Hypnosis is generally characterized as a tool, modality or technique , and seen as a freestanding strategy of supporting transformation. As such “it” seems tailored to managing bad habits such as smoking or drug abuse , or limited behavioral troubles , such as insomnia.
But hypnotic approaches have a much wider scope as a flexible set of relaxational and communication approaches to the lives of people who have entered psychotherapy. When Freud stopped practicing hypnosis, he kept the relaxation couch, the imaginative ease of thought and the firm direction of his hypnotic practice firmly in place. Later therapists have adopted hypnoanalytic and hypnotic dreaming as ways to use hypnotic communication in other forms of therapy.
Dental and medical practitioners, of course, utilize hypnotic conversation styles and the shifting of attention to help their patients feel calm during procedures and cooperative with the routines of recovery.
Whether a psychotherapy is termed “dynamic,” “analytic,” cognitive-behavioral,” or “psychiatric,” most practitioners use the notion of anxiety to point towards the expressed discomfort of their patients. And, in managing and reducing anxiety, hypnotic communication is really effective. An attentive, calm , self-reliant state of mind, such as hypnosis induces in participants, is a very good antidote to the pained, distracted, jumpy , uneasy experiences we group together as anxiety.
Dynamic therapies employ insight, the conscious understanding of patterns of woe in lives, as an important instrument for change. And they use transference, the perceived influence of the therapist on patient, as a tool as well. Both the healthy influence of the therapist in catalyzing change and the conscious attention to important habits can be aided by hypnosis.
In the behavioral therapies, including short-term coaching and direction and positive psychology models, hypnotic conversation helps to give directives and to bypass resistance . Learning hypnotic approaches helps therapists of all persuasions augment their effectiveness without changing their own vocabularies and theories .
Professional Training in Hypnotherapy
And, more importantly, hypnotic conversation allows exchanges with the patient’s unconscious mind, that vast area of resources which manages the entire neurophysiology of the body, ways of learning and development and the complex atmospherics of interpersonal emotion. This mind has often been accessed in therapy through dreams, images, visions and passing day-dreamy thoughts. It can be communicated with as well as understood using hypnosis . Imagine as a therapist being able to both investigate and also utilize the power of the unconscious mind to help patients meet their goals “in their own way, at their own good time,” as Milton Erickson was fond of saying .
Just as patients deserve respect for their own language of experience, styles of interacting and values in the world, so therapists deserve to be trained into the use of their own relational strengths to help patients. Training for therapists at the Milton H. Erickson Institute of the Bay Area and other of the worldwide network of Erickson Institutes, or at the Erickson Foundation Congresses, is a good way to enlarge one’s therapeutic orientations without losing the integrity of the therapist’s own pathways to healing.
