“What is Hypnosis… REALLY???”
Great question. But first, I’ll tell you what it’s not. It is not having someone say, “You are in my power!” and turning you into a mindless zombie or a crazy person doing the chicken dance. Those unfortunate misconceptions are holdovers from old “B” movies and stage hypnosis acts. Years of research and countless, clinical tests have proved – absolutely and positively – that no one can be hypnotized and forced to do anything they would not morally or ethically do. In fact, hypnotists cannot make anyone do anything at all. Those people up on stage dancing… they want to dance. They have joined in the fun and are not being coerced into doing anything. If they wanted to they could quit and come out of hypnosis anytime, exactly as anyone in hypnosis can.
Another misconception that is demonstrably false, is that only “weaker” minds can be hypnotized, and then only by someone with a more “powerful” mind, overcoming and dominating the will of the weaker. That misconception goes hand in hand with the, “I can’t be hypnotized because I’m too smart” myth. In reality, the more intelligent, creative, and imaginative a person is the easier it is for them to be hypnotized. In fact, the very words “being hypnotized” are technically inaccurate. At all times during hypnosis clients are in complete control of not only their level of trance, but the entire experience. Using the hypnotist’s or hypnotherapist’s words as a guide clients hypnotize themselves, just as later, during the actual therapy, they (through their subconscious minds) do all the actual work and therefore, are responsible for all the positive results. The only people proven to be unhypnotizable are individuals suffering from schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s disease.
A final misunderstanding many have about hypnosis is that people in trance are asleep. In reality, even though their eyes are generally closed, hypnosis is a state of very heightened awareness and focus of the subconscious mind, so much so, that the most common thing a clinical hypnotherapist hears from a new client is, “I don’t believe I was really hypnotized… I heard every word you said!” Well, yes he did… but also, yes he was. Even though an individual in a hypnotic state is very deeply relaxed, the “sleep” we refer to in hypnosis is not a physical sleep in the normal sense of the word, but a “sleeping” or a “moving out of the way” of the conscious mind. The client’s subconscious mind, however, is very much alert and completely aware of everything going on.
Hypnosis is a naturally occurring state of normal consciousness that we all slip into and out of many times each day. Have you ever been driving and talking with someone or thinking of other things, only to pull into the driveway and realize you have arrived at your destination safe and sound without really knowing how you got there? Think about that for a moment. How is that possible? We’ve always heard that we can’t concentrate on two different things at the same time and that’s true. But it is only true for the conscious mind. The subconscious mind is hobbled by no such restrictions. While you were talking it kept track of all the other cars, obeyed all the traffic laws, changed lanes, took off ramps, looked for dangerous situations… all in the background, without any conscious thought from you, while that conscious part of your mind was talking.
In addition to driving, think about other times when you’ve been so deeply engrossed in a book or movie that you “were almost there” and “experiencing” the story. Or think of times you were daydreaming and so deep within your own mind that you didn’t hear when someone called for you. In each of these situations and countless others, you were “in hypnosis,” a very familiar state for us. In fact, it is exactly because that state is so familiar to us that many first time clients have trouble believing they were really hypnotized at all… “It all just felt so normal.” More technically, hypnosis is a state of consciousness when our brain waves are in the “Theta” state and our minds are at their most creative and imaginative. When an athlete, ballerina, jazz musician or practitioner of any of the arts is “in the zone” and the results appear effortless, they are in a state of hypnosis and performing straight from their imaginative, subconscious minds. When that happens, when they – or we – are in the zone, marvelous, almost magical things are possible.
The human brain is the most complex and amazing three pounds of matter in the world… maybe the universe. “The Brain” and “The Mind” though, are two very different things. The brain is the physical engine of thought. We can touch it, dissect it, and examine it. It has the nerves, the structure, and the chemicals needed for thought, reactions, and the storing of memories. The mind however, is different… almost magical. It is the seat of our sentient consciousness. It embodies our will, our personality, our very being. Unlike the brain, we cannot open up a skull and find the mind. All we can do is describe it by its attributes, characteristics, and functions. The following description is how most professionals who work with the mind currently imagine it to be.
The mind is divided into two very different parts, the conscious and the subconscious, or as Freud called it, the unconscious. The conscious mind is the part we use to think, analyze and rationally view the world. It has a critical, analytic capability which enables us to compare new ideas and experiences against the database in our memory of millions of previous thoughts and experiences and judge them to be true or false. This “critical faculty of the adult mind” is essential for us to be able to weigh facts and make intelligent, informed decisions. It is that unique part of our being that qualifies our species to be called Homo sapiens… “thinking man.”
While our conscious mind is busy thinking deep thoughts, our subconscious mind is humming away, handling everything else about us… and that everything else is really quite a lot. The subconscious controls all our autonomic bodily functions: pulse, respiration, moderation of fluid levels, monitoring of glucose, salts, minerals and other chemicals and hormones in our blood stream, secretion of hormones in direct response to that monitoring, physical balance and muscle control, blood pressure, the list goes on and on. And it’s a good thing we have the subconscious to do all that housekeeping in the background. Can you imagine having to consciously tell our hearts to beat or our diaphragms to breathe every single time? We wouldn’t have much time for anything else. But it has another responsibility directly related to who we are as unique human beings. The subconscious is also the repository of our memories, habits, belief systems, creativity, imagination, and most importantly, our self image and beliefs we have about ourselves. More about that in a bit.
It is actually quite appropriate to think of the subconscious as a living computer. Digital computers run multiple programs at the same time, many of them “in the background.” Think spell checkers, automatic back-up, and anti-virus programs, just to name a few. Once those programs are up and running, we never think about them again, even though they are always working, protecting our hardware, software. and data, while we concentrate on our main task, say, word processing or surfing the net. In much the same way, our subconscious mind is running the breathing program, the heartbeat program, the driving program, the walking or jogging or running programs, the digestion program, and everything else going on in our bodies, 24/7, without any conscious input from us. And what a lot of work is going on.
Just as the brain stem and lower brain evolved before the cerebral cortex, it is believed the subconscious mind developed before the conscious – the subconscious to act as controller for the lower brain and the conscious mind to direct the more analytic, “thinking” cerebellum. At first glance, one might conclude that as the “thinking part,” the conscious mind would be the most powerful of the two, but that is not the case, not by a long shot. With all that the subconscious has to do, it has to be orders of magnitude more powerful than our conscious minds. Neurologists have only recently been able to accurately measure and study brain activity at that level of the individual neuron. With these new tools they have mapped out and calculated the data transfer bandwidths of the different parts of the brain which are controlled by the conscious and subconscious. To their amazement, they discovered that our thinking, analyzing, conscious mind only sends the amazingly low number of 50 to 100 bits per second. But the unconscious mind sends up to 11,000,000 bits per second! It is that incredible, raw power of the subconscious mind that enables hypnotherapy to be so amazingly effective.
The subconscious begins to develop in the womb and continues to be the only “mind” a child has until about five years of age. We know that because EEG’s show children’s brain waves are always in Theta, the wave frequency people exhibit when hypnotized or daydreaming. At the age of five or six the conscious “adult” mind” begins to develop, and with it the crucial “critical faculty.” That development is pretty well complete by 11 or 12. It’s no coincidence that it is within that time period – usually around seven or eight – that children begin to doubt Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. After this critical faculty is fully developed the individual will never again be as open to accepting statements at face value as they were as children. But before it’s complete, from birth to age five or six, the subconscious is all the child has, and since the subconscious has no way of rationally judging the relative merits of anything, infants and children accept everything they hear as literal truth, especially when it is told to them by authority figures, and most especially, by parents. Everything they hear goes straight in and goes in deep. That is why it is so vitally important that parents only speak positively to their children.
If a little girl child hears, “you’re stupid, you’re ugly, you’re fat, you’re clumsy, you’re a brat, no one likes you,” those judgmental statement go unfiltered, straight into her subconscious mind and become the basis of her self-image. After 11 or 12 that self-image is cast in stone. On the other hand, if a young man of 15, who as a child had only been praised, was told he was any of those negative things, his critical faculty would weigh the words against his positive self-image and discard them. But, again, if as a child, he had been told he was stupid or lazy, then any later words of praise will bounce off his negative self image every single time. That is why positive affirmations and Positive Mental Attitudes by themselves, ultimately fail; they cannot break through negative self images developed as a child. In contests between the conscious and the subconscious, the subconscious wins… every time. When those negative self-images are firmly established, hypnosis is the most effective (if not the only real) way to change them.
To learn more about the amazing power of clinical hypnosis, I invite you to give me a call at (916) 717-9150. The consultation and the information is free.
