Let Your Fingers Do the Talking

Wouldn't it be nice if you could directly communicate with your unconscious mind and ask it to change a habit, or engage your creative resources to resolve a sticky problem? Well, there is a time honored hypnosis technique that opens the door for doing just that.

In technical jargon, the hypnotherapist assists the client in establishing “ideomotor signals”. Ideomotor signals are answers coming in the form of physical movements directly from the unconscious mind to yes/no questions. Commonly, one finger will lift to indicate “yes”, and another to indicate “no”. Other types of signals may be used as well, for example, a head nod or leg twitch for “yes” and a head shake or a twitch of the other leg to indicate”no”.

One of my clients came to me with excessively dry eyes. Her doctors told her that the dryness was genetically caused, so they had no solutions other than eye drops. I guided her into hypnosis and arranged yes/no finger signals. I simply asked her unconscious mind if it would make more tears, and got a yes response. My clients eyes were bright, shiny, and moist as she left that day.

Simply requesting a solution may not be effective in some situations, and there are other more involved techniques. One such technique, a six step reframe, comes from NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP). It involves setting up ideomotor signals, and guiding the unconscious mind through a step by step process of creating superior new choices to replace the problem behaviors. Then the hypnotherapist makes sure that there is no internal conflict within the person over any of the new choices. Once complete internal agreement is secured, it's simply a matter of getting a commitment from the unconscious mind to use the new choices instead of the old behaviors.

The six step reframe is useful for a great many issues, including smoking cessation, and weight control. When a number of behaviors need to be addressed, as with the case in weight control, it may be useful to do several six step re frames, one for each different aspect of the changes needed in eating and exercise behaviors. For example, snacking may be a different issue than preferring fried foods at meals, so I would guide a client through a six step reframe for each issue.

Frog's Eyes and Phobias

Frog's eyes are only able to see something if it moves.And since frogs are rather simple creatures, that works just fine for them. Humans, on the other hand, need to be able to stay visually focused on objects for a minute or even longer. Our eyes are actually like the frog's eyes. If an object is unmoving in our visual field, it will disappear. The reason that you can focus on this text long enough to read it is simply that your eyes are continuously moving in short bursts multiple times each second. Those little eye movements are enough to allow us to continuously see things, like the edge of a computer monitor, in the background.

And, the same principle is true for all our senses. For example, you've probably not been aware of the sensations in your left earlobe until I mentioned it here. Chances are you've tuned out the sounds of your computer's fans, and other background noises as well.

So what does this have to do with phobias? Simply put, emotions, including the panic and fear of a phobic response, are experienced as physical sensations that must continuously change in some way to remain in our awareness. And, that fact opens the door for a person to eliminate, lessen, or transform any emotion by using the imagination to change the movements of that emotion.

When asked most people report that their feelings move along the middle of the body, either up or down, or clockwise or counterclockwise. In other words, the feelings spin. And it was Richard Bandler, one of the original developers of NeuroLinguistic Programming, who discovered that simply by having the person use his or her imagination to reverse the spin that it is possible to substantially improve the automatic emotional responses to situations in which that person was initially fearful.

I recently worked with a client who was having difficulty getting over a breakup with her boyfriend. On thing that really helped was for her to take the anxious and hurt feelings and make them spin in the opposite direction. We threw in a few giggles to the new feelings generated by the reversed spin for good measure. And, by the time she left my office she laughed when I reminded her that her ex had cheated on her before he broke up with her. That was a total reversal from her initial teary description of the breakup.

Can I be hypnotized?

The short answer is: yes. If you're capable of reading this sentence you are capable of going into hypnosis.

The idea that some people can't be hypnotized has been around for quite some time. However, excluding those in comas or similar states, everyone is able to go in and out of hypnotic states easily. The person who is so caught up in thought that they miss a turn while driving has the same brain wave patterns as a person who is officially hypnotized. Someone who is so absorbed in a movie that they temporarily stop noticing their surroundings is in a hypnotic state, too. The brainwaves state of someone in hypnosis is identical to being halfway asleep or awake. So we all experience hypnotic states at least twice a day.

There is some flawed research that promotes the idea that some people are more hypnotizable than others. One of the researchers, Ernest R. Hilgard, developed "hypnotizablilty scales" that are supposed to measure how susceptible a person is to hypnosis. These scales were based on the experimental volunteers' production of various hypnotic responses, such as numbness, or temporary inability to open the eyes, in response to a standardized set of suggestions during their first experience of hypnosis.

As I'm sure that you have noticed by now, people are not standardized, and have a huge variety of different personalities, levels of education, and belief systems, all of which can influence how they may respond to a hypnotic suggestion.

Milton Erickson M.D., one of the great geniuses of hypnosis, taught that everyone can learn to produce all of the hypnotic responses if their unique personality needs were taken into account by the hypnotist. And, he demonstrated his beliefs by routinely hypnotizing people who were considered unhypnotizable on the Hilgard scales. Even so, there are still a great many schools of hypnosis that use hypnotizability tests, and the Hilgard scales to evaluate clients.

Of course, it's true that some people will easily have the full range of hypnotic response the first time that they are officially hypnotized, and others will take a fair amount to training to have that level of response. The point being that everyone can learn.

Successfully going into hypnosis depends on several things. The client needs to feel comfortable with the hypnotist, and the hypnotist needs the ability to determine the appropriate approach for the client. So the well educated hypnotist brings a variety of techniques and approaches to produce a good hypnotic experience for the client. So, yes, everyone can be hypnotized.

Is "Growing Up a Part" Hypnosis?

One way of thinking of the human mind is that it is a collection of interconnected sub personalities. The idea that we have parts goes back as least as far as Shakespeare, who had two of his characters in one of the comedies saying something like, "A part of me wants to go to the party, and a part of me wants to stay home". And, it's still common today to hear people talk about one or more of their "parts" wanting this, or thinking that.

As a hypnotherapist, a part of me thinks that it might just be useful to use the notion of parts to help my clients resolve issues. For example, the parts model can be very useful in resolving internal conflicts. Most of my stop smoking clients for example, both want to quit smoking and desire cigarettes both. So I'll have them imagine the two parts and negotiate a new set of behaviors that both agree are superior to smoking for accomplishing their positive intentions for the client. Assuming that all behaviors (and parts) have a positive intention is very useful in these kinds of negotiations.

One way of approaching a behavior that the person consciously finds unacceptable is by assuming that the part that runs the behavior may have stopped developing an an earlier age in much the same way that alcoholics or drug addicts stop maturing when they start spending much of their time in a drug alter reality. So I may have the client ask the part how old it is. This is where the hypnosis is beginning to come into play. To answer the question the person has to go into an altered state of consciousness to have a dialog with the part. To be sure, this is a very shallow state of hypnosis, but it's hypnosis none the less.

If the part says that it's 5 years old, for example, and the client is 50, it's safe to assume that the part is immature, and never had access to all the learnings and experiences the person since he or she was 5 years old. The next step is to instruct the part to communicate with all the person's other parts and have them share with it all the learnings and maturity that they've accumulated over the years. In essence the part "grow up". Once the part has grown up, it no longer finds the original, childlike behavior desirable, and spontaneously develops choices that the person consciously appreciates as being appropriate and acceptable.

One example of how growing up a part can be effective is that of a client who came to me for help in stopping smoking. She had started smoking over twenty years ago specifically for the purpose of upsetting someone else. "I'll hurt myself, and then they'll be sorry" is a childlike and childish attitude. When I realized her purpose for smoking, I simply had her grow up that childlike part, and that was the last piece she needed to end her smoking habit. After all, she is an adult, and if she wants to annoy someone, she can do it without potentially harming herself or others.

Why Does Someone Start Smoking?

The vast majority of smokers start for just one reason. It's because we humans are herd animals. We need to belong to a group. Most smokers start in their teen years, and sometimes even younger. And, during those early years, smoking is a way to join a rather well defined and seemingly select group.

If you watch High School students hanging around, you'll notice that the smokers not only tend to stand together, they will stand in a circle facing inwards. For other young people the ticket of admission to that circle seems to be smoking, so they start.

Afterwards, smokers will develop associations to smoking that have nothing to do with the initial impulse to join the circle. A great many will come to believe that smoking has benefits like relaxation, or that it's an excuse to take a break from work.

What happens is that nicotine withdrawal will cause a mild craving sensation that goes away for a while after a cigarette. The sense of relief is accompanied with a release of the tension that was created by the craving in the first place. Then the person begins to believe that smoking causes relaxation, or a sense of relief in general, even though nicotine is a stimulant.

The old adage about seeing is believing is actually backwards. The truth is that we believe determines what we see and experience. Relaxation in response to smoking is more due to a slick piece of inadvertent self hypnosis than any response to the drug. Smokers believe that they will get relief from their stress if they smoke, so they do...sort of. If you've ever watched an upset smoker burn through one cigarette after another, you'll have noticed that not only do they stay stressed, they smoke more than normal. Because the smoking isn't actually calming them down, even though they believe it will, they keep putting more nicotine in their systems hoping for the relief that never comes.

Of course, some smokers start for unusual reasons. For example one of my clients told me that he started smoking at age 5. Apparently his parents thought it was cute to see a 5 year old smoking. This happened over 60 years ago, and it's safe to assume that his parents had no idea of how smoking might harm the health of a child.

Another of my clients recently told me that she had started smoking in her early 20's as a way of aggravating her life partner, who smoked. The partner was upset, of course, which was exactly the response that my client wanted. That is an example of what psychologists call secondary gain, and knowing my client's unusual reason for starting smoking was a key in helping her quit for good.