Ivan Tyrrell warns that hypnosis is a powerful tool that must be used with care, understanding and integrity.
HUMAN givens therapists, with good intentions, are no doubt accustomed to viewing hypnosis, however we might term it, as a force for good. Using this procedure can, indeed, lead to powerful therapeutic results but it can also be powerfully harmful, depending upon the ideas absorbed by the person in trance. Therefore, it is important that it is always used judiciously. I should like, in this article, to review human givens understandings about hypnosis, its uses and abuses.
Unfortunately, something mysterious often attaches itself to talk about hypnosis, especially amongst those who style themselves hypnotherapists, as if practitioners who use it have highly specialised, even esoteric, skills – indeed, some seem to encourage that belief. This is added to by the fact that, although hypnosis has been known about for centuries, and been the subject of scientific research for over 200 years, there is still widespread misunderstanding about what it actually is. A quick look on the internet brings up a whole range of notions, broadly divided into ‘altered state of mind theories’ (it is a half-conscious state, seemingly between sleeping and waking; an unconscious, cataleptic condition; a form of dissociation; a dazed or bewildered condition; “regression in the service of the ego”; or a state of focused attention) and ‘non-state’ theories (it’s just play acting).
Clearly, we need a bigger organising idea and the human givens provides one: hypnosis is not a state of consciousness at all; it is any artificial means of accessing the REM state. [In human givens, we use the term REM state to describe both the stage of sleep known as rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, during which most dreaming occurs, and all other states in which human brain activity is akin to that experienced during REM sleep.] Thus hypnosis is a process, separate from the trance state that it induces, and its effects are no longer mysterious because this can account for all phenomena associated with it.
It is self-evident that hypnosis is an artificial process, rather than a state, when we take into account that we usually go into a trance without anyone putting us into it. Indeed, hypnotherapists will often tell clients whom they are trying to reassure about its safety that we go in and out of trance quite naturally all the time – which is true. We are in a trance whenever our attention is focused and locked. But this means our viewpoint is limited by whatever trance we are in. And in that lies the danger.
Anyone who can focus their attention, who has a good imagination or who can become emotionally aroused, will, at many points in time, enter trance. We are in a self-induced trance whenever we are highly emotionally aroused in what is usually thought of as a negative way: anger, fury, hatred, fear, anxiety, worrying, depression, envy, greed, selfishness – all such emotions cut us off from our ability to think rationally and give us a locked-in, limited view of reality. The same is true when we are in thrall to conditioned belief systems that we cannot see beyond, whether those of religions, cults or politics. Exciting events which we experience as positive are no less limiting in terms of our seeing the bigger picture – however thrilling it may be to support one’s team to victory, to feel swept away by music, moved by poetry, art or drama, to fall in love or make love passionately or to experience an awesome wonder that takes our breath away.
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