Fools have played with it, knowledgeable people have experimented with it, charlatans have made money out of it and comedians have boosted their egos with it. Yet none of them can satisfactorily explain it.

 

Journalists have made blaring headlines out of it, the medical profession appears to feel threatened by it, those interested in the occult have tricked people with it and well-meaning therapists have alleviated symptoms with it. Yet the number of people who use it to maximum advantage is very small indeed.

 

People with little apparent experience have written books about it and some have even set up training courses and persuaded gullible members of the public to part with their hard-earned cash (often in considerable amounts) to learn very little about it.

 

The most effective weapon in the armoury of any therapist is Hypnosis, yet it is also the most widely misunderstood of any treatment.

 

It can be used to cure totally and permanently a wide variety of problems yet even those who are using it every day in attempts to help others, very rarely appear to understand the real power for good they have in their possession.

 

The reasons for this are many and one of them was summed up in a letter I received from a Hypnotherapist who had a practice in the same part of the country as my own. She wrote to say that she was moving out of the region and wanted to hand over her list of regular patients to another Hypnotherapist.

 

As soon as I saw the words "regular patients" I consigned her letter to the waste-paper bin as a Hypnotherapist should not have people coming for treatment over a long period and I assumed that what she really wanted to do was to sell a regular income. However, a few minutes later I rescued her communication and telephoned her as I thought it might be worthwhile finding out to what use she was putting Hypnosis.

 

Although she looked very professional, it appeared that this lady was not really committed to Hypnotherapy as, in spite of having been in practice for a few years and in spite of her "regular patients" she only had sufficient people coming for treatment to hire a room for a couple of half-day sessions each week. But the really distressing part of our interview was the pride she expressed in the number of people who had been coming to her for treatment for over a year and a half. Obviously, she must have been doing them some good even if it was only to devote time to listening to them but, just as obviously, the help she was giving her 'patients' was very limited and she either lacked a proper understanding of the use of hypnosis to best effect, or her interest was really in financial gain.

 

To learn how to hypnotise a person takes only a few minutes, but hypnosis is only a tool and it can be used in many ways. The internal combustion engine can be used in an ambulance to rush someone to hospital to save their life or it can be used for death and destruction when driving a tank on the battlefield. It could also be put to an innocuous halfway use just for pleasure, to take a family on a picnic. In a similar way hypnosis can be used simply to induce a temporarily beneficial state of relaxation, or to suppress symptoms, or for therapeutic visualisation - but it can also be used to CURE, although it is this latter use that so many people find hard to accept.

 

One can understand the medical profession, with their years of very hard training, looking with a slightly jaundiced eye when you point out that simple logic will often permanently get rid of the illness for which they have been prescribing medicine for 9 or 10 years, yet an increasing number are recommending people for treatment as they see more and more worth-while results in their patients.

 

However, it is not just the medical profession who sometimes looks askance at Curative Hypnotherapists. There are a very large number of people who are actually earning a living from the use of hypnosis who will not use their minds to THINK and are just prepared to go on using this tool in the way they have been taught. It does appear that more hypnotherapists are beginning to realise that they have the ability to help a sufferer lose their problem for ever, and one of the most encouraging signs of this is that on my recent training courses, a quarter of the trainees have been people who had gone through other courses where they had been taught to suppress symptoms or get the patient to fit some theory or other. However, these people had the intelligence to think and realised that there had to be more benefits to hypnosis than their previous teachers had told them. Hence their attendance in Birmingham.

 

In my previous book "Hypnotherapy Explained" (Curative Hypnotherapy Examination Committee) I attempted to describe the state of hypnosis but, for those who have not read it, a brief description seems to be called for here.

 

The first thing to do when trying to explain what hypnosis feels like is to forget the jargon about altered states of consciousness' and 'trance'. These are meaningless words when all you are talking about is a beautiful state of relaxation. It is nothing but that - an extremely beautiful state of relaxation in which you are aware and awake - aware of everything that is said and therefore have the ability to go along with the therapists' words or reject them.

 

That decision is yours and, because you are aware of everything, it is always yours no matter how deeply relaxed you become.

 

To achieve this state of relaxation it is necessary for you to accept what the Hypnotherapist says, to go along with his words. It is only commonsense that no-one can force you into relaxation - your automatic reaction to being forced is to fight back, which is in no way relaxing. A therapist cannot force you to become relaxed, he can only guide you into relaxation. You have the choice as to whether you follow his guidance or not.

 

Having been prepared to accept and become relaxed, how do you feel? You feel just that - relaxed. You are in that halfway stage between being asleep and being awake. A drowsy, day-dreamy state. An absolutely natural state in which you know everything that is going on and hear and understand everything that is being said but will only bother about it if it is really important to you.

 

It is a state that you have to go through every time you go to sleep and again every time you wake up. So anyone old enough to read this has experienced this state thousands of times and the only difference on this occasion is that you will achieve it by following the suggestions of someone else, and that by continuing to follow his suggestions you will stay in this state long enough to really enjoy it whereas, when you are going to sleep in the normal way (or waking up normally), you usually pass through this relaxation too quickly to really appreciate it.

 

So forget about being taken over, or being controlled (if I could do this I would have an appointment with my bank manager first thing tomorrow morning and be retired in the lap of luxury by the weekend). Forget about being turned into a Zombie or feeling the therapist's mind groping around inside your own. You are just accepting, with the ability to reject at any moment you choose.

 

Knowing that you can and will reject anything that does not suit you the therapist will, naturally, only ask you to go along with things that he knows are acceptable to you. You have the control but he doesn't want you to use it. The important thing is that you have control and knowing that means that you do not have to exercise it.

 

A large number of people, after experiencing hypnosis for the first time insist that they were not hypnotised because, as they say, "I heard every word". They believe that they should become unconscious, or that they should be 'taken over'.

 

No matter how much one may discuss what is going to happen before helping a person to achieve this beautiful state of relaxation, many still have pre-conceived ideas and believe that something dramatic should happen. They have difficulty in accepting that we are only aiming to achieve a state of relaxation. A state on the way towards, but this side of, sleep. It is so un-dramatic that, when you go to bed at night, you do not even realise that you drifted through this state into sleep until you wake up the following morning!

 

If you are about to experience hypnosis for the first time, the most important thing you can do is to accept. That is the key word - ACCEPT.

 

Do not try to relax. That involves effort and therefore is not relaxing.

 

Do not worry about how relaxed you are. Worry, too, is counterproductive. Leave your relaxation up to your therapist. A good therapist will know; he or she will be looking for physical signs of relaxation. I have no difficulty in recognizing when a patient is sufficiently relaxed but I certainly cannot recognise when I have reached that state myself. If I, who spends my life helping people achieve this relaxation before we commence treatment, cannot discern when I am 'in hypnosis', what chance does the uninitiated have?

 

Leave it up to your therapist to watch for the signs of relaxation. Do not analyse - analysis requires concentration and concentration is an enemy of relaxation. Just accept and you will very quickly drift into a truly gorgeous state of relaxation.

 

One cannot give a precise description of this state of relaxation. Our normal feeling of tension or readiness, whether for work or going to a party, is somewhat different to that of other people and we measure our feelings of relaxation against this normal state. Therefore the experience of hypnosis will be slightly different to everyone. But, I repeat, it is a state of relaxation in which you are awake and aware of what is going on and in which you have the ability to accept or reject.

 

The relaxation of hypnosis is not only pleasant but is beneficial to everyone. However, hypnosis is only a tool - and a tool that can be used in several different ways as we shall see. ...........