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Hypnosis and Ordinary Trances

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize
that we ought to control our thoughts.

 —  Charles Darwin

The trance state that clients experience in my office as a result of a formal hypnotic induction is just one of the many different trances they experience throughout their day. We are all continually and automatically transforming from one psychological state to another. Hypnosis refers to the procedure of evoking a state changes intentionally.

Initially, some clients fear hypnosis, others doubt its power [some do both]. To prepare them for their first formal trance induction, I often explain: "Hypnosis is a method to intentionally change your emotional or motivational state. The way it works: Act as if the the premises I assert are true." I then assert premises designed to elicit the intended response, typically relaxation for a first induction, for example, "Your hands are becoming warm and heavy."

Ordinary trance formations are the consequence of a similar mechanism of action: Accepting a premise as true elicits an emotional/motivational reaction in the subject. In the ordinary case, this happens automatically as the trance-inducing premises are assumed to be true. When, for example, you interpret a stimulus as signaling threat there is an unintentional trance formation [fight-or-flight reaction].  

To summarize : There is nothing weird or unusual about hypnosis. In fact, there is no such thing as hypnosis, because everything is hypnosis. The only thing unusual about a formal hypnotic induction is that the state change is elicited intentionally rather than as an unintended consequence of your interpretation of whatever has captured your attention at the moment. 

You are always in one state of consciousness or another. In some cases it is determined biologically—by a drug, a medical condition, extreme fatigue, or it may be determined by what you are attending to. For example, if you are thinking about something that makes you angry, your level of arousal will probably increase. On the other hand, focusing your attention on calming imagery or certain sounds will reduce your level of arousal.

Formal Trance Induction {Click Here}

By paying close attention to the script [feel free to let your eyes close at any time], you will alter your psychological state, and along with it will come changes in your level of arousal, perceptual bias, and other state-dependent phenomena.

Anxiety, confidence, anger, and romantic love are all trances and each distorts subjective phenomena such as perception, motivation, and behavior in different ways. You are literally a different person when you are calm than when you are desperate. In a sense, there is no "real" you. How you see things and how you react to them depends on your psychological state at the moment.

Thought Experiment: The Emergency

Imagine that you just got a message that someone in your family had been seriously hurt in an automobile accident and you must get to the emergency room right away. Your biological state would change immediately and you would run or drive there as fast as you could, heart pounding, thoughts racing, experiencing great distress. When you got there and discovered the report was untrue, you would experience a different trance, relief. Objectively, the report was never true; nevertheless, regarding it as true had a great impact on your physical and emotional state.

In this example, your psychological state — including your motivation, perceptual bias and response tendencies — was determined by what your thought was true, not by what was objectively true. It is what you think, not what is objectively true, that determines your psychological state. Understanding this principle gives you a potent weapon in your battle against external sources of control.

Change that comes from within

What you say and do becomes part of world history (and so can never be undone), but the subjective reality that motivates and directs your overt behavior is a creation of your nervous system and does not exist outside of your consciousness. Changing the external world begins within.

Intentional Trance Formation

When you tell yourself to raise your hand it goes up, but when you tell yourself to calm down, become sexually aroused, or salivate, you may not get the desired response. You directly control your skeletal muscles, but do not directly control your experience. However, there is a method to exercise intentional influence over subjective phenomena: Intentional Trance Formation.  

Instead of willing the response directly, as you would to produce a skeletal response like clapping your hands, aim your attention to the stimulus that elicits the intended response. For example if you want to salivate, instead of telling yourself to salivate, imagine licking a juicy, sour lemon—the same approach works with sexual arousal, anger, and other emotional reactions.

Thought Experiment: Eliciting a Cringe

Take a few moments to relive a time when you embarrassed yourself.  You will find that the more vivid the image and the more you can get into it, the greater the cringe effect.

If you were able to evoke the cringe, then you initiated Intentional Trance Formation— that is, you willfully aimed your attention to a particular stimulus, perhaps an embarrassing moment, in order to produce the intended state change.

Thought Experiment: Eliciting Negative Emotional States

Can you bring on the subjective experience of fear or anger intentionally? How would you do it?

Below are some common paths to negative emotional states for you to explore. [Please do not spend too much time with this exercise or take it too seriously. It is presented as an introductory demonstration of what not to do in real life]:

  • Think of everyone you know who is younger than you and makes more money.
  • Review the Popular Thinking Errors. Choose the ones that might apply to you and reify them by making a case for each. Note the ones that elicit an emotional reaction and dwell on them.
  • Use the powers of your imagination to create thoughts and images that would elicit the emotional state of anger or fear. The topics can be real or imagined, and may pertain to the past or future. Themes of previous episodes of Ruminative Self-Focus are good places to start.
  • Act as if you were an anxious fellow [Barry] or an angry one [Bernie]. For this personal experiment you are an actor playing the part of Barry or Bernie. Because you are a good method actor, you can really get into it and see the world through the character's eyes, and feel in your heart what the character feels.

Because this is an early exercise and I wanted to make it easy, I asked you to attend to negative rather than positive cognitions. Efficacy-enhancing thoughts and images are far more difficult to work with than pathogenic ones. In fact some people are so biased against imagery that would strengthen them that they actively work to suppress suggestions such as I am competent, successful, lovable, etc., because they were trained to be modest or self-deprecating. If shaming suggestions such as: I am not good enough, I am defective, I am unlovable, etc. are part of you conditioning history, then De-Reifying these beliefs is likely to be the key to good long-term outcome.

 

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