential research with and amongst midwives and health visitors which validates their experience, and that of mothers, as well as mature adults. The research involves investigating altered states, without recourse to psychotropic agents.

There is a principle agreed amongst many practitioners that we all of us spend much of our waking hours in states of variously and subtly altered consciousness, or waking ‘trance’, and that to understand this is a route to greater wakefulness and improved ethical functionality. This idea is also at the heart of Buddhist practice which, stripped of its metaphysical baggage, is a very helpful mental science.

One of my cousins has spent the last few years becoming qualified as a hypnotist. He is increadibly enthusiastic about what it can do. A lot of his clients are people trying to give up smoking or other addictions.

Yes, David, hypnosis is a reputable and valid intervention, but it has got a name for quackery too, because claims are made for it that are not supported by the evidence and it can be misused by the manipulative and unscrupulous for mischievous and criminal purposes. I am sure your cousin is not one such, of course. Proper training takes several years of thorough professional formation and supervised practice.

In China major surgery is sometimes conducted with the patient conscious but in an altered state that admits no suffering of pain, and little physiological disequilibrium (and surgical shock) during or after surgery. It is frequently used in dental practice too in UK.

Hypnosis operates outside the dualities of easy/hard and weak/strong will, Chris. It draws on your holotropic or self-healing tendency which is very powerful and only awaits your cooperartion, and perhaps the suspension of some of your well-established assumptions and the letting go of some of your resistances to change. You don’t even have to know what they are. Your consciousness knows, even if you don’t. :upside_down_face::eye:

I think the supposed hypnotist in the demonstration was a complete charlatan, it was supposedly entertainment (I was working for a radio station and he was the guest, it was an outside public event) I wouldn’t for a second put him in the same category as therapeutic hypnotists.

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My husband was a practising hypnotherapist in the UK and we have both attended various courses. Through this work I have seen many remarkable things. He helped a lot of people with phobias and also asthmatics. Interestingly enough, when he was doing his training I was obviously the person on whom he could practice. He was unable to hypnotise me until an occasion where I was in a lot of pain due to my son slamming my hand in the car door. It became apparent that it would work when I needed it. We attended a ‘holistic hypnotherapy’ course and I was picked to be the subject - it became embarrasing when the tutor failed to hypnotise me. he described himself as a ‘solution centred’ therapist and often didn’t know what the client’s problem was.

Another very interesting account of how people understand hypnosis, in its many forms. Would you entertain the idea, Margaret-Ann, that a practitioner does not necessarily need to know “what the problem is/was”, because the practice is not a linear one, or a diagnostic one, like medicine or fixing a broken-down car. Very commonly, what is described as the problem is just a metaphor for an entirely different state of affairs, and giving it a name works against the possibility of a resolution.

There are many misconceptions about hypnosis, many of them around trance-states that are supposed to feel different, or being taken over by a mysterious force generated by the hypnotist’s voice, or gaze, or the words used.

Most hypnotic states are experienced only as a feeling of slight surprise that nothing happened, and occasionally a slight embarrassment about that, or a little disappointment. The effects are noticed after a variable interval, sometimes after the hypnotic event has been forgotten. It’s a very subtle but powerful process, and often misrepresented (but not, I am confident, by yourself!)