Demystifying the mysterious

I’m not sure that hypnosis can ever be demystified completely, but I’ll give it a shot! 

After discussing it with someone this week, there seems to still be a misunderstanding about what it involves.  So I thought it would be a good idea to try and explain. 

First, to de-bunk the myth that while under hypnosis a person might experience a loss of self control. Quite the opposite is true, the person is in full control at all times – no one can make anyone do anything they don’t want to do.  In the hypnotic state people are able to make changes in their minds that improve their lives.  The hypnotherapist acts as a guide to help them towards what they want to achieve and decides which techniques are appropriate for getting the desired result.    

Next, to try and explain the process in biological terms. Freud describes the process of hypnosis by using metaphors, but the modern scientific explanation is another way of understanding it.   It’s good to use a learned behaviour to illustrate what’s happening, such as learning to drive.  At the beginning, when it’s all new, driving is a fully conscious process.  When we’re out practicing we are consciously thinking through the actions: “mirror, signal, manoeuvre”.   We focus our full attention on each step. I can remember consciously lining up the car with the driving school’s back window lettering in the mirror when reverse parking.  At the time of learning, all thought processes to do with driving are taking place in our conscious minds – and this is creating new neural connections in our brains. 

But within a few months of passing the driving test, the behaviour of driving a car becomes automatic – it has become subconscious.    The practicing of driving has led to the new neural connections being reinforced repeatedly until it becomes ‘hardwired’ in our brains.  This is necessary because our conscious mind has a limited amount of space and can only attend to a few things at a time.  So the behaviour of driving becomes subconscious, which is a good thing – it frees up our attention to focus on the things we need to be aware of on the road.    

Learning to play a musical instrument is another good example of the shift of a behaviour pattern from the conscious to unconscious.  We start by focusing our attention on each guitar chord, one by one – attending to where each finger should be – and it’s all a bit clunky to start with because we are consciously processing it.  Through practicing though, the behaviour becomes automatic and we arrive at the stage of playing the guitar without thinking - the process has moved into the subconscious.

Hypnotherapy works on unwanted habits by tackling this unconscious hardwired behaviour and re-routing the neural process.  In the same way as positive things like driving and guitar playing are learned behaviours, so too is every bad habit.  So for example with nailbiting the trigger is stress and so, as soon as the person starts experiencing stress, it kick-starts a set of neural connections to lift the hand to the mouth and start biting the nails.   This behaviour is also learned – just like driving - and it too has been practiced repeatedly to become hard wired in the subconscious. 

We use hypnotherapy to extinguish the neural connections that underpin the unwanted nailbiting behaviour and replace them with neural connections that result in a desired behaviour instead.   So, when stress kicks in – instead of lifting the hand to the mouth – the new route diverts to something more positive, such as self hypnosis, or another behaviour that the person finds relaxing.

In short, I guess you could say that hypnotherapy is a way of shifting from being like a hamster in it’s wheel, running round and round – where your thoughts are controlling you; to taking control of your mind, refiguring and using it as a tool that helps create the life you want. 

Personally, I’ve never fancied being a hamster in a wheel.....all that going round and round.....and round and round.....

: )