How I Use Hypnosis in Counseling ($)
There are two conversations: the intellectual one is verbal, the emotional one is visual.
“Trance is a focusing on one thing… dropping all the peripheral foci and narrowing it down to one focus.”—Milton H. Erickson (1979, p.369)
Great Expectations
Most of the people to whom I provide counseling don't know what to expect. I tell them I provide another perspective, and I use hypnosis to explore their feelings.
I advertise myself as an explorer, not an expert or healer. I avoid diagnoses. Most of my clients are bothered, anxious, or tense, but they’re not lost or despairing. There are exceptions.
Everyone has their story and they need to tell it. Personalities exist to navigate situations, and there is nothing that a person is invested in more than their personality. I encourage my clients to tell me their stories, and I’m particularly interested in the stories of what’s good and going well versus what’s not working out.
I draw out the conflict between my client's intellectual and emotional parts. I don't state that directly, but try to lead them into a state in which there is some equality between their intellectual and emotional attitudes.
The intellect usually presents the good side because that’s where we’ve put our plan into words. Reservations and conflicts are stored on the emotional side because emotions are where we put things that have nowhere else to go.
I look for contradictions, assumptions, needs, and fears. Once I feel I have some understanding of those motivations, I use guided visualization to explore the underlying feelings.
The Stories of Our Lives
We create rational dialog in order to provide a framework for our justifications. Using rational dialog, we substantiate our virtue and reiterate our control. Outside this spotlight lies the gray area of our doubts. Beyond that is “the dark side” of our fears. Most of us get increasingly uncomfortable as we move away from being reasonable, but that’s where the roots of our conflicts lie. That’s where we find new ideas.
Moving my clients from their preferred rational dialog to my target of emotional exploration feels like wresting control away from a driver and careening over the side of a bridge. People don’t slowly become more reflective, they suddenly get emotional. They start to cry.
This break between reason and emotion doesn’t have to be sudden. When I see it, I take it to be a measure of a person’s resistance. I try to make this transition sound natural, but it usually requires some deception to get someone to relinquish control from one part of themselves to another.
There are different ways to characterize the shift between reason and feeling. It’s commonly experienced as a loss of control. I don’t think this has to be. It is possible to rationally explore one’s emotional landscape, you just can’t expect things to be reasonable.
This is what we do in dreams: we rationally explore emotional situations and arrive at irrational conclusions. In the dream world, where reason has little power or benefit, things rarely make sense. The recounting of every dream should be preceded by the admission that “this is hard to put into words.”
Hypnosis is the perfect tool to move from the small world of what’s reasonable to the much larger world of what’s possible. You might be tempted to say that the unreasonable world offers infinite possibilities, but, in practice, our imaginations are limited. We often work from our reasonable ideas one extension at a time. To jump into a completely new world leaves us with nothing to return to.
My work integrates people to become greater than the sum of their parts.
If you’d like to add up to something greater, then schedule a free conversation.
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