What is Hypnosis?

Hypnosis works by allowing a condition of relaxation and deep inner attention to develop. When people are in this trance state, the internal critical faculty that usually keeps the conscious and unconscious minds separated quiets down. Therefore, during trance, a person has access to all of their mental capacities.
I am trained in and utilize an approach to hypnosis called the Ericksonian approach. This approach is permissive and cooperative. Other approaches to hypnosis emphasize an authoritarian relationship between the subject and hypnotist wherein the hypnotist is active and the client is passive. The Ericksonian method views people as individual, unique, and endowed with enormous potential.

An Ericksonian hypnotist attends carefully to a person's patterns of communication. That allows to hypnotist to acquire the individual’s personal “vocabulary” and so use this as a means of entering the other’s system as a foundation for development of hypnosis. Ericksonian hypnotists craft unique hypnotic experiences for each person.  In this way the practitioner of the Ericksonian approach guides hypnotic experience via utilization of the individual’s resources and communication, cooperation, and flexibility.

From the Ericksonian perspective, hypnosis is a process of communicating ideas and experiences. The channel of that communication is experiential and participatory rather than conceptual and passive. This allows the client to experientially absorb communication. To illustrate, compare in your mind the difference between reading a book on how to ride a bicycle versus actually riding a bicycle. The depth of learning while riding is much, much deeper than the depth of learning while reading because learning while riding distributes across many channels of experience. Because hypnotic trance emulates experience it includes information that emulates all of the senses. So, since trance is multisensory trance seems real. During trance the therapist suggests that the client, "see the sights, hear the sounds, smell the smells..." In this way the client's multichanneled attention channels into therapy.

Ericksonians assume that people have vast resources and much greater ability than they ordinarily they think they have. More than allowing the acquisition of new learning, the process of hypnotherapy facilitates the client to access and learn to use abilities they already possess. Experiential explorations during trance allow people to recognize and mobilize present but disused resources. Trance potentiates resources.

Often people encounter blockages or limits in their lives due to rigid and fixated mental systems. These systems may become endlessly repeating loops that underlie repetitive, non-productive, and even compulsive behavior. Hypnosis provides a way to “unstick” rigid beliefs and so allows fixated psychological systems to reorganize in more productive and flexible ways. The transforming change accomplished during hypnotic trance includes freshly potentiated resources by providing an unbiased state that allows for alternate, productive, and flexible ways of being to become clear.

Hypnotic Trance is natural. Trance states occur naturally in everyone's normal life. The hypnotic process makes use of this natural potential by intensifying and lengthening the usual spontaneous experience of trance. So expanded the client's experiential involvement during trance is focused on a specific goal.

Because it is natural, focused, resourceful, flexible and unique, Ericksonianally elicited of trance provides an ideal method for developing and maintaining deep systemic changes by recognizing and modifying basic experiential relationships. In these ways and more hypnosis provides a pathway to growth and change whether used independently or integrated into a wider ranging psychotherapy.