HYPNOSIS

Hypnosis has evolved as a mental health treatment of choice because it works more quickly and more effectively than other psychological and medical treatments for a number of goals where beliefs, habits, perceptions and the subconscious mind are involved.

Understanding hypnosis and how we enter into trance is misunderstood by many people. We define hypnosis, as do many others, as a focused state of attention during which the wider environmental stimuli are ignored. There are many ways of inducing trance. Simply asking clients primarily to give their attention to one particular idea allows them to centre their attention on their own experiential learning, to direct their attention to processes which are taking place within themselves.

Anyone  who can focus their attention, who has a good imagination or who can be emotionally aroused can be hypnotised. So it follows that a focused state of attention can be generated in many ways. The most basic trance state (which we share with animals) occurs when we become highly emotional. When the emotional brain takes over, it locks our attention on what has aroused us, to the increasing exclusion of other information from the environment. This focus means we are seeing reality from only one particular perspective because in this type of trance the higher cortex is less engaged in reality checking.

Another way we enter trance is when we voluntarily choose to focus our attention on something. A football game or TV show, for example, allows us to become absorbed and although voluntarily entered into, this state involves emotional arousal as the fortunes of the teams or characters fluctuate. So this could also be described as an emotionally induced trace state.

But there is yet another trance state fundamental to our daily lives and behaviour – one produced when someone else focuses our attention. Mentally healthy mothers are instinctively expert as focusing young children’s attention. Good teachers focus the attention of children, as does a good salesman or society leader. In this trance state our attention is guided and certain aspects of reality are left out and certain courses of action are made more compelling to us. So trance states can be created in us simply by another person focusing our attention. We all experience these trance states in our normal daily lives. Going into a hypnotic trance is not really so extraordinary because we all do it every day.

When we deliberately put a client into a hypnotic state, we are activating the very process that the brain itself activates during dream sleep, including the brain’s powerful reality generator.