Mastering Hypnotic Language - Further Confessions of a Rogue Hypnotist (3 page)

In order you get hypnosis you can use the following technique: the aim? To get the conscious mind and the unconscious to dissociate. You do this by talking about what consciousness does and what the unconscious does. It is done very vaguely as you’ll see. Whether hypnosis is just dissociation is another matter, I don’t think it is. I use this method as a deepener once I’ve already gotten someone in a nice light hypnotic state.

Conscious and Unconscious dissociation script.

‘As a part of you listens another part becomes more and more immersed in this process…

Maybe one part wants to follow what is happening, while another in fact knows without effort and simply absorbs things…

Perhaps a part may be concentrated on some ideas yet at the same time another can continue on its journey into the inner world of experiences…

A part can doubt and question and another can accept positive change and experience is possible, can understand with more and more trust…

Maybe some part wants to observe and be alert whereas another uncovers its own creative potentials and deeply desires to try something new…

One part may try to exert too much control over everything with its learnt bias, while another deeper part of you is free to imagine some things you desire and put into practise…

A part is preoccupied by the moment as another simply finds it easy to go down stream and act on certain things that please it most…’

Remember you can learn this by heart if you want but working off of scripts is fine: it doesn’t make you a ‘scripnotist’ whatever that means. Dr. Milton Erickson did it sometimes and he invented modern hypnotherapy single-handedly. I think that spending hours of your lifetime learning hypnosis scripts is a TOTALLY unproductive waste of time. I have a life; I am not a hypno-nerd or hypno-obsessive. You learn through repetition anyway not memorisation. The way you learn a script is through muscle memory, that is the muscles of the mouth, tongue etc. (the organs of articulation) ‘remember.’

As I hope you noticed all comments to ‘consciousness’ occurred first – the left hand side of the text and the unconscious was addressed on the right hand side. Incidentally these mirror the hemispheres of the brain which supposedly predominate for each part, left being logical and right intuitive. The hemispheres of the brain are actually much more complicated and the brain/nervous system is a giant interactive neural network. People with physical brain damage have started using parts of the left or right side of the brain to carry out the task of the former hemisphere which was impaired: no one knows anything! Although ‘Neuroscience’ claims it is mapping the brain I think the human brain is like an internal cosmos: too vast and grand for the puny human mind to ever fully understand. Thank goodness!

What the heck are ‘colour feelings’ I hear you ask?! Simple: the human brain associates/encodes feelings with colours. Why? Who knows? Red usually with anger, passion. We hear it in clichés: ‘He was red with anger!’ Blue for coolness, calmness, depression/sadness: ‘I felt blue.’ She was green with envy: it’s all in our language fabric. Jealousy: …’tis the green eyed monster that doth mock the meat it feeds upon.’ Depressed people often refer to the depression they feel as ‘The black cloud,’ Winston Churchill referred to it as his, ‘Black dog.’ Boys like blue, girls like pink.
The colour yellow makes people more suggestible.
Blues and greens tend to be soothing. Red’s, oranges tend to be associated with aggressive, energetic feelings. Now how is this of any use to a hypnotist?

During an induction, quite near the beginning, instead of progressively relaxing the muscles I ask someone to,

‘Imagine a colour that makes you feel very relaxed…now allow that feeling, that colour feeling (ambiguous/confusing) to spread from the top of your head all the way down to the tips of your toes. ’

You can see this in my basic hypnotic script in ‘How to hypnotise anyone,’ my first book. I am explaining it thoroughly now. When you understand the theory you will be able to find other applications. It can be used to reduce injury pain, control IBS (Irritable Bowel) gut pain, elicit emotions and cause a woman to orgasm.

A woman once told me she felt anxious in social situations, which people call being ‘shy.’ I asked her
where
the fear was located. She looked confused (she wasn’t used to thinking that way – her attention became focused); she pointed to her solar plexus (feelings are often said to emanate from this point, who knows why??!) I then asked -
what colour
is the fear? (again confused look); she said red. I asked what would the opposite feeling be. She said blue. In hypnosis I told her to,

‘Imagine that (that - dissociative) red feeling in the solar plexus changing to blue, this (this- associative) blue feeling, these (these - associative) feelings of calmness and wonderful confidence, now. And they can spread all through your mind and body, making you
feel wonderful, now…’

It was of course only part of what I did to help her. I asked afterwards how the solar plexus area felt, had that old feeling gone? She said it had and she felt much better. Aren’t we weird?! The way the brain, nervous system actually works seems bizarre because it is the opposite of what we are told. No one knows nothing - as Shakespeare once wrote.

I once had a man who said he felt empty and hollow in the solar plexus area as a result of his cruel, abusive upbringing: I used colour feelings in this case too.

You can take any feeling, turn it into a colour and spread it through someone’s body: confidence and happiness are two good states to play with.

What I call ‘hidden code hypnosis’ is really a way of bypassing consciousness and directing a therapeutic suggestion to the subconscious/unconscious. I do this by hiding it, like a hidden code within a larger sentence. I break the suggestion up and disperse it one word at a time in between a piece of writing/speech. Let me show you. Note: in order for hidden code hypnosis to work you must make subtle use of pauses and embedded command tonality – that is a falling tone.

Notice I am actually delivering two suggestions: a longer overt one and a shorter ‘covert’ one.
Multiple communications which the subconscious can easily process.

‘You
have many abilities of which you have been consciously unaware…and you
can
discover them because the other mind knows more than you know, you know, so you can really
stop
and find out that the ability to be
using
your natural capacity to feel good without
drugs,
free and healthy, even – in control, all right,
now.
Recognise this hidden truth at some level haven’t you?
For
many things can change and
your
behaviour can change appropriately so that you
own
these changes and it’s the
unconscious
or subconscious that secretly does all the work for you for its own
reasons
without the other knowing or needing to know.’

The hidden hypnotic code is (obviously):
‘You can stop using drugs now for your own unconscious reasons.’
By the way that on its own ‘un-coded’ would work.

Aha! But there is also a third message to the unconscious! Did you spot it? It is about half way through, the sentence:
‘Recognise this hidden truth at some level haven’t you?’
The hidden truth being – the hidden hypnotic code.

If
I use this I add it in quite early in a session after a basic induction and one deepener. You can encode any message:

You feel confident.

You have self-belief.

Scratch your nose.

Do something different.

You can also use this technique in normal conversation without any hypnosis, the unconscious will still pick up the message and it will act upon quite frequently.

The prime purpose of negation is to attract resistance and so diffuse it.
Negations are sneaky ways of delivering suggestions that don’t seem like suggestions. Some good examples follow…the first is probably the best, derived from Dr. Milton Erickson’s work. It implies choice.

A.     You don’t have to…

‘You don’t have to
relax.’

‘You don’t have to pay any attention to what I’m saying.’

‘You don’t have to
feel growing comfort.’

‘You don’t have to
go into trance
until you want to.’

B.    Don’t…

This brings me to the: ‘Don’t think of pink elephants principle!’
In order to NOT think of pink elephants you have to think of pink elephants.

‘Don’t relax too deeply…yet.’

‘Don’t make any changes you don’t want to.’

‘Don’t
relax your breathing…’

‘Don’t notice where you feel most peaceful…’

C.    Never. (A don’t variant.)

‘Never imagine pleasant scenes.’

‘Never feel very good until you’re ready.’

‘Never fall into a deep hypnotic sleep till you know it’s what you want to do.’

These sorts of language patterns can be used well with so-called ‘polarity responders’ or contrarians if you prefer. Certain people like to be contradictory, it’s in their nature, perhaps they are natural rebels who knows but if you want to get children like that to do something you can say things like,

‘I bet you could never eat all your dinner up.’

They will guzzle it all while looking at you thinking, ‘I’ll show you!’

D.    It’s not necessary…

‘It’s not necessary to try to remember consciously…’ (The implication? Forget!)

‘It’s not necessary to learn consciously…’ (Implication? Learn unconsciously!)

‘It’s really not necessary to
stop smoking today…
only when
you’re ready, now…’

Note: much suggestion work can be done through implication. Normal conversations use implication often. All the hypnotic patterns in this book occur naturally but you are becoming aware of them so that you can use them to help people. I will cover implication in detail thoroughly in book 3.

Negations can inoculate against resistance because they don’t seem to be suggesting anything. The client has no need to resist; you already did it for them. If that makes sense?
Remember your attitude should be, I don’t want any power and authority over anyone anyway,
when you think like that people don’t resist. They see you as an ally, which you are.

E.    You shouldn’t…couldn’t…wouldn’t.

‘You shouldn’t go inside and remember a happy time, but you could…’

‘You couldn’t make just the right shifts unconsciously until you were ready anyway.’

‘You wouldn’t want to
become deeply hypnotised
without becoming aware of your most comfortable big toe.’

F.    Tag questions.

‘You already know how to
relax deeply,
do you not?

When you tag a question on the end you hide the command/suggestion.

‘All these changes have occurred without your conscious mind knowing how, haven’t you?’
(The past predicate ‘…haven’t’ is non-grammatical and so, confusing and it is a suggestion – ‘…haven’t you?’ suggests change has already occurred.)

For God's sake don’t be a total twerp and talk like this in real life – you’ll sound weird or pretentious or both!

‘You’ve learnt some new habits and you will, will you not? Will you not?

Again we create confusion but this time with a future temporal predicate ‘will’ which doubly suggests the new habit will be acted on…you just aren’t stating it explicitly. As the client doesn’t consciously know what the hell you are on about he won’t resist.

‘It’s easy to learn hypnosis, is it not?’

Notice the hidden command – It is easy to learn hypnosis – the tag question on the end hides it. A bit like an embedded command.

To learn the patterns in this book you might want to write down five examples of your own to train your brain to use this type of hypno-speak. Writing things down helps clarify thought. The trick with all this stuff is that it adds variety to your repertoire. You have a bigger tool box to draw from. Don’t overdo these things in practise use them subtly, deftly.
When you think of hypnotic language think precision. Know your intent and use your new languaging skills to achieve it.

As a hypnotist it is a good idea to learn as much as you can about the nature of the subconscious mind and what it is capable of: what its true nature is. In the last few years I have learnt something quite startling about this part of our selves. When we speak we communicate with others in forward speech. Subconscious slips (‘Freudian slips’), ideomotor signals may give away the truth of what we really think BUT we also reveal ourselves through ‘backward speech.’ What do I mean? Record someone speaking. Play it backwards – reverse it and listen out for what the subconscious is revealing in reverse. It takes skill to be able to identify real ‘reverse speech’ from things that sound as if they might be actual subconscious communications. It is most illuminating to do so with the speech of politicians and people of that ilk. You might be surprised as to how the reverse speech reveals something totally contradictory to what the forward speech claims. Be careful doing this with friends and relatives – you might discover something it’s best not knowing! Don’t violate loved ones privacy. No hypnosis teachers will teach you about this stuff. The weird and whacky world of the subconscious! So let’s continue in this vein.