Everyday hypnosis

Dear reader,

time and again there are debates even among experts what hypnosis is and what trance is. Many, even hypnotherapists, talk with clients and newbies about “putting them under hypnosis”. I personally prefer Milton Erickson's approach that trance is the state of awareness and hypnosis is the way or method to it. James Tripp on the other hand is famous for his “hypnosis without trance”.

I believe that most people would agree with the following: that this changed state of awareness, whether we call it trance or hypnosis now, is an everyday phenomenon. In order to reach this state of awareness, you don't necessarily need a second person and also words are not always necessary. In the following I'd like to describe a couple of examples and what phenomena are behind them.

One typical example of amnesia, memory loss, is when you get from one place to another and after reaching your destiny, you have no recollection of how you got there. I don't mean that you forgot if you got there by car or bus, but details about the way and occurrences on your way. Irrelevant details got cut out.

On one work day at the Alzheimer's society (of all places!) it happened one time that several of my colleagues came into the room at different times and even though nobody interrupted them, they came in and stopped dead with a desperate look on their face and the question, “What did I want here?” or, “Why am I here?” Although none of the persons in the room interrupted them, someone or something did interrupt their train of though on the way to the room. The original thought was covered up with other thoughts and therefore the reason to enter the room was forgotten.

I already mentioned eye fixation in the previous post, which doesn't necessarily need a shiny plate as a fix point, any more that you need a swinging pocket watch. Especially children can easily get lost in their own thoughts with a shining candle. I had to wait for over three hours in the waiting room at a doctor once. They had magazines and I most certainly had a book with me, too, but I just stared at the wall across from me and just hopped desperately that I would be still enough present to react fast enough when they finally called me up. Since I got myself out of that state only a short time later, I didn't miss the call. All I had needed was a point and the wall had nothing special, it was just plain white. The reason to pick a shiny object a lot is that it's eye-catching literally, because it's shiny.

It can also happen time and again that we notice bruises on our body, but don't remember at all about how we got them. That's pain control, anaesthesia for you and with that it's trance respectively hypnosis. That also applies to the way of doing pain control I described in a previous post, although I deliberately didn't use the words trance and hypnosis then.

Two phenomena are very typical with children and if you ask me, they should by all means not be taken in a negative or mean way. The first is positive hallucination: which is seeing things that aren't there really. For example there are every now and then reports of children that have “invisible friends” or imaginary friends. The reverse of that phenomenon would be negative hallucination: which is especially annoying when you're about to go out and can't find your house keys or car keys, check a table several times and after many unsuccessful attempts, you stand at the table again and suddenly the keys are there in plain sight and unable for you to overlook them on the table. Why didn't we see them before?

But negative hallucinations aren't limited to seeing only. Very annoyingly for the parents, sometimes children can be so absorbed in their own world, that the calls from the parents go unheard. That's not necessarily malicious not listening, but can also simply be a sign of the children being deeply absorbed in their activities in the way that they shut out all stimuli that doesn't directly belong to their activity. Dear parents: this is a normal phenomenon! In this context you should check if the seemingly repeatedly stubborn child is deliberately not listening as a kind of behavioural problem, if it's a hearing problem or if they are absorbed in their activity and therefore not listening. The physician and educator Maria Montessori described a phenomenon with children that are so deeply absorbed and where other obviously noisy children were unable to distract or disturb the child. As far as I know Montessori never wrote or spoke about hypnosis or trance then. Although I only learned about the principle ideas of her at university. The term Montessori used for this concentrated state of consciousness was “flow”.

Book lovers and film fans know how easily hours seem like minutes with a good book or movie. Time distortion is a phenomenon of hypnosis. Sadly we often don't use that phenomenon to our advantage. So good moments fly away way too fast and situations we'd prefer to be over in a flash drag on forever. There are possibilities to manipulate our perception to our advantage. Not only can we make it seem like it's warm for us when it's cold in reality or vice versa, we can also change our perception of time deliberately. We only have to find out how our individual perception of time works and what factors influence it.

One of my favourite phenomena is what I call “traffic trance”. A line of cars is standing at a red traffic. Everyone stares at the light and when the light changes there's inevitably someone every once in a while who doesn't change. We notice that when some other driver behind them gets impatient and honks. Here, again, is eye fixation the reason.

I hope that I was able to show that trance respectively hypnosis is something normal, even everyday. Only we often don't talk about it in those terms. I'd wish that people would be less scared of those words and phenomena, which are linked with trance and hypnosis. Sadly even today many people think that hypnosis has to do with loss of control and one can be turned into an evil criminal or they'd be totally ridiculed in hypnosis shows. Hypnosis is far more than that. Above all it's something totally normal. The phenomena I mentioned are only examples. Maybe you can think of situations you experienced. If you want to share them, write a comment. I'd be happy to read from you.

Until next blog,

sarah