Month: June 2017

Open post
Trance

Does every trance change you?

    There are essentially four ways that I judge whether or not I am hypnotised:

    1. Have I achieved Effortless Selective Thinking? I.e. Can I easily focus on one specific idea to the exclusion of all others, or does my mind wander when I don't want it to?
    2.  I completely lose awareness of my immediate environment, and the noises and distractions it generates?
    3. Do my limbs feel so heavy that they are almost impossible to move?
    4. Do I visualise moving patterns under my eyelids? This is very much a feature of hypnosis for me.

    I know that I do not necessarily need to go very deep to do useful work on myself, but if my mind wanders I do not feel that I am deep enough.

    The very first time I tried the Dave Elman technique on myself I went so deep it took me 90 minutes to get out of it, despite the fact that I had slumped forward into a very uncomfortable position! I have never got that deep with it since.

    Twice, using a different technique, but on consecutive days, I went so deep that I had the sensation of leaving my body, everything going white, and feeling a Nirvana-like state where I had a direct line to God. I really thought I had cracked it, but have never achieved it since!

    What you say is very interesting, because despite having sometimes gone very deep, there are plenty of times when I fail to even get close to Effortless Selective Thinking.

    I am hoping to find something in your collection that will assist me to achieve a reasonable trance state more reliably.

    Thank you again for your help.

    I replied:

    I am not sure that I agree with your measures of how to know when you're in hypnosis or not. I am certainly not a world expert on these things, but it does seem to me that some of the indicators you are using are contradictory. Others are not good predictors of the presence of trance.

    You listed:

    1. Have I achieved Effortless Selective Thinking? I.e. Can I easily focus on one specific idea to the exclusion of all others, or does my mind wander when I don't want it to?
    2.  I completely lose awareness of my immediate environment, and the noises and distractions it generates?
    3. Do my limbs feel so heavy that they are almost impossible to move?
    4. Do I visualise moving patterns under my eyelids? This is very much a feature of hypnosis for me.

    Effortless Selective Thinking

    Number one is not something I would associate with being in trance. Does the "Effortless Selective Thinking" refer to some specific thing, or something you picked from a  training course? I have never come across this before.
    Almost by definition, if you can focus on something, then you are not in trance. Focusing on something is certainly a very good way to get into trance, but is not itself trance. Once you enter trance, you have no idea whether you're focusing or not, because you have lost conscious control. For me, the essence of the unconscious is that it does go off in random directions. When I enter my unconscious I enjoy the unpredictability of it. I love the images that morph from one into another. It is rather like a dream. I would actually feel cheated if my mind did not wander. It is the wandering away into the realms of the subconscious which lets me know that I am actually in trance.

    Completely lose awareness

    Number two does seem to me to be a legitimate indicator of trance in some instances, but not in others. If you are totally lost in a TV show you may very well be unaware of your surroundings, and in trance, but you are completely aware of what's going on in the plot and hearing the actors speak, etc.

    Limbs feel so heavy

    Number three is definitely not an indicator of trance. You can be totally relaxed, and not be in trance. You can be totally in trance, and not relaxed. Relaxation is used to help to get into trance, but it is not itself trance.
    I personally often find I'm lying in bed, every muscle relaxed, feeling the weight of my body, not wanting to move, hearing myself snoring, but still being aware that I am aware of my body and that I am actively thinking. The opposite is also true. Bandler reports that people have been hypnotised while pedalling on an exercycle.
    So relaxation is not a necessary part of trance. The same is true of highway hypnosis where a driver loses all consciousness of driving. Definitely in trance, but is still guiding the car through a changing landscape. The Benson Relaxation Response will put most people into trance, and leave them totally relaxed. But the trance is the result of the repetition, not of the relaxation.

    Visualise moving patterns

    Number four, the patterns under the eyelids, is not trance either. When you close your eyes in a quiet place you are depriving your mind of external sensory stimulation. Your mind is still very active. And it searches for things to work on. What it finds is random firings of the optical nerves and interprets these as external stimulus, and tries to make sense of them. These are often mapped onto images of parts of faces, or other familiar things. This is close to trance, and often experience on the way into trance, but again, this is not itself trance. It is a purely physical phenomenon.  It can be used as an induction. After a while, the conscious mind gets bored with it, and allows the subconscious mind to wander off to wherever it wants to go, which is the definition of "being in trance".

    Deep Trance

    You mentioned several times the importance of being in a deep trance. It might be useful to remind yourself that there is no such thing as a "deep" trance. Trance does not have levels. "Deep" is a metaphor, an attempt to explain something that we do not understand in terms of something else that we do understand. There are no gradations of "deep". No one has ever successfully measured trance, in any meaningful way. There is no dipstick to the unconscious. There are certainly many different trance phenomena, but they are not connected to any sense of "deep". They are what they are, independent of each other, and no one has so far found any way of explaining and predicting when and how they arise in the mind.
    I think you should try to suspend judgement. I admire the successes you have had so far. Well done.
    However, you might want to consider that every time you go into your own unconscious mind you are inevitably causing changes to happen. After you come out of a vivid trance, you have caused or encouraged changes in your own psyche, and you will no longer be the same person. That is the essence of what we as hypnotherapists do in our therapy. That is why we lead our clients into trance.
    So perhaps the person who had the "deep" trance with the Elman induction can not repeat it because they are not the same person?
    Open post
    Problems with self hypnosis

    Problems with self hypnosis

      A reader wrote to me about Problems with self hypnosis

      As a therapist of the Resolute Organisational personality type, I do not find it easy to hypnotise myself. I have used various techniques with mixed success - sometimes going deep, but often not. Strangely, I find Dave Elman's technique has worked quite well at times.

      I replied...

      I find your comments about putting yourself into trance quite interesting. My experience of hypnotising people is that people are only resistant until they have been successfully hypnotised. Once their subconscious mind realises that they can give up control and nothing terrible happens, then they are as susceptible to hypnosis as anyone else. A resistant person does not stay resistant.
      If you have been successfully hypnotised to a deep state, then your mind should have no problems with allowing you to go back to that deep state easily and quickly. After a bit of practice, the very simplest induction should put you back into that state.

      Personal Experience of Trance

      I know that when I was in training many years ago, the instructor said that I was the hardest person he had ever come across to get into a trance. If he used an instant induction, I would drop into trance just like everyone else, but immediately come out of it again. My mind totally did not want to give up control and in fact would not. It took quite a few sessions, and many different approaches, before I finally slid into trance and experienced the magic of accessing my unconscious mind.
      When I have a resistant client, I usually fall back on the My Friend John technique. That usually succeeds in slipping past the person's self-preservation control mechanisms and drops them into trance quite nicely. Because I am a working hypnotherapist I do not usually see people more than twice, three times. So I have very little experience of inducing other people over and over again. I do have 20 years experience of inducing myself.

      Problems with self hypnosis changing effects

      I notice in myself that after the initial period when hypnosis was mysterious and deeply satisfying, the quality of my trances changed. I spent many years experimenting on myself. In one of those sessions I was trying to give myself a finger lift instruction while in trance. What I ended doing was accidentally anchoring my hand on being in trance. Now, every time I go into trance, I hand twitches. For example, whenever I start to lead a client into trance, I start going into trance myself, and I notice that my fingers are twitching and my hand is lifting. This tells me that I am entering trance, even though I am fully alert and talking to a client.
      I also notice that, distressingly often, when I think I'm working on my computer, I find my fingers moving. This tells me that part of my mind has actually gone into trance and I am not nearly as focussed as I think I am. Even as I write this, thinking about what to say next, and remembering  the experiences, the process of visualising or accessing those memories is putting me into a trance because my fingers are twitching.

      Maybe you don't really have Problems with self hypnosis

      Perhaps you are expecting too much from self hypnosis? I believe that once you are adept at going from fully conscious into your subconscious that you slip in and out of it constantly.
      My theory is that when you first start playing around with hypnosis there is a very clear difference between being in trance and not being in trance. But once you are skilled at it then you get additional abilities. One of them is the ability to "work" in trance. You can be in trance and still be conscious of what is happening.
      On the other hand, a beginner trance takes up all your attention and you are quite clear that you're in that state. It's clear because it's so different. But once your mind is happy about slipping in and out, it becomes standard. Nobody notices at what point they slip into a daydream. A daydream is simply being in your unconscious mind and allowing it to wander where it will. It is a form of hypnosis.

      Perception is everything

      So what I'm thinking is, that you are actually succeeding and going into trance with these various inductions. I suspect you are getting a more noticeable result from the Elman induction because it is long and repetitive and emphasises bodily responses. Trying to open your eyes, trying to lift your fingers, and so on gives you immediate feedback on how you are feeling, and emphasises that the feeling is in fact different from your normal control of your muscles.
      I wonder if it is the case that when doing the Elman you are not just in trance, but noticing that you are in trance. It is quite possible that you are going into trance with those other inductions very quickly and easily, and just not being aware that you are in trance because being in trance has become such a normal experience.
      I find that after years and years of being comfortable with being in my unconscious mind, I have literally become unconscious of it. It does not seem strange or in any way odd, and therefore I cannot tell when I'm in trance and when not. My only indicator is that when I am going into trance my fingers twitch. Otherwise I would have no idea it was happening.
      I can in fact put myself into trance simply by willing it. I can slide my attention down to my left hand side... and even as I think about telling you how I do it I find my fingers curling up. The whole process takes less than three seconds.

      Problems with self hypnosis

      If I deliberately want to put myself into a deep trance, I lie down in my favourite chair and do a quick count down. Sometimes I am so worked up about whatever problem I'm working on that I just can't let go. But most of the time I feel myself relaxing, going into trance, my mind wanders off somewhere random, then I suddenly find myself back in the present after some long period of being unaware of where I am and what's been happening. I'm not really sure whether I remember what I was thinking about or not. I might have been asleep. I might have been daydreaming. But I certainly feel a great deal more refreshed but I do have the feeling that I get on my lips after I have been hypnotised by someone else. So my best guess is that I was in deep trance.
      I can only speak from my own experience, but I do think that the personal experience of going into trance changes over time and becomes much less noticeable.
      Perhaps that is what you are experiencing? Perhaps there is nothing wrong with the way you are going into trance?
      Have you read the book  Trances People Live by Stephen H. Wolinsky? 
       
      It has some very interesting things to say about when we are, and are not, in trance in our daily lives, and how to tell the difference.
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