An Introduction to Hypnosis & Hypnotherapy. Damian PhD Hamill
that rapid therapeutic changes can generalise and be carried forward, creating momentum for further changes, both within therapy and the client’s life in general. Milton Erickson noted that effective therapy was often simply a matter of toppling the first domino! Many of my past students students who have trained in other psychotherapeutic models find that brief hypnotic approaches both augment their approach and also frequently enhance the speed and effectiveness of their methods. I welcome and encourage such cross-fertilisation of approaches, which can only benefit clients.
I also have regard for the concept of ‘demand characteristics’. Demand characteristics are the subtle, often subliminal expectations, or ‘rules’, that are communicated to any participant in a psychology experiment and which the participant may find himself perceiving and either adhering to or reacting against. In psychology they are viewed as being a ‘confounding variable’, which can impact upon the purity of the experiment. I suggest the concept can also be extended to interpersonal interactions such as psychotherapy. If a therapy client is told (or has it subtly implied) that change will be slow and painful, the client’s ongoing experience may well manifest these ‘characteristics’ that have been implicitly ‘demanded’ of them. What sort of message is a therapist communicating to a client if he tells her that therapy will take 1000 hours, over four sessions a week? What type of message does a therapist convey to a client if she tells him that his symptoms indicate repressed childhood sexual abuse and that the only way he will get better is to recall the abuse in vivid, excruciating detail? If the client is likely to fulfill the predictions of the therapist, is it not more humane and productive to make suggestions that therapy may well be swift and painless? (‘Suggestions’ - sounds a bit like hypnosis, doesn’t it?)
Even some early psychoanalytical practitioners began to realise these possibilities and famous psychoanalysts such as Sandor Ferenczi experimented with the technique of setting a date for the termination of therapy in order to focus the client’s mind and expedite therapeutic progress. He seemed to appreciate the well-known, everyday adage that the amount of work to be done will expand to fill the amount of time available to do it. If you create a context where therapy is perceived as being endless what motivation has the client to produce change?
Another important point worth noting at this stage is that I do not advise talking in terms of providing clients with ‘cures’. The very use of the word ‘cure’ implies that in some way the client who comes to a therapist is ‘broken’ or ‘sick’. With something as complex as human behaviour I suggest it is inappropriate to use these types of terms. Furthermore, as the client will often set his or her own outcomes in terms of the goals to be achieved, it is naïve to assume that there even exists such a thing as a universally recognised ‘cure’ for any particular problem. I prefer instead to think of clients as being people who are living or experiencing elements of their lives in ways that are problematic for them, or at least less than fully satisfactory. Consequently our role as therapists is to assist clients in finding ways to behave, think and feel that are more enjoyable, effective and life-enhancing. Often these changes can be so profound and radical that they can seem to represent a cure or a recovery from some terrible affliction but this is not the case.
In this book I will be setting out an introductory framework for creating therapeutic change in clients that is largely based upon the use of clinical hypnosis. The approach is eclectic and incorporates traditional hypnotic approaches and more contemporary ‘permissive’ approaches. I believe that effective therapists can respond flexibly to the client in front of them, rather than expecting the client to adapt to the therapeutic approach of the practitioner. The approach is described as brief, in as much as we attempt to make rapid, identifiable changes in the presenting symptom without concerning ourselves more than is necessary with the history or provenance of the symptom. It is strategic in the sense that the approach is designed to reach a defined, recognisable end point and the therapist and client devise a therapeutic strategy to get to that point as rapidly and effectively as possible. Brief strategic therapy is goal-oriented, solution-focused therapy and has a starting point and clear end point in sight. As such, defining the client’s outcome and establishing an evidence procedure to recognise when it has been achieved is important and will be addressed in the course of this book. I believe that hypnosis is an immensely powerful therapeutic tool and it is a natural human ability to access states of trance. In this book I attempt to sweep away the unnecessary and misleading mystique that has clung to the subject over many years and present it as what it is – a rapid, effective and empowering way of accessing the abilities and resources that we all possess within us. Rather than being a special ‘gift’ that one is born with, hypnosis is a skill that can be learnt like any other. Obviously, as with most skills, some people will be ‘better’ at it than others but it is a learnable skill nonetheless.
This book is written with the assumption that the reader knows virtually nothing about clinical hypnosis and is designed to introduce basic concepts and build upon these, introducing more advanced and sophisticated techniques as we progress. Although I take an inclusive and eclectic view of the field of clinical hypnosis, we will restrict ourselves to validated and credible approaches. There are many esoteric and rather eccentric approaches to hypnosis being touted, however the reader will not find such approaches here. Please note, however, that although I have attempted to make this book quite a comprehensive, introduction to the subject, it should not be viewed as a hypnosis training in its own right. Reading a book is not sufficient training to allow someone to practice as a hypnotherapist. Clinical hypnosis is a highly practical skill and anyone wishing to practice hypnotherapy should undertake training with a reputable organisation that provides extensive experiential, hands-on training in a classroom environment. I strongly advise against training in clinical hypnosis through correspondence courses of which there are many. Although often cheaper than a practical training, I strongly believe that they are a false economy and that nothing can substitute for the experience and close supervision obtained through practical training. Hypnotherapists who have already completed training with other organisations may, of course, find that they can incorporate some of the methods outlined directly into their own practices. Even experienced therapists may find unexpected gems and nuggets of gold hidden amongst these pages. I believe that you are never too old or too knowledgeable to learn new things.
Chapter 1 - A brief history of hypnosis
In the introduction I referred to the fact that there are a number of esoteric and eccentric approaches to hypnosis. Indeed, in many people’s minds, hypnosis is still associated with mystical or occult forces. Whilst I hope that this book will sweep away such misconceptions I feel that the student of hypnosis will benefit from understanding how such associations originally arose. To this end I would like to present a brief history of hypnosis. Obviously, any subject as extensive and long established as hypnosis is likely to have a detailed history. My purpose, however, is simply to pick out some of the key figures in order to give an overview of the historical development of the subject.
Once we recognise what hypnosis is we can say that hypnosis has been around for a very long time in various forms of ritual and healing ceremonies. Most people agree, however, that a recognisably modern practice of hypnosis began with Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) who devised an approach to healing called Mesmerism. Mesmer was born in part of what is now Germany and studied both theology and law at university before turning his attentions to medicine. He was a very interesting and charismatic character and, although we recognise in his work the seeds of hypnosis, he didn’t actually develop the term hypnosis and misunderstood the hypnotic phenomena he undoubtedly evoked in his subjects. Mesmer based his therapeutic procedures on a completely different type of reasoning, derived from Newtonian physics, but we can say that he was definitely using hypnotic processes. Mesmer believed that all of us have an energy or life-force running through us that he called ‘animal magnetism’. He believed that problems, particularly psychological problems, developed if there was some blockage in this flow of energy which he likened very much to gravity. He developed techniques such as the laying on of hands and the making of ‘passes’ to direct this energy past particular blockages. He also believed in using magnetised instruments to re-direct this energy flow. Mesmer initially used magnetised rods but developed this idea further to believe that he could magnetise objects such as trees and other inanimate