New Ways of Using Hypnosis (Part II)

What then are some of the common uses of hypnosis as we know it today?

Classical Applications continue to work, and so continue to be employed. They include:

Hyper-suggestibility

Hypnosis has often been characterized as a state of heightened suggestibility induced by belief, expectation, and focused attention. Simply put, some hypnotized subjects are more likely to do what they are told, whatever that may be. If the suggestions are beneficial – whether “decreasing sensations of grief” to “cessation of nail-biting” – the practice can be beneficial. And with highly hypnotizable subjects direct suggestion sometimes works and even persists. Certainly it is an option to be aware of.

Deep Relaxation

However else classical hypnosis may be characterized, the classical trance is certainly a state of deep and profound relaxation. While it is usually simply a preparation state for some other predefined end, the deep detached calm of hypnosis may well have strong health benefits in and of itself.

Pain management

There is no doubt but that hypnosis is generally effective in reducing pain. The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis found that hypnosis relieved the pain of 75% of 933 subjects taking part in twenty-seven different experiments. In a study comparing the effects of hypnosis, ordinary suggestion and placebo in reducing pain, the American Psychological Association found that highly suggestible individuals experienced a greater reduction in pain from hypnosis compared with placebo. Less suggestible subjects experienced no significant pain reduction. (Interestingly, and perhaps confirming somewhat Ericksonian methods, ordinary non-hypnotic suggestion also caused reduction in pain compared to placebo, but did so in patients ranked as highly suggestible and in those ranked as not.)

In 1996, the National Institutes of Health declared hypnosis an effective method of reducing pain from cancer and other chronic pain situations in patients. Symptoms related to cancer and other incurable diseases (such as nausea and fatigue) may also be better managed with hypnosis. In research done at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, two breast cancer surgery patient groups received hypnotic treatment. After surgery they reported less pain, less nausea, and less anxiety post-surgery. (Indeed, treatment costs for the typical hypnosis patient were lowered by an average of $772.)

Studies have also been done in which hypnosis effectively reduce the pain experienced during childbirth burn-wound debridement, bone marrow aspirations, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and skin ailments.

Habit Control

Numerous studies have been conducted showing the effectiveness of hypnosis as a way of modifying self-destructive behavior. Hypnosis has proven to be quite effective in many endeavors to get people to stop smoking, to lose weight, and to discard various undesirable habits from nail-biting to stuttering. Results have ranged from the completely successful to no effect. More effective, perhaps, is the use of hypnosis within a framework of other supporting techniques. A 1996 meta-analysis involving cognitive-behavioral therapy found that hypnosis combined with cognitive-behavioral counseling resulted in greater weight loss than as compared with subjects who were treated by therapy alone.

Sports Performance

Another little-examined but deeply fruitful area of study is the use of hypnosis in sports performance. In many cases, hypnosis is often the one of the last techniques called upon to correct a particularly difficult problem. In sports performance the goal is not to bring malfunctioning behavior up to an acceptable norm, but rather to develop healthy individuals above the norm to competitive excellence.

Forms of “sports meditation” from autogenic training to prayer to visualization have been tried, and, by and large, have been successful. Studies conducted in 1998 by Dr. J. Stanos, a professor at Harvard University, show a definitive link between visualization and performance. The group using visualization before performing their task performed at near 100% success rate levels, while the placebo group was successful only 55% of the time. The depth immersion capabilities of hypnosis, enhancing the capacity of subjects to visualize, to re-live, to imaginatively experience perfect performance, can and has augmented these approaches, as well as helped sports performers through direct suggestion, pain reduction, and enhanced healing.

Additional Benefits

New hypnotic techniques share the goals of the old. As in the American Psychological Association study quoted above, apparently non-hypnotic suggestion not only reduced pain too, but reduced it in patients ranked as resistant to hypnosis as well!

However, the oblique suggestion approaches of the newer hypnotherapeutic schools have other, and more unusual, goals as well. To touch on only a few:

Business Persuasion

One of the neuro-linguistic programming’s uses of the legacy of Milton Erickson has been the development of a wide range of hypnotically based techniques to boost business relationships and sales success. Ranging from physical rapport (mirroring an individual’s body language, vocal tones or speech patterns to establish subtle feelings of trust and inclination), to embedded commands (ways of imperceptibility dropping direct commands into speech patterns), such as saying training the subject or student to turn a potential ‘no‘ into a ‘yes’ or a ‘maybe’, to strategy elicitation (extracting hidden assumptions and patterns of response that limit an individual’s ability to succeed), to name just a few. NLP has, in some ways, adapted the entire range of therapeutic processes deployed to alter a patient’s thinking and applied them to change the thinking of consumers, competitors, and colleagues. To what degree, and with what success, may never be quantitatively determined, but anecdotal evidence is quite impressive.

Repressed Memory Controversies

Repressed memory refers to significant memories (often traumatic) that are blocked out and become unavailable for recall. Repressed memory syndrome became for a time a nationwide controversy as various individuals were accused of heinous crimes for which evidence proved to be sorely lacking, and has since been widely discredited. The explanation for many lay in the possibility that therapists over the course of many (apparently non-hypnotic) conversations could elicit suspicions and finally evoke certainty that earlier abuses had occurred (thus illustrating the degree to which memory is not only faulty, but malleable). The process is entirely in conformity with newer understandings of hypnotic influences and suggestibility as a factor in eliciting thoughts and convictions, and the processes may well be involved in other socially anomalous behavior, from cult formation to claimed UFO abductions.

Seduction

One of the arguably comic applications of the new hypnosis has been in the service of an old practice: seduction. Readers of journalist Neil Strauss’ The Game, or Ross Jeffries Speed Seduction materials find themselves introduced to a strange underground where some of the subtlest hypnotic innovations of Ericksonian therapy are deployed for ends ranging from evoking carnality to simply getting a date. The reading may be comic, but the reality is a serious deployment of hypnotherapeutic techniques for non-therapeutic ends. As with business success NLP coaching, the increasing permeation of hypnosis-like techniques to achieve non-therapeutic ends is a new element in the social picture than warrants attention.

Military Applications

A declassified document, obtained by The Black Vault Freedom of Information Act archive, shows that hypnosis was investigated for military applications. However, according to the document, “the use of hypnosis in intelligence would present certain technical problems not encountered in the clinic or laboratory. To obtain compliance from a resistant source, for example, it would be necessary to hypnotize the source under essentially hostile circumstances. There is no good evidence, clinical or experimental, that this can be done.”

It is fair to say that this analysis applies more to classical hypnosis that to the new covert varieties. However, no material on that subject has as yet been classified.

Brief Therapy

One of the happier developments of the new hypnosis is its part in orienting the certain recent schools of therapy towards faster solutions. The amazing success of hypnosis, especially when combined with NLP techniques, in eliminating certain problems by eradicating the negative core beliefs surrounding such issues and the emotional connections dating back to the origin of the belief, and then simply suggesting that these issues are now eliminated has been taken as inspiration by a number of practitioners in Brief Therapy schools. The orientation in brief therapy is on what clients want to achieve by undergoing therapy, not on the problem. The approach focuses on the present and, in particular, the future: the client is invited to envision a preferred future and actions that help secure it, small or large, are encouraged and supported. Numerous Ericksonian techniques, such as future pacing, are deployed. Client resources, potentials and strengths, rather than challenges and difficulties, are dwelt upon; and exceptions to and respites from problems, not the problems themselves, are considered and analyzed.

The Futures of Hypnosis

Hypnosis faces various futures – a new world with new difficulties to help resolve, new developments in its own tools and self-definition, and new enhancements from related schools and discoveries. The full range of hypnotic applications grows with each problem that is called in to address, and so all the ways it can be used is probably inexhaustible. Hypnosis is now being used as a tool to wean young people from video game addiction, for instance, and as an ever-advancing technological civilization throws up ever new, ever unexpected, problems and challenges, hypnosis in one form or another will surely be there to help individuals meet it. Will we recognize it – or ourselves – centuries hence? Possibly not. But the impulse to heal, to strengthen, to liberate, to improve, is as central a part of the heritage of hypnosis as it is of the human spirit. To the degree that those goals endure, phenomena like hypnosis will surely accompany the human spirit into the future.

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