Bowers Hypnosis

People ask me what’s the worst thing that can happen when they become hypnotized. I’ll tell you, you fall asleep. That’s it, you fall asleep. When you wake up, you feel great.

When I tell my clients this, at first they don’t believe me. They’ve been told that hypnosis is mind control and that the hypnotist has the power to give them any suggestion, good or bad. Bull!

What people don’t realize is that the hypnotist has no power whatsoever over the client. It is the client who accepts suggestions and in doing so hypnotizes themselves. More importantly, at any point in the hypnosis, the client can choose to reject any suggestion given to them.

If you don’t believe this, go to a hypnotic comedy show. For whatever reason, most of the shows I’ve witness seem to go to the R or X rated side of the scale. At some point during the show, the hypnotist will ask a person on stage to do something risqué. Watch what happens next. You’ll see one or more of the participants move their head slightly and maybe shift in their seat. This is followed by the hypnotist quickly asking the participant to leave the stage. The audience is left wondering what happened.

Here’s the scoop. The hypnotist gave a suggestion that did not conform to the morals or social norms of the participant. As a result, the participant choose not to accept the suggestion and if fact, came completely out of the hypnotic state. The hypnotist recognized this and asked the participant to leave the show so that the show was not ruined.

What about in a clinical setting? The same thing, if I as the hypnotist, give you a suggestion that you do not feel is appropriate or don’t want to follow (think eating spinach for a diet) then you’ll simply ignore the suggestion. If the suggestion goes to far; you, like the participant in the comedy show, will come completely out of hypnosis.

How does this happen? The subconscious mind has a gatekeeper called the critical factor. Its role is to block out any unacceptable suggestions based on your previous moral and social programming. No matter how deep a person goes into hypnosis, the critical factor is always there guarding you from any unacceptable suggestions.

So that’s the behind the “most dangerous thing that can happen in hypnosis”. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be talking in more depth about some of the other common misconceptions I hear about hypnosis as well as some of its more interesting uses.

Smokers trying to quit sometimes use nicotine patches to fight their tobacco dependence. But patches don’t work for everyone. New research suggests that patches might be made more effective if used in combination with hypnosis, just as they tend to work better when used in conjunction with professional counseling. A recently published study showed hypnotherapy to be as effective as standard behavioral counseling when combined with nicotine patches in helping smokers to quit and stay off cigarettes for one year.

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One of the three important factors that influence our performance in any sport, the mental state of the athlete, is often the one most commonly overlooked in any training regime, or practice in general. Most people will focus on fitness and technical ability, but often do not take enough time to train for the “Flow”, or mental state. This is crucial to performing without the negative and destructive thought processes that can sabotage any amount of physical and technique training. It is very common to find reasons for failing, even before we start a session of our chosen sport.

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