When You Don't Know Where to Turn / A Self-Diagnosing Guide to Counseling and Therapy

by Steven J. Bartlett

The hypnotic state induced by a trained hypnotherapist is very similar. When in a hypnotic trance, you never become unconscious; your mind continues to be active. As you go gradually into a deeper trance, your breathing and heart rates tend to slow, and you feel increasingly more deeply relaxed. Usually, the experience is one of being lulled into a state of calm repose. Sometimes—for example, in former surgery patients who have had unpleasant experiences with anesthesia—hypnosis may cause people to become anxious or frightened and to refuse to continue.

You relax physically while in a hypnotic trance. You will slump in your chair; your breathing becomes slow and deep; you move very little. In other cultures, however, trance states take very different forms. Behavior may become ecstatic, even violent; individuals may begin to dance frenetically and to spin about, as in the case of Algerian dervishes. But in Western society, hypnotic trance usually takes the form of deep, passive relaxation.

After their first experience with hypnosis, most people tend to disbelieve that they have really been in a trance state. They realize they have been pleasantly relaxed, but they feel that "hypnosis" has not occurred. Clients who are suspicious, hostile, or feel threatened by the experience, or who do not trust the therapist, tend to resist hypnosis. Frequently, on the other hand, clients who are extremely anxious and feel greatly in need of help turn out to be especially good candidates for hypnosis.

If their first experience with hypnosis is comfortable, safe, and pleasant, clients will usually allow themselves to drift into a deeper trance state in subsequent sessions.

Many techniques exist to induce hypnosis. Commonly, they make use of the well-known method in which you are asked to fix your attention on an object—a coin, a stone, a pendant—while the hypnotherapist speaks softly in a monotone, suggesting that you are relaxing ever more deeply, that your eyes are getting heavy, and so on.

Milton H. Erickson (1901-1980) has been one of the leading American contributors to recent developments in clinical hypnosis. His ideas have been among the most creative, imaginative, and subtle in the field. He is well known for his indirect induction techniques, which, because of the complex and unusual perspective they reflect, we cannot deal with at any length here. They are techniques that frequently induce a trance state without the client's being in the slightest way aware that this is happening. Dr. Erickson is often able to induce hypnosis only by means of a handshake. An example may give some general idea of his approach. Dr. Erickson describes this technique:

When I begin shaking hands, I do so normally. The "hypnotic touch" then begins when I let loose. The letting loose becomes transformed from a firm grip into a gentle touch by the thumb, a lingering drawing away of the little finger, the faint brushing of the subject's hand with the middle finger—just enough vague sensation to attract the attention. As the subject gives attention to the touch with your thumb, you shift to a touch with your little finger. As your subject's attention follows that, you shift to a touch with your middle finger and then again to the thumb....

The subject's withdrawal from the handshake is arrested by his attention arousal, which establishes ... an expectancy.

Then almost, but not quite simultaneously (to ensure separate neural recognition), you touch the undersurface of the hand (wrist) so gently that it barely suggests an upward push. This is followed by a similar utterly slight downward touch, and then I sever contact so gently that the subject does not know exactly when—and the subject's hand is left going neither up nor down, but cataleptic. Sometimes I give a lateral and medial touch so that the hand is even more rigidly cataleptic....