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
