HOW TO STUDY HYPNOTHERAPY

Recommended introductory reading for the

Post Graduate Diploma in Ericksonian Hypnotherapy and NLP

Stephen Brooks

The British Hypnosis Research and Training Institute 2013

Preface by Igor Ledochowski Milton Erickson MD was a genius. Many believe that he was the greatest hypnotherapist ever to practice. He inspired the creation of many therapeutic disciplines like NLP, Time Line Therapy and Brief Therapy. Erickson developed a rich style of therapy and created long lasting, deeply rooted changes in people. Even when he taught hypnosis people made remarkable transformations. He is still a legend and an inspiration to countless therapists today.

Every budding hypnotist must have wondered at some time what it would have been like to get the chance to train with the old master of hypnosis. Can you imagine entering Ericksons private study, where only a select group of people have been invited? What would the atmosphere have been like: the hush of anticipation, the excitement as the old master entered the room, bathing you with his presence. Suppose you had been invited to a private seminar. Imagine having the opportunity to experience deep trances that allowed you to absorb therapeutic patterns, experience personal change and see remarkable demonstrations of therapy. What would you give for the chance to learn directly from such a master?

In the 1970s hypnotherapy was virtually unknown in the UK. Most of the practicing hypnotherapists used old and rigid models of direct hypnosis adapted from stage hypnosis courses. Nobody had even heard of Milton Erickson. Nobody, that is, except one man: Stephen Brooks.

Stephen Brooks was trained in and began to practice hypnotherapy in the 1970s. He quickly became disillusioned with the therapeutic models on offer in the UK and he started to search elsewhere for answers. He found them in Erickson. Brooks contacted Erickson and soon was being guided by the old master in his own therapeutic approaches. Brooks was the first person to introduce the powerful new form of indirect hypnosis to the UK and he got results. Fast!

His clinics filled to capacity: he was treating 8 to 10 patients per day, in 6 different towns for 6 days a week every week of the year! He worked with every problem imaginable and, under Ericksons careful guidance, developed his own unique approaches of powerful indirect hypnosis. His patients made miraculous transformations. People across the country were stunned. Demand for Brooks continued to grow as he learned to master these powerful new skills.

Brooks was in great demand. Soon he found himself teaching across the UK. His own innovative indirect therapy techniques had a major influence on the health professions both in the UK and Europe. They forever changed the perception of hypnosis and how it should be used within therapy.

In the 1970s Brooks founded British Hypnosis Research (1979) and the British Society of Clinical and Medical Ericksonian Hypnosis (1995). Both were major training bodies for the caring professions. As the UK's foremost hypnotherapy trainer, his Diploma courses became the standard training for thousands of health professionals. Over a period of 15 years Brooks taught indirect hypnosis courses in over 27 major British hospitals. His Diploma courses also became the standard training for hypnotherapy associations and organisations in France, Belgium, Spain, Ireland, Canada and Malaysia.

In 1991 he was awarded special acclaim when archive recordings of his work were preserved in the British National Sound Archives. Brooks was widely acclaimed as the new standard for innovative, quick and long lasting indirect therapy.

There is a twist in the tale. Brookss reputation and success continued to soar. Many believed his skills had outstripped even those of his old mentor, Milton Erickson. The demand for Brookss talents was greater than ever. Then one day, in the mid 1990s, at the height of his fame and success he decided to go. He retired from British Hypnosis Research and the British Society of Clinical and Medical Ericksonian Hypnosis and vanished without a trace.

Nobody knew what had happened to him. Everyone was puzzled. No one could find him. Like Erickson, Stephen Brooks name simply faded into legend. He became a folk hero to many young therapists now practicing hypnosis and NLP. The only access they had to him were through Brooks video "Training in Indirect Hypnosis" and the once numerous video and audio training programs that were becoming rarer and harder to find.

So when we heard that no one could resolve the mystery of his disappearance, I decided that it was time to find him. It took me a while to do it. He was a hard man to trace. But finally I did it. I managed to track him down. Stephen Brooks had retired to the jungles of Northern Thailand, of all places. He had been spending the last six years studying Theravada Buddhism and Shamanism there. But we were curious to know: could Brooks still hack it? Could he still perform personal miracles with people? Or had he lost the magic touch?

We talked to him and, in our arrogance, demanded a demonstration. With a mischievous gleam in his eyes he agreed. We brought him a patient, someone he had never seen before. Then we sat back and watched him go to work. We could not believe our eyes. We watched as Brooks weaved the magic that had made him famous. Not only had Brooks not lost any of his edge, if anything his awesome skills had improved!! We were completely blown away.

Brooks approach to hypnosis and indirect therapy is unique. A common thread in his work is his humour, compassion and creative approach. He also has this deep respect for the unique needs of the patient. For the first time since his disappearance in the 1990s people now have the chance to study the work of this undisputed master of hypnosis. Brooks is already a legend in his own time. Now you have the opportunity to study his work as it forms the

basis of the British Hypnosis Research and Training Institutes Post Graduate Diploma course. And, if you wish to also train with him personally, you can still learn directly from him on his annual Master Class Retreat that he runs from his base in Chiang Mai Thailand. Imagine that: the anticipation and the excitement as you prepare to learn at a private seminar directly from Stephen Brooks. This is an experience like no other: you will learn by doing, enter deep trances as your unconscious mind learns exceptional things and observe live demonstrations from Brooks as he weaves his magic.

Stephen Brooks emphasises the need for his students to see his magic in action. He insists on doing many demonstrations with real patients - people he has never met before with real, deep seated problems. Brooks works with patients and volunteers live during training courses by way of example, something that many trainers are still afraid to do. And he gets results. Fast!

Igor Ledochowski founder of Conversational Hypnosis

Contents PART ONE

Using Concepts and Contexts In Indirect Hypnosis Understanding The Nature Of Reality Hypnotic Trance and Becoming One with Reality A Brief Introduction To The Six Stages of Indirect Hypnosis Rapport Information Gathering Identifying Resources Trance Induction Therapeutic Interventions Motivating Your Patients The Meta Components of an Indirect Hypnotherapy Session Approach, Technique, Strategy and Skills Approach Technique Strategy Skills Learning All Of This Overlapping

PART TWO Example of a live tutorial - The utilization of ideo-motor responses in accessing

unconscious information, memories and resources as a primary treatment modality in Ericksonian Hypnotherapy

Live audio course Link to an audio course of a therapy session with subtitled commentary

Appendix Five Eminent French Doctors talk about the work of Stephen Brooks Dr K Axon Interviews Ericksonian hypnotherapist Stephen Brooks The Unconscious Mind of a Master Therapist research project at Roehampton

University London based on interviewing Stephen Brooks while in hypnosis. Stephen Brooks Biography

Introduction So often in psychotherapy, problems remain unexplainable and solutions elusive. This can happen despite all effort on the patients part to explain the events and patterns that have led up to their symptoms developing, and despite the therapist asking the most pointed and searching questions. In such cases, where no concrete answers present themselves, hypnotherapists often ask patients to trust their unconscious and to allow therapy to happen all by itself. Trusting the unconscious is of course the stock in trade of the Ericksonian Hypnotherapist, and while this is often a powerful tool for inner healing, it can also be a dangerous weapon in the hands of a new, if enthusiastic therapist.

The reason for prescribing this form of DIY unconscious healing is often the therapists ignorance about what to do next, so this approach to therapy can sometimes deliver unpredictable results, especially if the therapist does not have a basic understanding of how patients experience reality, the effect of trance states on that reality and vice versa.

Knowing that anything is possible when the unconscious decides on its own therapy, without guidance, you might understand my concern about the way that many therapists practice indirect hypnosis or the Ericksonian approach.

Many trainees try to model established therapists in the hope that they may acquire some of the therapists skills. This concept has primarily developed from the field of NLP. While this is positive in principle it can be misleading if the trainee then believes that he can then install the therapeutic strategies that will allow him to replicate the excellence of the therapist.

Take for example the innovative work of some eminent Ericksonians like Dr Ernest Rossi. Dr Rossi appears to work with minimal verbal intervention or patient guidance. His therapy sessions seem to be the closest thing to non-verbal healing you might find in psychotherapy, so much so that it might be easy to discount his contribution to the talking therapies. Yet behind Rossis approach lies a complete model of psychotherapy that not only respects the integrity of the unconscious mind but also understands the dynamics of how problems develop and are maintained by patients.

Yet to see him working it would be all too easy to model what one sees and hears, believing that by replicating his minimalist approach, the same results could be achieved. So easy would it be to model in fact, that you could do it after watching one session, and it would most likely look and sound the same. Yet it wouldnt be the same because you would not have his unique life experience or the same understanding that lies behind the approach.

Modelling is a good way to learn, but only if supported with a detailed and precise analysis of the strategies being employed by the therapist being modelled. Sadly, not many great therapists allow us the opportunity of watching them do therapy, and of those that do, not

many have the additional skill to accurately communicate what they do at an unconscious level as they demonstrate their art. So we are left to model well known therapists only on video and usually without any on-going commentary from the therapist themselves as to what they are doing.

Whenever possible, therapy trainers should walk their talk and demonstrate therapy in real time, ideally with a running commentary to the audience or at least a blow-by-blow analysis afterwards. Trainers should demonstrate why they believe that they have the authority to teach what they teach.

Trainee therapists are often let loose on the public with only a brief experience of modelling so-called excellence, when in reality what they are modelling is their own limited perception of excellence. What they really need is to get their hands dirty on courses and take the therapy trainer, demonstration patient and themselves apart piece by piece to analyse the structure of how it all works. Regrettably this rarely happens as many courses are no more than the rote learning of inflexible techniques.

So where do you start when there is just so much going on? Isnt it just easier to sit back, trusting your unconscious to learn by going into trance and modelling what you think you see and hear? Sadly no, this isnt the way, although it can be a useful way of filling in the gaps in your learning that you may have missed consciously. I always try and give my students a multi-dimensional learning experience when I teach, and this applies to the courses I write for others to teach. There is no point in holding back and keeping strategies to myself. I am not happy unless I too have learnt something from my own therapy demonstrations and have been able to empower others by discussing those demonstrations in full with my students.

I have taken Ericksons approach to hypnotherapy and developed it in my own unique way to hopefully be more appropriate for practitioners and their patients in the 21st century. Back in the 1940s when Erickson was at his peak, psychotherapists believed that their job was to help patients get back on track and meet the expectations of society and family. Being seen as normal and conforming to the American dream of a good education, early marriage, 2 children and a respectable job with promotion was seen as the goal, and Erickson designed his therapy sessions around helping his patients achieve this by easily moving through each stage of the process from birth, school, socialising, dating, parenting and aging.

These days, while these are still important, our patients have more individual needs with their own goals and dreams. So Ericksons criteria for successful therapy does not apply in the same way anymore. His techniques, skills, strategies, approach and therapeutic principles are still just as valid however. And it is this aspect of Ericksons work that I have been most interested in developing and applying to my own patients over the past 40 years.

And it is my application of these that I have taught to my students on the British Hypnosis Research and Training Institutes courses since the 1980s.

The Structure of Indirect Hypnotherapy Sessions An Overview

Using Concepts and Contexts In Indirect Hypnosis

Over the years on my training courses I have been asked one question over and over again How do you know what to do first, next and last? Of course there is no simple answer, but most recently I have been telling students that there are two simple concepts that you can apply that will enable you to see yourself, your patient and their problems in perspective and therefore see how you relate to one another within the context of a therapy session. If you learn these concepts everything else will start to fall into place, often without too much effort.

The first concept relates to how we experience and maintain our relationship with reality, and the second to what we choose to include in our reality.

Behind any kind of therapy there should be a basic understanding of how people experience reality. Without this understanding, therapy will be a shot in the dark. Yet rarely is the nature of reality taught on therapy courses. Most course participants are hungry for techniques and pursue the learning and practice of these techniques without realising that a basic understanding of the nature of reality will itself enable the trainee to develop their own innovative therapeutic techniques.

Understanding The Nature Of Reality

A topic such as Understanding the Nature of Reality may sound a bit daunting and a bit like a hefty PhD thesis but this does not have to be the case, as it can easily be learnt in just a few hours of training. Even given that the practice of this knowledge may require several sessions of concentrated effort and on-going application of this understanding, it is still relatively easy to understand.

To know how a patient relates to his problem and how the problem is maintained, you also need to understand how you relate to your own experience of life events and how you maintain an interest in these events. By understanding the interaction between yourself and events you will also understand how hypnosis plays a part in your own experience of everyday reality and be able to see how hypnosis also can also play a part in resolving

problems for patients. Understanding reality will help you understand hypnosis and vice versa, because they are very closely linked.

Hypnotic Trance and Becoming One with Reality

The above title may sound a bit esoteric but any hypnotherapist knows that if you look at a spot on the wall for long enough, your eyes will de-focus and your visual field narrow, leading to eye fatigue and possible internal imagery, but why does this happen? There are many explanations, and all may play a part but by far the most important reason is that we cease to connect with reality. We are still looking at that spot but that spot is static, as are our eyes, so there is no movement and without movement we have no way of measuring our relationship with the spot.

When reality fails us externally we seek it internally and so we start to experience internal imagery, or at least some kind of connection with our inner absorption. Our internal reality becomes more real than our external reality, because it has more movement in terms of internal imagery and / or thoughts and feelings, by which we can measure our relationship to it. If we cease to experience movement in our internal reality we become one with it and dissociate from all conscious thinking or way of comparing or judging.

Everyday we continually test and measure reality by adding to it and observing its response to our contribution. If you have an itch you scratch it and then you wait to see the result, if its still there you scratch some more. If you do not scratch it in the first instance, there comes a time when it ceases to itch, not because the itch has gone but because you have stopped interacting with it and stopped knowing that you are separate from it. If you merge with the itch you become part of it and no longer feel separate from it and so no longer feel it.

People naturally fidget when they are sitting still, talking, sleeping or watching TV. Every movement is a deliberate, albeit unconscious, mismatching with reality, a deliberate attempt to separate the self from reality in order to relate to reality. As contradictory as this seems, people try to feel part of reality by separating themselves from it and comparing themselves to it, moment by moment. While this does confirm that they are part of reality it also prevents them from becoming one with it. This is one of the reasons some people have difficulty going into trance. They are simply too keen to go into trance, and continually keep checking back with reality to see how they are progressing.

If you stop fidgeting, you blend into reality, you become one with it, but it is difficult for you to tell this is happening because you are no longer separate from it. So your instinct to survive tells you to keep checking to test that you are still independent, alive and part of the living world.

When we touch things we tend to incorporate movement into the touching and this increases the tactile sensations. A touch without movement gives you limited information. Likewise, the first thing you do when you look at something is to look away so you can see the difference between what you are looking at and what you have not been looking at. By comparing the two you give solidity to each. You continually test reality to know your relationship to it. Your patients do this too. They do it to you, to everything they experience and especially to their problems. The more you appreciate this simple concept the easier therapy will be.

Patients check how well they are doing in order to know how good their therapy is, but their observations can sabotage the benefits of the therapy. If you can get your patients to let go of needing to know how well they are doing then your work will be more effective.

There are two fundamental ways to stop your patient from continually checking how well they are doing; by decreasing how much content they have in their reality (by limiting how much access they have to their reality) and by increasing how much content they have in their reality (by getting the patient to see their problem in other contexts). It is your understanding of how these two concepts work together that will give you the therapeutic edge as a therapist.

Profound hypnotic trance requires a reduction in the need to compare oneself with the external world and an acceptance of the state of uncritical acceptance, in other words, a merging of the self with reality, initially by merging with external reality (de-focusing, immobility etc), and then by merging with internal reality (eye closure, visualisation, dreaming, states of non-self etc). When the patient has truly merged with their reality their problems can appear to cease to exist as they no longer feel themselves to be separate from them and so can no longer be critical, objective or governed by the rules of their external reality or everyday conscious ways of thinking.

However, while this is an ideal state in which to work therapeutically during therapy sessions, it is not a practical state for patients to maintain in the real world. In the real world, patients usually try and stay out of trance by fidgeting and doing anything that prevents a merging with reality in order to check how well they are doing or otherwise in therapy. Reality contains events, behaviours and many shades of experience, which act as reference points by which people measure how they feel. Patients can be both limited and empowered by the amount of reference points they hold in their reality. And this is why by decreasing how much access they have to their reality and by increasing how much content they have in their reality we can break patients out their current rigid ways of thinking about their problems.

When the patient enters therapy he brings in a fixed number of reference points. He refers to these continually, usually throughout the first interview. Your job as therapist is to use a combination of techniques and language patterns to help the patient increase and decrease

the number of reference points available to him at given times during the therapeutic process so as to steer him, albeit indirectly, across the map of his recovery.

The less information patients have in their reality, the less reference points they have with which to assess the state of their problem, so the harder it will be for them to make conscious decisions. This is often useful when they are over active consciously and want to manipulate the treatment in some way, even with the best intentions. Some patients however need more reference points, not so much to assess their own progress in therapy, as this would not be useful, but to help them see their problem in a new light.

This is where the concept of contextual change comes in. Shifting the problem to a new or different context, either by transforming the context through expansion to include more reference points or by moving the problem to a new and novel context for example by seeing the problem as if embedded in a different time frame, the patient can gain insights that can then be applied therapeutically to the problem when in trance.

If reference points are removed with hypnotic trance, either formal or indirect trance, a patient can often reach the point where they lose awareness of their problem. At this stage they are ripe for change. Armed with the insights from the prior contextual shifts they can enter the world of hypnosis, often without bias or interpretation and apply their insights unconsciously to resolving their problem without the contamination of conscious interference and with a sense that they no longer need to check their progress, as they sense that it has already started happening anyway.

Your job as a hypnotherapist is to open up new worlds that have remained elusive until the patient enters therapy with you. These new worlds require the patient to be active both consciously and unconsciously, but for different reasons and at different times and within a safe and caring environment. It is your responsibility as a therapist to provide this environment, to know how to affect the patients awareness of their reality and to know how and where you can learn to develop your skills to do this.

A Brief Introduction to The Six Stages of Indirect Hypnosis

Rapport

Information Gathering

Identifying Resources

Trance Induction

Therapeutic Interventions

Motivating Your Patients

Rapport

The first time someone telephones for an appointment, and if I get the chance to speak to them personally, I will start work right there on the phone. Part of this chat will be based on building rapport and part will be based on offering hypnotic suggestions. I will start with something very simple.

A woman phoned me because she was pregnant and wanted to know if I could teach her self-hypnosis for pain control. To build rapport and to insert some pre-session suggestions for pain control I told her this story:

I had a woman telephone me recently who wanted the same thing and all I did was, ask her to come into my office and sit down and listen to me. I told her that her hand was getting very, very numb and I allowed this to happen over the next few minutes. I then I taught her how to do this for herself. She then just placed her hand wherever she wanted and she was able to anaesthetize that part of her body. It just happened all by itself automatically.

After this story, my new patient booked an appointment and when she turned up I started talking to her and she started to go into trance, she just drifted off, and I said, Whats happened to your hand? and she said. I cant feel it.

The indirect pre-session hypnotic suggestions were given on the phone, and as shed had a few days to allow them to become integrated and fixed in her mind, so the trance and anaesthesia just happened by its self without me having to suggest it directly. This is where the science of hypnosis becomes an art. By being indirect and implying the therapeutic

outcomes we want, we can bypass any resistance the patient might have to hypnosis or change.

So the work starts right at the very first contact with a patient. In this case it was on the phone before we had even met. The first step is to build rapport and prime the patient for the session. Unless you have that, nothing will happen. So rapport is the prerequisite of successful therapy. I always stress the importance of learning how to build rapport on my courses. Rapport is like the foundation of a house, without it, everything falls down.

Information Gathering

The next step is Information Gathering questioning and observation. If you pay attention with your eyes you will pick up a different class of information from when you only listen. You need to use all of your senses to pick up information because you are looking for a mismatch in the way that the patient communicates. Every mismatch will give you valuable clues about what to do next with your patient.

You are looking for incongruity. For example, if you ask your patient the following question; How are things with your mother? and the patient answers Fine but at the same time shakes her head as if disagreeing with herself, she is demonstrating incongruity. If you then ask; How are things with your father? and again the patient answers Fine but then digs her heels into the floor as if she is uncomfortable talking about her father, she is again demonstrating incongruity. The patients words sound positive but there is a mismatch between her positive verbal responses and the negative non-verbal communication, and these are the things you need to watch for. Think of them as opportunities to identify areas of inner conflict.

You ask; Can you remember what it was like being a teenager? The patient answers Umm yes and the heels dig in again. When you see a simultaneous positive verbal and negative non-verbal behaviour repeated as a response to further questions you can be sure that your line of questioning is evoking important clues about the source of the patients problem.

The patients non-verbal behaviour is a running commentary on what the patient is thinking unconsciously. For example you may again ask; Please tell me about your relationship with your father, and the patient replies, Oh we dont see each other much anymore, and as she replies, she unconsciously massages the back of her neck as if experiencing tension there. So you notice a physiological non-verbal ideo-motor response accompanying her verbal response. You might even in some instances interpret the non-verbal response as a kind of non-verbal metaphor, implying that she feels that the father is a pain in the neck. Look for verbal and non-verbal incongruities and this will give you valuable information.

Identifying Resources

I believe that every patient has within them the unconscious resources necessary for solving problems, but that usually they dont know they have these resources, or, they know they have them, but are unable to access them. Most psychological problems require more than just everyday rational thinking but because most people have no conscious awareness of the unconscious minds ability to solve problems effectively they only use their conscious resources. The patients failed conscious attempts at problem solving usually increases their anxiety. So when a patient comes in to see you they usually come with two problems. Firstly, they come in with their actual problem and secondly the problem of not being able to resolve their problem.

Everyone knows how hard it is to try and do certain things which really ought to be done unconsciously, like tying shoelaces, tying a necktie or driving a car. All of these things can be best performed at an unconscious level and once learned are really difficult to manage consciously.

If I asked you to explain how to tie a shoelace, your fingers could probably show me a lot faster than you could tell me. This is because, by letting your fingers demonstrate how to do it, you would be letting go and allowing the unconscious part of you to do it for you.

So Indirect Hypnosis is about teaching the patient how to go inside, say hello to their unconscious mind and getting it to heal them. You, as a therapist do not do any healing, you only help the patient open up the channels for their own self-healing and you do so with as little visible intervention as possible.

You should never give your patient the impression that you are doing the therapy - it is always the patient who does the work. You should be empowering them by acknowledging their ability to heal themselves, not disempowering them by claiming to be the super-talented therapist. With your help the patient is taught to go inside to gain access to their natural ability to heal themselves with the resources that they have at an unconscious level, and they should be encouraged to realize this so that they feel an active part of their success.

I am often asked about the therapeutic benefits of healing with unconscious resources in hypnosis, compared to the benefits of meditation or the positive effects of placebo, where the patients belief that they will get better actually stimulates the healing process. I believe that if the patient can get better with the unconscious mind utilizing inner resources, by meditating on candle flame or through the placebo effect then all of these approaches are viable and should be classed as successful techniques or approaches. Therapy can only be said to be successful if it gets results, so as long the success as can be reasonably measured and then replicated in others they are all viable approaches to therapy. I am always amazed

(and disappointed) when a patient gets better because of a placebo and the medical profession dont consider it as a valid or successful intervention.

The placebo effect is very active in psychotherapy, maybe much more than is given credit. If I could teach therapists to be charismatic enough to just sit in front their patients, and have their patients get better, without them having to say anything, then I would do it. I think that although you are being taught therapeutic structures as part of your training in hypnotherapy, sometimes, the less you do, the better. This is the origin of my Non Attachment Therapy, something that I developed as a result of my work with Buddhist monks in Thailand in the 1990s and something I hope to teach and share more fully in the future.

Your patients needs will determine the direction of the therapy. If you force your patient to match your model of how you believe therapy should be done then you will severely limit your patients ability to get better by themselves. The more open you are in your approach and the more flexible and non-authoritarian you are with your language, the more successful the treatment will be. So rather than forcing your patient to follow a particular therapeutic model I suggest that you sow the seeds of therapy indirectly and then step back two or three paces and just watch your patient get better. It can work all by itself, on one condition; that you work from the heart, but more about that another time.

Trance Induction

People go in and out of trance on a day to day basis. Your role is to evoke these naturally occurring trance states indirectly in a conversational and naturalistic way that respects the patients integrity. The actual art and science of evoking these trance states is a lot more complicated than it at first appears, and you should set your sights on mastering this particular stage of the therapeutic process. If you are unable to put people into trance simply by your presence in the room with them then you havent been studying hard enough. Keep this in mind as you learn everything and put it into practice. Trance is both the vehicle for the therapy and the adhesive for making it stick. It is your means of accessing the patients unconscious mind which holds the memories and resources required for problem solving.

Successful trance induction is based on two things, your ability to induce an appropriate trance state and the patients ability to experience it. There can be many variables and no two trances are the same, so its a little bit like juggling with reality. Successfully trance induction is contingent on your ability to master hypnotic language and to do so with integrity, understanding of unconscious processes and compassion for other people. Hypnotic language can be highly manipulative in the wrong hands but is rarely successful in these cases because it lacks the integrity and compassion to have deep lasting meaning for a patient.

Therapeutic Intervention

Therapeutic Intervention is where you actually step in and do something when you have to. So far Ive been talking about stepping back and being as visibly inactive as possible but of course there are certain things you need to do more directly sometimes in order to help people, especially in the field of couple or family therapy, so I often give people tasks in order to bring about outcomes. The indirect therapeutic skills you will learn are multiple, that is, there are many skills youll take away from your studies and training, and of course you can use skills in different combinations, which is why its never the same set of skills for each patient.

For example, one day you may have a particular patient, and you will suddenly decide to reach into your box of skills and pull out a skill that you have never used before or a new skill that is an integration of several others. Once you have learnt how to use each of these skills, and to create your own by combining the principles behind each skill, you will be able to be very creative. Good therapeutic intervention is based on your ability to be observant, innovative and flexible in your approach and skill development, most of which then happens spontaneously as you work.

Motivating Your Patients

Regardless of how well you progress through the various stages of a therapy session there is one deciding, and in many cases, elusive factor that will determine your success as a therapist. This concerns the patients degree of motivation.

There seem to be two common patterns that often prevent patients from getting better. Patients are usually confused about how to help themselves so they consistently repeat failed attempts at problem resolution, thereby increasing their anxiety and frustration, which often aggravates the symptoms. Secondly they consistently apply these failed attempts through conscious effort. This has the negative affect of training the brain to devalue the role of the unconscious and often reinforces the severity of the symptoms by giving them more conscious attention.

Many patients seem divided by doubts about their ability to get better. This is usually caused by previous failure, either with their specific problem or from a general lack of confidence caused by past experiences of failure. Patients sometimes say things like Theres a part of me that wants to change and theres another part which says I cant.

The patients chance of success is very low while they have such doubts. Patient motivation is the pre-requisite to the acceptance of your therapeutic interventions and is the key to

really successful therapy, so its very important that you deal with the part that says I cant.

I believe that you can do anything you want to if the goal is realistic. If you want to accomplish something within a reasonable time frame, and you have the resources and the skill to do so, then I think that there is every reason to believe that it is possible. I often tell this to patients and give examples from my own history.

In therapy we are dealing with the realm of the possible. So when people come to see me, I try and access whether they have the resources and time to achieve what they want. If they want something reasonable I will deal with any doubts and go for it immediately. If what they want is unreasonable, either in terms of time, context or resources I will try and get them to re-evaluate their goals so they are reasonable and attainable. Then I go for it. The whole process is to get them motivated by convincing them that realistic change is possible. This is an integral part of the therapy process.

When you have a patient with a habit, compulsion, or phobia then I think its quite reasonable to believe that they can overcome it, even if they say I want, but I cant. Sometimes, when looking for the cause or a reason why a problem has not been resolved, you might have to look further than the patient. Often there are other people, maybe at home, socially or at work that make it difficult for the patient to overcome their problem. In which case, if you really want the patient to achieve what they want, you also have to work on those other people as well, and you can do so in many ways. You can either work on them directly by asking them to attend a therapy session, or indirectly through the patient, by giving the patient tasks that involve the third party outside of the therapy sessions.

Usually if a problem is self-contained, that is, other people or contexts are not reinforcing it, you can work on it relatively easily. Ideally, successful therapy is based upon the patient having a good level of motivation where the patient can work without contamination from others or external influences.

We need energy to keep ourselves motivated, both physical and mental energy, and thats how we keep going. We thrive on energy and we try and direct it into the different areas of our lives. If you direct all of your energy into negative things then life will be negative, if you direct it into positive things then it will be positive. It sounds very simplistic but it is true. This is why patient motivation is so important. We have to have them on our side, working for the same outcomes.

I believe that people are like sponges that soak up whatever comes along and that we are habitually drawn towards soaking up what is familiar, even if it is not good. I remember when I was young I caught my hand in a door. This wasnt enough to make me obsessive. It wasnt even enough to make me cautious, because I did it a second time. But when Id done it a third time however, I had the beginnings of a potential phobia, which my mind could

have nurtured if it had wanted to screw up the rest of my life, because thats often how phobias start, but luckily for me, I just decided it was just something that happened and to not give it any importance.

But what about the person who is so worried about repeating a mistake that they go out of their way to avoid it happening. The way people usually try to get over their problems is to avoid them. If theyre agoraphobic, they stay indoors but this actually makes the problem worse. If you stay in, you become a confirmed agoraphobic because you never learn to face your fear. So if you get your hand caught in a door, you run the risk of developing a minor obsession if you deliberately start avoiding doors. The crazy thing is that it is human nature to avoid what hurts rather than confronting it. This is why I believe that most patients are victims of their own habitual thinking. If you walk past the door and you say to yourself I must not catch my hand in the door this time, then you are reinforcing your fear.

A woman came to see me about a chocolate compulsion and I asked her how often it occurred. She said every afternoon. She said I went to a hypnotherapist, but it was no good, it got worse. He had taught her self-hypnosis and then instructed her to practice at the start of every afternoon and repeat to herself that she shouldnt eat chocolate. From then on all she could think about each afternoon was that she shouldnt eat chocolate, which she desired even more by thinking about it continually. The consequence was that her need became even greater because she felt so guilty about her increased desire to eat, so she comforted herself by giving in and eating the chocolate.

Patients either avoid their problems by consciously telling themselves not to have them or they try and resolve them through repeated failed attempts, and then they wonder why the problem is still there. The way to avoid thinking about the things you dont want, is to think about something else instead.

As discussed earlier, many patients spend a lot of time negating their own healing potential. I cant, maybe, yes but. This effort takes up a lot of energy. If you help the patient change the yes but to yes and, then everything they say will be positive. Everything said after a yes but is negative, the tonality what is being said is even negative it goes down at the end of the sentence. Say yes and instead, and everything is positive, even the tonality it goes towards the end of the sentence. Try it for yourself.

John Grinder, co-developer of NLP taught me that trick, and it is a very important observation. People often run their lives on whether they think yes but or yes and. Guess who has the happiest life.

If you go through life as the kind of yes but sponge that gets your hand trapped in the door and says Done it again, just realize what you are doing to yourself. The implication is that it happens a lot and its going to happen another time. Ive done it again, cant believe it or life has done it to me again and I wonder what will happen next. Thats no way to

live your life. You must know patients like that? They start to look out for things to go wrong in order to avoid them, and by looking out for them they keep finding them, bang, bang, bang (there goes that door again) and they have an awful life. They have a negative life because they spend all their time putting energy into avoiding things that they dont want to happen. And people who are accident-prone tend to do that. Theyre not born accident-prone, they teach themselves to be accident-prone. They keep looking for things to go wrong, and sure enough they find them.

So often, people maintain their problems by trying to solve them. Because trying occurs at a conscious level the patient usually only has his conscious resources available for problem solving, the root of most problems are at an unconscious level, if they were purely conscious it would be easy for people to solve them themselves and they wouldnt need a therapist. So its necessary to help patients gain access to their unconscious resources for problem solving. The word try implies difficulty; so the harder they try to solve the problem the more difficult it becomes. This is because theyre using only limited conscious resources. A patient may try to lose weight by telling themselves not to eat a particular food. However the very thought of not eating the food requires them to think of the food before deciding not to eat it. By doing this theyre reinforcing the thought of that particular food in their mind.

We tend to gravitate towards what is uppermost in our minds. So if a person is constantly thinking, I dont want this anxiety state or I dont want to smoke or I dont want this phobia etc. the thought will be reinforcing it. If you say I mustnt forget this then you are giving yourself a direct suggestion to forget it, the thought that should be uppermost in your mind should be, I must remember this. Think about what you want rather than what you dont want.

I know a lady who when she was young had a father who in the process of doing amateur radio repairs on the kitchen table would cause chaos in the house. She swore to herself repeatedly that she would never marry a radio engineer, and, yes youve guessed it, she did.

Its only natural for patients to try and make themselves better, but they are usually unaware that the act of trying reinforces the problem. Its not always a good idea to tell the patients they are doing this. You will get better results if you introduce the idea indirectly in the form of metaphor or with analogies, mainly because patients sometimes defend themselves if you confront them with the reality of the situation. When people start to defend their actions it usually results in them becoming even more fixed in their views as they search for more evidence to prove they are right.

Often patients will get themselves into situations, which leave no room for success. They will put themselves into double binds whereby any decision will bring about a negative outcome. In the same way that if you lose your keys you may return to the same place many times to look for them rather than looking somewhere totally new. Patients will often try to

solve a problem the same way over and over again even if it fails because the problem takes all of their attention and theyre unable to step back and look at it objectively. This saturation of subjective experience tends to severely limit their awareness.

Often, when patients realize how they have been trapping themselves through their limited awareness, they find it funny. Sometimes this realization can be very enlightening and even therapeutic, but it isnt usually enough for them to change for good, because they still need to learn new ways of behaving and interacting with the new world around. They dont yet know how to behave and interact in a different way, so you need to help them create the alternatives. These alternatives can be offered in the form of tasks or new strategies. Alternatively you can suggest indirectly that changes occur by using hypnosis and indirect suggestion.

Ok that is a brief overview of the basic stages of an indirect hypnotherapy session, with some other tips thrown in to keep you motivated in your study of hypnotherapy. We now need to look at the best way for you to learn hypnotherapy and how to focus your enquiring mind on the task of exploring and pulling apart the hypnotherapeutic process as it occurs.

The Meta Components of an Indirect Hypnotherapy Session This section is about how to learn indirect hypnosis. It is not about indirect hypnosis but about the best way to study the subject. I am going to share with you information about the set of perceptual filters that I teach my students to use when they watch me teach indirect hypnosis or watch me do a live demonstration with a patient. There are now enough DVDs of me working available for you watch that you should easily be able to apply these perceptual filters to my sessions. This will give you a real advantage when learning hypnotherapy, especially when learning the Ericksonian approach.

If you have these filters, it will help you to home-in more specifically on what will make a difference for you in your application of indirect hypnosis, especially if you ever get to see me work live or on DVD.

Approach, Technique, Strategy and Skills

There are four components that make up the way I work. They are Approach, Technique, Strategy and Skills. At a deeper level there is a set of principles that govern where, when, how and which of these components are used in conjunction with each other at any time in a therapy session. The concept of principles would require more space than we have available in this book at present so we will concentrate of the components of approach, technique, strategy and skill for now, as these will help you analyse what is happening as a hypnotherapy session progresses.

Approach

Approaches are philosophies and interpretations.

Approaches are based on beliefs about how and why people have problems and how they can be resolved.

Approach is broken down into its linguistic application and its behavioural application.

Linguistic: General tonality, vocabulary and speech patterns.

Behavioural: Demeanour and general manner.

Are you familiar with the stone sculptures made by the British artist Barbara Hepworth? I first saw her sculptures in the 1970s. I didn't realise it was her work at the time. I saw several pieces in different locations and didnt realise they were by the same artist but I was drawn to them for some reason. When I found out they were all by Barbara Hepworth I realised that I obviously had a feeling about this woman's work.

Recently there was a programme about her on TV. The programme had archive footage of her working with a huge block of limestone and a simple chisel and a hammer. Basically what she had there were the same tools that Neolithic homo sapiens would have had 3,000 years ago during the Bronze age, just a bronze tool and a rock, nothing sophisticated. In the programme she was shown just chipping away, chipping away, chipping away for 14 hours a day, almost every day of her life. When she started creating a sculpture she had a solid block of rough stone and when she had finished she had created this sensual spherical shape in smooth stone. It had movement and it followed the natural forms that you also see in nature. She discovered that she could put a hole through the middle of a sculpture to give it another dimension, and that she could put two sculptures together and let sunlight shine through one hole and into the other hole. She created a communication between the two sculptures. What is fascinating is that she started with a huge solid block of rough stone and when she finished she had something of unbelievable beauty that had a sensual quality that you felt compelled to touch.

Researchers did some research on how people feel compelled to play with spherical objects. They secretly filmed people standing at an office reception desk on which they had deliberately left a soft rubber ball. The receptionist would say "I'll go and check your paperwork", then go into the backroom and the person waiting would be waiting there at the desk being filmed secretly. After a minute or so, everyone being filmed picked up the ball, played with it and quickly put it back when the receptionist returned. Everybody did this without exception. Barbara Hepworths sculptures are like that. You feel that you want to touch them, they are very sensual and tactile. You want to touch them. I think that this instinct is hard wired into us from birth and is something to do with our locating our mothers breast.

At home I have some Neolithic bangles, prehistoric bangles from Thailand and France discovered at gravesite excavations. I have one bangle, which is absolutely beautiful and made of serpentine, and it is an absolutely perfectly circular bangle. It is about half an inch across and about a quarter of an inch thick. These days we are so used to seeing factory made bangles that we take their manufacture for granted. But when you realise that this pre-historic bangle was originally a solid block of serpentine rock, and that somebody had to hollow out that bangle from a block of rock by hand 3,000 years ago with only a basic primitive tool it is quite breath taking. The chance of it splitting or cracking must have been so high and to actually chip away until you've got this very, very fine bangle made of serpentine must have required a lot of patience and love. Just imagine the commitment that

person must have had to create something so beautiful. This is the attitude you must have in your relationship to therapy with your patients.

Patients come in as a rough piece rock and you have to help shape their lives, and do so with commitment and care. If you do this, it will communicate through the way you speak and interact with your patients, friends and family, and the results will be so beautiful that it will strike a chord in everyone who knows you. Therapy isnt just about fixing things, it is about transforming lives, and this can only happen if you make that commitment to give no less than 100% of yourself to that process.

So the first component here is approach. Every therapy has its own approach. Erickson had an approach, which in fact is very different from the approach that Ericksonian therapists have today. During Erickson's peak, which was in the 50s, his approach was based on maintaining the American dream. Everybody had to get married by a certain age, and they had to settle down and have x number of children and look after their grandparents, it was that kind of pattern, in America. If you look at Erickson's case studies you will see that a lot of his work was based on getting people to conform to what society said was the American ideal. This is not the case now. Ericksonian psychotherapists do not follow that approach any more.

If you look at the bigger frame, his approach was based on a model of the perfect society. Within that was embedded another approach, which was based on his belief that everybody could help themselves and had access to the resources to do so. Maybe his belief came from his commitment to overcoming disability, as he taught himself to walk again after being paralysed with polio. Your view of what patients should do, why they should do it and how it relates to their personal goals within their home, social and work enviornments is called your approach.

When students watch one of my demonstrations, or when they listen to my lectures, I often ask them to get a filter, call it an approach filter, and place it over everything they hear me say and do and then to only pick up those elements of what I do that fit into the category that we call approach.

If you meet with other therapists for supervision or practice sessions you can do the same thing with your partners in exercises. What is their approach? What is it they are doing? Where are they coming from? Place an approach filter over what they do, to separate their approach from everything else they are doing.

These four components have their linguistic application and their behavioural application. With approach we have first got the linguistic application which is the tonality, the vocabulary and the language patterns. You communicate the linguistic application of your approach with the words you use and by the way you use these words. That's the linguistic

side. The behavioural application of the approach is how you sit, how you move, your body movements, even the way you use your eyes, everything that is non-verbal.

Have you ever just sat in silence and looked at a patient in a particular way and they have burst into tears? That's an example of a behavioural application of an approach. You haven't said anything, you have just been present. Your approach in this example was probably one of compassion and acceptance.

So once again:

Approaches are philosophies and interpretations of how therapy should be done.

Approaches are based on beliefs about how and why people have problems and how they

can be resolved.

Approach is broken down into its linguistic application and its behavioural application

Linguistic: General tonality, vocabulary and speech patterns.

Behavioural: Demeanour and general manner.

Technique

Techniques are sets of instructions and templates.

Techniques are utilise the strategies and skills of a given approach.

Technique is broken down into its linguistic application and its behavioural application.

Linguistic: The things that you say to guide your patient across your therapeutic map.

Behavioural: The gestures and use of non-verbal communication.

Techniques are embedded into the approach and strategies and skills are the building blocks of techniques. I rarely design techniques before I meet a patient. I create techniques as I go on, and at the end of a session I have usually created several new techniques most of which I discard at the end of the session as they were only designed for that particular patient.

Techniques are a great way to learn. But once you have created them just let them go. Techniques are created to help patients navigate across their own personal territory, and are custom designed for that particular patient at that particular moment. So there is no need to hang on to them, just let them go and create new techniques for each new patient

you see. This way you are honouring and respecting the individual needs of each patient as a unique person.

Again, when I am demonstrating, I teach my students to use the technique filter so that they can identify when I am developing or using a technique. Techniques can also become templates. A template replicates a process and can be used again and be adapted to the needs of future patients. Techniques that do not evolve into templates are just techniques that worked for that particular patient at that particular time.

As with approach, technique has its linguistic component, which is basically the instructions (the things you say to guide the person across the map you are using) and its behavioural component (the gestures and other non-verbal components which help illustrate the technique).

For example, if I wanted a hypnotic subject to project memories onto the palms of my hands (using my own hands gives me control over their experience), I might put one hand to the patients left and another to the patients right and say, "see one memory projected onto that hand, and see another memory projected onto this hand." The verbal suggestions would make up the linguistic component and the positioning of the hands would be the behavioural component.

So once again:

Techniques are sets of instructions and templates.

Techniques are utilise the strategies and skills of a given approach.

Technique is broken down into its linguistic application and its behavioural application.

Linguistic: The things that you say to guide your patient across your therapeutic map.

Behavioural: The gestures and use of non-verbal communication

Strategies

Strategies are cognitive processes.

Strategies are based on ways of thinking within a given approach and are defined by the

rigidity or flexibility of that approach.

Strategy is broken down into its linguistic application and its behavioural application.

Linguistic: Your internal dialogue and the unconscious messages you receive while doing therapy.

Behavioural: What you feel as a response to the internal dialogue and unconscious messages (visualisations etc).

Embedded inside of techniques are strategies and skills. Strategies are cognitive processes the way you think through things. They are a series of steps based on what to do first, next and last. You can't see them because they are purely cognitive, so you can't see somebody's strategy (although NLP claims you can identify individual strategies through eye accessing and predicate identification). I never go into a session thinking I am going to use this or that strategy because every session is unpredictable. I have to be just there at that moment and decide what to do, based on what the patient gives me. The strategy comes out of my interactions with the patient during the session, I dont create it before-hand.

Strategies are harder to break down into linguistic and behavioural components but they are still distinct. Strategies are invisible and internal, so they cant be seen but they are there never-the-less. When I am working with a patient I am constantly receiving unconscious internal dialogue and images from my own unconscious. It's as though I have someone there in the control tower giving me advice all the time and telling me what to do. I cant clearly hear a voice in my head, but I hear and I see messages which give me instructions on what to do next. I call these unconscious messages. I then make decisions on what advice to follow if the message is combined with an intuitive feeling of some kind. The feeling is the behavioural component of the strategy. It is what you feel kinaesthetically.

So once again:

Strategies are cognitive processes.

Strategies are based on ways of thinking within a given approach and are defined by the rigidity or flexibility of that approach.

Strategy is broken down into its linguistic application and its behavioural application.

Linguistic: Your internal dialogue and the unconscious messages you receive while doing therapy.

Behavioural: What you feel as a response to the internal dialogue and unconscious messages (visualisations etc).

Skills

Skills are behaviours and actions.

Skills are the behaviours of a therapist working within a given approach and are defined by the rigidity or flexibility of that approach.

Skill is broken down into its linguistic application and its behavioural application.

Linguistic: The language patterns you use.

Behavioural: The non-verbal application of the skill.

When you use words they have a sentence structure and your ability to apply a sentence structure that most effectively conveys the message within the words is known as your linguistic skill.

When you use a particular tonality, lift your eyes, raise your eyebrow and put your hand out, you are communicating non-verbally. Your ability to convey a message effectively non-verbally is known as you behavioural skill.

Linguistic skills are made up of words (language patterns) that you can hear, and behavioural skills, including tonality, are made up of non-verbal communications that you can observe.

Insertive Eye Contact, a skill I developed for communicating indirectly with the unconscious mind, utilises both of these skills in a very precise way. It utilises hypnotic language patterns combined with a shift in focus, from one eye to another, to place emphasis on either the conscious, or unconscious part of the communication (this can occur midway through a sentence so precision is important). The use of appropriate hypnotic language patterns is the linguistic skill, and deciding when to emphasise the words aimed at the unconscious (by shifting the gaze from one eye to another) is the behavioural skill.

So once again:

Skills are behaviours and actions.

Skills are the behaviours of a therapist working within a given approach and are defined by

the rigidity or flexibility of that approach.

Skill is broken down into its linguistic application and its behavioural application.

Linguistic: The language patterns you use.

Behavioural: The non-verbal application of the skill.

So when you watch me do a demonstration you need to notice the approach, the technique, the strategy and the skills and you need a different filter for each, so that you can separate them out for study. You should break down your learning into these 4 components. Imagine that you have four different pairs of glasses, use one for looking at approaches, one for techniques, one for strategies and one for skills. This will give you an in-depth understanding of each component as they happen moment by moment during a therapy session. This will make it a lot easier to then understand the therapeutic process when each of these components are combined. It will allow you to see, what others believe to be, magical demonstrations of psychotherapy, as a series of logical, clinical processes that evolve during sessions and result in success for the patient.

Reinforce Your Learning

If you want to consciously remind yourself of what you are learning in this book, please go over it again several times. The repetition will help you break down what I am doing, rather than just trusting your unconscious and being a sponge, trying to absorb it all first time around. If you are a sponge and just absorb it all unconsciously, you will put down this book with a lot of hope and not a lot of knowledge. You can go to a concert and watch a fantastic pianist and wish you could play the piano as well, but unless you sit down on your own and practice the scales youre not going to learn how to play. If possible practice as much as possible with other students before inflicting yourself on patients.

Overlapping

Although, for the purpose of teaching, I have listed these components sequentially, they are all happening simultaneously. You have approaches, and then within approaches you have techniques technique 1 and technique 2 for example, and within them you have strategy, and skill, and within all of these you have got the linguistic and the behavioural aspect for each of these. That's how they are embedded within each other. That's the big frame, smaller frame, smaller still, and they all happen simultaneously.

When I'm working I don't pay attention to this structure, because I know it well and I don't need to pay attention to it anymore, but I am able to stand back and see it in operation, almost as if I were someone else observing, and this should be your goal too to observe what you are doing when doing effective therapy but without getting in the way.

While learning this you should be mindful of it. These components are sieves. Use a big sieve when you want to look at approach and smaller sieves to get the detailed stuff. So there are a series of sieves, or a series of filters that you use for examining what I do and then what you yourself do. It is unlikely you will be able to do all of this simultaneously

consciously. When you do therapy you do them all simultaneously unconsciously, but initially, to study someone else, it will probably be very difficult for you to see them all simultaneously. You cannot keep your mind focused clearly on each of these filters simultaneously (well I cant anyway), so you will have to move from one to the other. You can say "Right, for 5 minutes I'm going to pay attention to the approach, for 5 minutes just the technique, 5 minutes to the strategy and then the skill. You move your focus of attention from one to another and then they will become more distinct. You will then be able to recognise the approach, without you even thinking about it, because you have trained yourself to do it. The same applies to your understanding of the other components.

You will be conditioning yourself to think along these lines. It's a bit like training yourself to tie a shoelace. Initially it has to be conscious. When you play the scales on a piano for the first time it is conscious, even if youre playing is a little bit wooden. But then after a few times it become unconscious, you don't have to think about it. It is the same with learning to see the components of indirect hypnosis.

This will be invaluable in your work as a therapist, because if you apply the same observational model to your patients you will see patterns in the way that they communicate with you. They have an approach too. They come to you with their problem, they have the big frame - how they approach life and how they approach problems. They have their own techniques for either trying to resolve the problem or trying to maintain the problem, and within that they will have strategies, cognitive processes, and they will have behaviours which assist them in maintaining their problem and they will communicate all of this linguistically and behaviourally.

This model can be applied to all interactions, all communication. Once you learn this model it will be an integral part of your work as a therapist, and when you look at your patients you will no longer think "What do I do next?", because you will have so much more information about them.

It's a model, which will enable you to get a deeper understanding of another person. The more you practise it and the more mindful you are of using this when you are watching people and talking to people, the quicker it will become an unconscious process, and then your intuition will kick in and you will start to have feelings about people and how you can help them. You won't have to pay attention any more to each of the components, because you will just have the sense of knowing what to do. This is when you can just be present with your patient, with no need to be inside your own head trying to think what you should do to help them. You will be able to home straight-in on to the source of their problem and know intuitively what you need to do. Its not magic, but it may seem like it to others.

Like all disciplines, this requires careful dedicated study. Read this book again and again until you can recall it easily. It is worth the time and effort to get this right if you are serious about learning indirect hypnosis and helping your patients. The next step is to attend one of

the BHRTI courses and watch videos of my work. Read, get good training, understand the principles, and then practice.

PART TWO Example of a Live Tutorial The Utilization of Ideo-motor Response in Accessing Unconscious Information, Memories and Resources as a Primary Treatment Modality in Ericksonian Hypnotherapy.

Introduction

This is an edited transcript of an Ericksonian hypnotherapy session demonstrating the use of ideo-motor signaling. The session is taken from a course I was teaching for the British Hypnosis Research & Training Institute at St Annes Psychiatric Hospital in London in the early 1990s. Many years later in 2012 the session was transcribed and I edited the transcript to simplify the text. The demonstration is in front of a group of seventy doctors, psychologists and other health professionals and as will be seen from the transcript I teach the class what I am doing as the session progresses. The demonstration subject is Elizabeth, who is one of the students and she has volunteered to be a demonstration subject for the therapy demonstration. In Ericksonian hypnotherapy, ideo-motor signaling is the name given to a technique whereby a movement of the patients finger is used to signal an unconscious communication typically a yes or no response. I often use ideo-motor signaling with my patients in therapy, just as Milton Erickson did. I find it invaluable in uncovering the source of early learning experiences that have contributed to problems and the patterns that have maintained them. I frequently do therapy using only ideo-motor response as a communication tool, because in this way the patient has no conscious realization of what therapy is occurring. It's a confidential therapeutic encounter between the patient's unconscious and the therapist. The patient just gets better without knowing how they did it.

The technique is quite simple but does require some skill at observation and timing. Once in hypnosis, the therapist asks the patients unconscious mind to lift one finger for a yes" answer, and another for a "no" answer. Sometimes the therapist will indicate on which hands the yes and no fingers will be, I prefer to leave it to the patients unconscious to decide. The responses can either be on the same hand or on different hands. It is most common to use both hands maybe a yes response from a finger on the left hand and a no response from a finger on the right hand (as happens in this demonstration).

It is usually easy to tell when a patient is faking, because an unconscious finger signal is slow with minimal movement and at first a little shaky. A conscious response is a direct, conscious more or less immediate lifting of the finger. Ideally there should be no conscious participation on the part of the patient so you get a true honest unconscious response. When genuine, patients are often unaware of the finger movements as they happen.

Ideo-motor movement can also be an unconscious movement of the head, foot or other part of the body and sometimes when a patient has been asked to allow their unconscious mind to move their finger, they also nod or shake their head without realizing it. Because head nodding and shaking is a part of our everyday non-verbal behavior it can happen quite naturally and unconsciously.

In hypnosis the unconscious head nods are different from conscious everyday head nods. In trance they are usually very slow and barely noticeable. If a patient nods their head in a very enthusiastic and conscious way then the response is consciously generated and should not be relied upon, it is just the patient answering consciously and the responses are based on the patients usual conscious understanding. Sometimes there may be an unconscious movement of the foot or hand as well, or a twitch in a face muscle. These are usually unconscious. It is rare for these to be consciously generated as most people do not deliberately use these other parts of the body to communicate consciously.

There is usually quite a delay between the therapists question and the patient lifting the finger, especially at the start. This is because the patient has to process the question unconsciously, search for an answer unconsciously, and then move the finger unconsciously. This process gets faster as the patient answers more questions and the process becomes more familiar. The therapist can encourage the finger to lift with indirect suggestions and notice the initial slight twitch of the muscles in the back of the hand that usually happen prior to a finger actually lifting.

With some patients you may only see a twitching of the muscles in the back of the hand or a finger shifting from side to side and a full lift may not happen or take much longer to happen. This is of no concern. The twitch in the muscle is hard to fake and so is a very good indicator of a genuine unconscious response. It can be used as an alternative to a full finger lift. I often will only need that small twitch as a response as this saves time in therapy when one has a lot of questions. However beware, sometimes a movement may occur in one place during one session and during another session occur in another part of the hand. So you need to develop your observation skills to notice these subtle minimal movements.

The whole purpose of using Ideo-motor responses is to communicate with the part of the patient that knows more about the problem than they do. By communicating directly with the unconscious mind the therapist is able to call upon the patients unconscious resources for problem solving. A certain amount of negotiation can be done between the therapist and the patient's unconscious mind in this way although the answers are limited to yes and no. The patient need not have any conscious awareness of the communication as it is happening and he will often forget that it did happen. Usually patients can remember that the fingers moved but cant remember all of the answers.

There are however limitations when using finger signaling. Any attempt at evoking direct answers, especially detailed answers via finger signaling, is severely limited because the fingers can only answer "yes" or "no". Often keeping track of the answers obtained with ideo-motor responses can be challenging for the therapist. So when getting answers with finger signaling the therapist should write down both the questions and answers on a sheet of paper. Sometimes the responses can be quite confusing and contradictory because the

unconscious mind has its own sense of logic and a written record of the session will help sort out this often contradictory unconscious logic.

There is also the issue of unconscious confidentiality to consider. Keeping a clear written record of the responses as the session progresses will definitely help you to keep track of the unconscious communication, but it may not be advisable to show the patient the written record afterwards, as it will often contain confidential information shared about the patient by his/her unconscious, and the patients unconscious mind may not wish it to be shared with the patients conscious mind. Strange as it may seem, the unconscious mind often holds back information from the patient, especially if that information is of a traumatic nature.

Brooks: OK, do you know anything about deep trance work? Elizabeth: A little, I used to do it sometimes, but its rather hit and miss. Brooks: Tell me a little bit about how you use it. Elizabeth: Well when Im inducing hypnosis people sometimes... they go into a deep trance, and sometimes they seem to sort of... (Elizabeth pauses and starts to go into trance while moving both arms left and right simulating a wave movement) Brooks: Do you know what you do differently when you work with people in deep trance? Elizabeth: What I do differently?... (Pauses for a several moments) ... you mean am I getting?... (Pauses for longer as she goes deeper into trance) I think I am... just responding to that person more completely, probably... Brooks: Umm... Elizabeth: (Smiles) Brooks: Umm. Are you aware that you also go into a trance when you hypnotise your patients? Elizabeth: (Smiles and nods her head) Oh yes, yes, yes.

Brooks: How did I know that you do that? Elizabeth: (Laughs) I was going into a trance just then. Brooks: Yes, we were accessing the state you go into when youre helping patients. Elizabeth: (Smiles) Yes, yes, yes, yes. Brooks: Umm yes. (Talks to the students) OK let me explain a little about deep trance work and the role of indirect and direct suggestion in deep trance work. Youve been learning a lot about indirect suggestion on this course and we often use indirect suggestion to help people overcome any fears they may have about going into hypnosis. When a person is actually in a deep trance, or already going into a deep trance, there is less of a need to use indirect suggestion, because they are already in hypnosis. You can still use indirect suggestion when doing therapy in hypnosis, if you want to only address the unconscious mind, and dont wish the conscious mind to eavesdrop, but when you just want to deepen trance, or evoke hypnotic phenomena, you can be quite direct if you want, once the patient is in hypnosis. Milton Erickson was often very direct once his subject was in trance. My video called Training In Indirect Hypnosis, which was about inducing and deepening trance while evoking hypnotic phenomena using only indirect suggestion, was based on the sole use of hypnotic implication. There was very little direct suggestion in that session, because I wanted to demonstrate how powerful indirect suggestion is on its own. But you dont have to do it that way every time you work with a patient, although admittedly, that is my personal preference. You can be direct as well, once the patient is in trance. So at this point in your training Im going to encourage you to utilize direct suggestion as well as indirect suggestion, but not until your hypnotic subject is actually in a trance. Dont use the direct approach as a way of putting the person into hypnosis, use the indirect approach for the first part of the session. We dont want you sounding like a stage hypnotist. Were here to help the patient feel that the hypnotic experience, and their ability to heal, comes from within them, not that it is being done to them by someone who claims to have some kind of hypnotic power over them. We want to empower our patients, not dis-empower them. So use indirect suggestion for the induction and then use caring and encouraging direct suggestion for the trance deepening and therapy. I will demonstrate how you can do this using ideo-motor signaling. You will need to watch closely to see the indirect induction as a lot of it will be non-verbal. The direct suggestions will be obvious. Brooks: (Talks to Elizabeth) So what Id like to do, is ask you to think about how you feel at this moment? Elizabeth: (Closes her eyes)

Brooks: How secure do you feel at this moment? (security was something the patient had mentioned previously) Elizabeth: Fairly, not completely. Brooks: Umm, how do your hands feel right now? How secure do your hands feel at this moment? Elizabeth: Umm... fairly all right. Brooks: Fairly all right? Please tell me what position you would have to put your hands in for them to not feel so secure? Elizabeth: (Elizabeth tightens her hands) They feel sort of... (Elizabeth tightens her hands again) Brooks: Yes OK. Can you do that even more? Can you make your hands feel even less secure? Thats it! Elizabeth: (Smiles) Brooks: And how does it feel when you make your hands fell less secure like that? Elizabeth: Tight all the way across my shoulders and my legs. Brooks: Not very comfortable? Elizabeth: No. Brooks: So does that mean... (pause) if I lift your arm like this (Brooks lifts Elizabeths arm as part of the hypnotic induction), and then I ask you to relax it... just to relax your fingers, thats it... just relax them nice and comfortably like that, so they feel the opposite of how they felt... thats it... the opposite from how they were... (a series of implied questions) And then you relax that one... (Brooks lifts her other hand) Does that then feel more secure? Elizabeth: Yes Brooks: (Brooks gives a short analogy) I realized something some time ago. I was stuck somewhere, I cant remember where it was now, but I needed something to eat but there wasnt anything to eat. I knew I had to wait a long time to eat and I felt very hungry. But as time passed I started to appreciate the waiting and the hungry feeling. I realized how important it is to feel hungry in order to enjoy food. And the more I looked forward to eating, the more I knew I would enjoy the food when it came.

Now you know, that when you wake up in the morning, theres usually daylight, and when you go to sleep at night its dark. But with hypnosis you can go to sleep any time, (Whispers) if you wish... and you know that I can use the word sleep yet dont mean sleep. When I use the word sleep it can mean something entirely different. But you dont need to know what it means consciously. Brooks: (Talks to the students) Im going to ask Elizabeth some questions here... questions about what she feels like, and about what is happening for her. There are three ways to deepen trance initially. One way is to suggest it, the other way is to wait and let her go deeper, this means, you dont say anything, and the other way is to utilize the physiological and psychological changes that occur and the hypnotic phenomena that develops, to deepen trance. So I will use a combination of all three. Brooks: (Talks to Elizabeth) OK Elizabeth, I just noticed that you moved your hands just then. How do they feel right now? Elizabeth: They feel OK. Brooks: OK? and how do your fingers feel? Elizabeth: Tingly. Brooks: Tingly?... which hand feels the most tingly? Elizabeth: The left. Brooks: The left hand feels more tingly than the right... OK, and how do your eyelids feel right now? Elizabeth: Heavy. Brooks: Heavy? Do you think that you can still open them? Elizabeth: (Elizabeth opens her eyes) Brooks: So they are not that heavy, not yet. OK, what would you have to do in order to make them so heavy that you couldnt open them? Elizabeth: Just let myself breath deeply and slip deeper into... (Elizabeth goes into hypnosis) Brooks: Umm, thats right, thats it. Now I can ask you questions, but of course you dont have to answer verbally.

You know that there are many ways you can communicate. Just allow that tingling to develop in your hand as that heaviness develops in your eyelids as you breathe. Just going as deep as you need to go in order to accomplish what were going to do here today. Id like your unconscious mind to let you go even deeper into a hypnotic state. You can think, you can hear, you can see in your minds eye. You can feel. Every thought that you have can help you go deeper into hypnosis. Every image can help you go deeper into a hypnotic state. Every sound can help you go deeper and deeper into trance. Every feeling can help you go deeper and deeper into hypnosis. Now I wonder whats happening to the thumb on your left hand. Thats right. How is the feeling in that thumb different from the felling in the thumb on your right hand? Im going to talk about your fingers and thumbs because we can all be fingers and thumbs. I wonder what it would feel like to not know how to pick up something with those fingers. Almost as if that hand isnt yours. Yet somehow unconsciously your hand can move to pick things up but without you knowing how its happening. Now your hand knows how to hold a pencil or a pen, or a knife and fork. But you dont have to think about how to hold a knife and fork. Because your unconscious mind knows how to hold things without you having to think about it. Now you can go into a deep deep hypnotic state as you breath. Going deeper with every time you exhale, or maybe your unconscious mind would prefer you to go deeper as you inhale. You can be curious about that. Maybe youve spoken on the telephone and written something down without knowing what you were writing. Maybe you were doodling and didnt notice what you were doodling until afterwards.

You know how to wave at someone in the street. You dont have to think about how to move your hand, it waves all by itself. A friend comes towards you with their arm outstretched and they raise their hand to shake your hand, and your hand lifts all by itself. You dont have to think about how to do that. Id like you to go deeper and deeper into hypnosis now. Deeper and deeper, deeper and deeper. Notice what its like to go deeper and deeper. Experience it in your body, as you breath and as I talk to you. Going deeper and deeper each time you breath. Thats right, deeper and deeper. Id like you to count numbers to yourself as you go deeper. I dont know if your unconscious will ask you to count yourself into hypnosis by counting forwards or by counting backwards. Wait for a moment to find out... Then just count to yourself and let each number fade into the distance as you go deeper and deeper. Just deeper and deeper, each number fading into the distance. Each number as you count, as you go deeper a