Suggestion is all it is.
Whether it’s NLP Hypnosis EFT Chinosis Symbolism, the bedrock of everything is suggestion.
Suggestion in psychology is the process of inducing a thought, sensation, or action in a receptive person without using persuasion and without giving rise to reflection in the recipient. I think that explains pretty much what has been happening with hypnosis and all it’s off shoots over the past few thousand years.
No really hypnotised person reflects on why they are doing or thinking what ever it is they are doing or thinking, if they do then they are not hypnotised.
All hypnotists whether they be clinical, theraputic, stage, motivationalists, NLPers, or any other sort of “If I do this then you will do this” Hypnotists use suggestion.
They have to, it’s all they have.
Now when I was training I was given a list of rules for suggestion, and because I don’t like rules much I have tested every single one and guess what? Not one of them stand up as necessary in practice.
Lets look at some of them.
In suggestion don’t use negative terms like ‘Don’t’, yes I was actually told that! Apparently the mind can not process negatives. No it’s true, they actually write this rubbish in some pretty famous books.
Another beauty is never use the past tense or mention the thing you are trying to cure, repair or remove. It like trying to prepare a plate of poisonous blow fish by carefully making sure that there s absolutely No blowfish in the dish!
I used to lie awake at night trying to think of alternatives!
I gave up.
Nowadays, and I don’t do this often, I tell smokers they don’t smoke, that they never have smoked and although some people may tell them they smoked that won’t bother them they won’t get confused or have any problems with that.
I then cement that with some symbolism and that’s that. It never fails and is as permanent as any other behaviour or belief.
For a phobia I say this, “You know how you get scared and panicky when you see a [spider or sit on a plane etc] well you can stop that now. Just stop. And the next time, and every time you do —- you’ll act —- ” Then cement that with a little symbolism, job done.
This works 100% with people who are hypnotised.
Suggestion is strong stuff.
So strong that we can carry around a poor self image simply from someone telling us – suggesting – that they think we are useless. And this only has to be accepted as our internal reality and that can happen instantly.
So why has this industry – never saw it as a real science – of explaining all this taking time to change a mind grown into psychology, psychotherapy and all the cumbersome complex theory that holds no water in practice grown to where it is now?
Human beings want complexity. If it’s complex it is difficult and therefore it has to be studied and examined. It has to have reams of dead tree devoted to it and hours of fairly useless and cumbersome techniques applied.
You know I stopped ‘teaching’ when I found it much easier to install simple concepts at a subconscious level. And apparently, acording to the experts, I can’t do that either.
