30 Days of Hypnosis: Day 23

Have you ever had difficulty going into a trance/hypnotizing someone? What happened?

Have you ever had difficulty going into a trance? What happened?

For the longest time I had a very poor opin­ion of how I was react­ing while hyp­no­tized. On some emo­tion­al lev­el that I intel­lec­tu­al­ly knew was wrong, I was cer­tain it was only a shal­low trance, I was­n’t deep enough, main­ly because of the emo­tion­al expec­ta­tion that I did­n’t feel that I was that deep. It took some con­sid­er­a­tion to make me real­ize that, pri­mar­i­ly, lev­els of trance depth were a mea­sure­ment that did­n’t seem to be real­ly prac­ti­cal in appli­ca­tion, at least in my sit­u­a­tion. Instead, I real­ized it was lev­els of accep­tance and com­fort instead of depth that made sense to me.

That was demon­strat­ed to me when I vol­un­teered as part of a demon­stra­tion on hyp­no­sis. The demon­stra­tion was a sug­ges­tion for sit­u­a­tion­al amne­sia, where I and anoth­er vol­un­teer would expe­ri­ence tem­po­rary amne­sia when asked sim­ple ques­tions. We both respond­ed per­fect­ly, but made it all come togeth­er for me was that both of us were giv­en slight­ly dif­fer­ent sug­ges­tions, and I was sur­prised that I respond­ed to the sug­ges­tion I was giv­en with­out real­iz­ing the dif­fer­ence. (Basi­cal­ly, the oth­er vol­un­teer only respond­ed with amne­sia when ques­tioned by one par­tic­u­lar per­son while would respond with amne­sia when ques­tioned by anyone.)

Have you ever had trouble hypnotizing someone? What happened?

I men­tioned ear­li­er that I have had some train­ing, and part of that was prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence in trance induc­tion. I was­n’t exact­ly bad but giv­en my his­to­ry and knowl­edge about the sub­ject, I would have expect­ed to do much better.

Was it ner­vous­ness? Cer­tain­ly giv­en that I am some­times a very pri­vate per­son and try­ing to hyp­no­tize some­one I only sat near in the class­room did­n’t help. How­ev­er, if I have the oppor­tu­ni­ty for some prac­tice time again, I would cer­tain­ly take advan­tage of it, espe­cial­ly if there was some­one there whom I trust­ed to act as a men­tor or instruc­tor. The best way to get around that ner­vous­ness is prac­tice and experience.