Hypnosis acts, have you ever been involved?

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Hypno-Rick said:
Hypnotists often say ""you can't make someone do what they don't want to". I don't like or use that wording. I prefer "You won't do anything that is morally or ethically against your beliefs". When you see the stage hypnotists having the people on stage do goofy things everyone always say's "Why would they do that?". Well the answer is, it wasn't against their moral or ethical belief. I have seen stage hypnotists make suggestions that one or more people on stage refused.

As far as your comment on working with those with severe mental issues. 99% of trained hypnotherapists will not work with clients who have severe mental issues.

Keep in mind. All hypnosis is self hypnosis. Anyone how wants to be hypnotized can be. Anyone who doesn't - Won't....
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yes, exactly. it's the appearance of the commanded acts performed by the volunteers which gives hypnosis the "putting them under effect" and at the same time giving the effect it's more than it is.

on to therapy. even sigmund freud gave up hypnotherapy because it was ineffective and if 99% of hypnotherapists won't work with people with severe problems, then what use does it actually have? what makes it any different from selling tap water with a claim that it boosts your confidence and improves your social skills for 50x the cost of tap water? hypnotherapists don't even care about the specifics of the problem because all they do is tell the patient to get over X, go do X or don't do X. they make no attempt to find the cause of the patients problem so how are they supposed to know whats best for the patient?

if water was sold with some ridiculous claims(which there has been), people on here would be debunking it like crazy, yet if someone comes along with a technique with similar types of claims, it's considered ok? unless i'm missing something huge here, it's a double standard.

hypnotism for entertainment is fine as it obviously provides entertainment as it's trick, but it's still no more than a trick and it will never be anything more than entertainment. the performer/hypnotist has to put on a show, be charming and glamorous and tell the volunteers to do entertaining acts, mystical, funny etc. class it as anything more than entertainment and it's a con.
 
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porch said:
Tell me more about this please?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

This is an interesting mnemonic, which I first learned of in a psych class. The prof read to us a list of thirty random items, and instructed us to visualize them at certain points along a route we were very familar with. I chose my driving route to high school, and visualized the first word "fish" in my passenger seat, the second word, "gift" in the rear seat. The third item in my front window looking forward. The fourth item at the point where I backed out of the parking spot, and the fifth at the end of the driveway, etc. Several of us were able to remember all thirty items for extra credit the following class period.
 
Hypno-Rick said:
Ok Guy's and Gal's...... I've been trying for two days to become a member of this site so I can join this conversation. I am a Certified Hypnotherapist and I would love to take this forum to answer all of your questions..... Reading through this thread there has been alot of the common misconceptions brought up. There have also been a few truths. I think at this point in time it would be easier for me to just ask those you have questions, and want a honest and straight forward answer, to post those below. I will try to check this thread a few times a day to get all of those questions answered. I'll leave you with these simple description of hypnosis. Hypnosis in it's simplest form can be described as the ability to concentrate on a single thought whereby excluding all others.... Everyone uses hypnosis everyday... Do you daydream or zone out? Do you drive down a road you travel alot, then notice that you are farther down the road then you remember or perhaps got home and don't remember the entire drive? Have you ever become emotional watching a movie. And last but not least.... Do you Sleep?? Everyone goes through the brain waves commonly perceived as hypnosis everyday........ Rick
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Where did you get your certification and who were you trained by? Do you have a practice / products? Hypnosis is a bit of a hobby of mine and I always like new and different takes on it.
 
Ivor the Engineer said:
I’m always amazed when people claim they or people they’ve hypnotized performed acts that they would not have done normally. The situation was anything but normal when they did these things! They had agreed to play an imaginative game called hypnosis. Couple this with the implicit subordinate role the subject is agreeing to take in the game and what you can get them to do while hypnotized seems much less impressive to me. Any potential embarrassment can be defused with the excuse ‘I was hypnotized’.
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Exactly.

I think there are other situations that are similar. Like the goofy things people do at some church services that they certainly wouldn't do anywhere else. Also, to a lesser extent, the willingness of people to be entertained in general. I've done just enough stand-up to know that you can get pretty far when the audience is there to have a good time. Ever tuned into a live comedy-club show on TV where you come in midway through? It seems almost absurd how little it takes to make the audience roar with laughter at a certain point.

Again, the difference is with honesty. When people think they're seeing hypnosis, the bar is lowered as to what is entertaining. (Similar, in a way, to some "improv" comedy groups--where maybe 5% of what you're seeing is actually improvised.)
 
Alan, I could stay up all night quoting research proving that hypnosis is real and it works. But that's not what I'm going to do. I personally think there is a big difference between hypnotists (stage entertainers) and Hypnotherapist (using hypnosis to help the client achieve a goal). In some cases the hypnotist is also a Hypnotherapist. But they use a different mentality when doing each.

As far as not working with 99% of severely Mental issues, Most Hypnotherapist won't work with clients who have bi-polar, multiple personality disorder and the like. These issues are traditionally dealt with non-trance talk therapy.

As far as Sigmund Freud is concerned. A lot of research, technology and methods have been found and developed since his time. The American Medical Association accepted hypnosis as a complementary adjunct in 1958.

Most Hypnotherapist have extensive training in different methods and tools to help their clients. These people are highly trained professionals who make their living doing something they love to do, helping people. I would love to sit here and give you some bit of information that would change your mind on hypnosis.... I don't believe that's going to happen. You have made up your mind, and that's fine. But on the flip side of that, what would it take for me, or anyone else, to prove to you that hypnosis is real and it helps thousands of people every year?
 
Kage, I was trained by the only school in Illinois licensed by the state to teach Hypnotherapy. I do have a private practice with products and the like.

Hypnosis has been a hobby for many people for hundreds of years. These day's it is a full time career for thousands of highly trained, dedicated people.
 
The other thing to keep in mind about hypnosis is that there is not a specific "Feeling" that comes with it. Some people feel different things and some people feel nothing. Some people remember everything that happens and some don't. To a certain extent it depends on what level they allow them selves to get down to. The standard scale currently uses is the Aaron scale of 6 levels. I use technology to tell me where the client is at instead of doing what they call "manual depth testing". When a hypnotist is doing a stage show, he uses covert manual depth testing to be able to tell how things are going and see who it isn't working for so he can send them back to their seats.
 
Hypno-Rick, I agree that hypnotherapy and stage hypnosis are two very different things, so I suppose the following might be a tangent to this thread.

As to hypnosis being "real"--how do you define that? Claims that many therapists have made are certainly unsubstantiated: that hypnotism can reveal repressed or otherwise lost memories (as if the mind were a tape recorder that you can rewind and replay to get more details than you first remembered), that hypnosis can lead to recall of past incarnations or instances of alien abduction, among others.

Other than these exceptional claims, what's left? If, as you say, hypnosis is the same as day dreaming, or sleep, or dissociative events (3 very different things), what exactly is it? (Those things are very different, one from the other, and various brain wave patterns are associated with all of them. Surely you realize that there are many different brainwave patterns associated with different stages of sleep?)

Is there any evidence of a trance state differentiated from relaxed waking state, or other states? (In other words, is there any evidence that a hypnotic trance even exists?)

What does it mean to say that hypnotherapy works? Is this compared to other forms of therapy? Is there a placebo control (like perhaps mock hypnotherapy performed by a counselor who is not trained and certified)?
 
Rick, what do you treat your clients for? How effective is the treatment compared to other techniques?

Based on my readings of journals and books over the years (Scientific American had a good article in 2001), I'm fairly convinced that there is a kernal of something real going on in hypnosis, and it has been shown to be effective in alleviating pain and anxiety in some cases, but this may be just relaxation and distraction ("think of some place where you want to be...").

I'm much more skeptical of using hypnosis to help people quit smoking or lose weight or such... the effects seem to be short-term, and I haven't seen any conclusive studies that this kind of hypnotherapy is effective.

And of course, we all know that "recovered memories" under hypnosis (of past lives, alien abductions, or of supposed childhood abuse) are totally bogus, and people who try to plant (or "recover") these memories are acting unethically.
 
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Joe, There are different brain waves of sleep. We could look at the groups (Alpha, Theta, and Delta) or we can look look at the specific hertz of these waves. The Alpha and Theta groups of brain waves are hypnosis. They are what they called the altered consciousness. Beta is wide and Delta is deep sleep. From the middle of alpha to the middle of theta is where you dream. There is no difference (short of the length of time) between day dreams (zoning out) and dreams you have in your sleep.

I'm having trouble coming up with a way to word my answer to your second question about "evidence that a hypnotic trance even exists". Let me sleep on how I want to word that one. I can come up with alot of examples, but I don't think that's what you are looking for.

Hypnotherapy has been extensively compared to placebo and traditional counseling. On my web site I link to three different reputable organizations that have done this. They are The National Institute of Health, Stanford University, and Harvard University. There are others but they are by subscription only so I don't link to them. All three of these have hundreds of articles written by researchers comparing hypnosis to other therapies.
 
Mfasion, I will help clients with anything that they want me to help them with. Remember all hypnosis is self hypnosis. The client is the car and the road, I am the map. All I do is help guild them achieve their goal. As far as how effective is it, that depends on the client and the goal. Like I said in an earlier post, I could spout off statistics all day long. I don't think that is what you guy's are looking for. How long do the effects last? That depends on if the hypnotherapist has done their job completely, and if the client is fully honest. To me these seem to be the biggest issues. We both know that nothing in life is 100%. But if those two things are fofilled the percentages rise dramatically.

I don't agree with your thought on past memories. I have personally found that with hypnosis I can go back and "view" or "re-live" specific events in a clients life. Wether it's something as simple as I can't find my wallet or car keys, to, who taught me how to ride a bike. If done correctly and ethically, without ANY leading regression work is very powerful and sometimes needed to help the client achieve their goal. I could sit here all night long giving you examples of clients I have worked with that have had wonderful sucess with regression work, the bottom line is that it sounds unbelieveable until you witness it or better yet experiance it. I guarantee you have done self regression 1000 times. You just didn't call it hypnosis. But it was.....
 
Hypno-Rick said:
Joe, There are different brain waves of sleep.
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Right--that's what I said to you.

You implied that there's one brainwave pattern common to hypnosis, zoning out, being in a relaxed waking state, and sleep. In fact, some stages of sleep have irregular EEGs that look just like normal waking EEGs. So what is it that's the same as hypnosis? Remember, this is in reply to your response to the question, "What is hypnosis?" You said it's something we all do every day and then cited three very different mental states as having the same brain wave pattern as hypnosis.

On a side note, plurals don't get apostrophes. Sorry, that's one of my pet peeves.
 
Joe,

Go to nih.gov , stanford.edu and harvard.edu These are the 3 common one's that I link to. They all have search engines in their web site. Just type in "hypnosis" and start searching. There is also a "scientific research" web site as well. It is subscription only though.
 
Joe, Sorry about the plural thing.... Its way past my bed time. I'll answer your question in the am...
 
Hypno-Rick said:
I don't agree with your thought on past memories. I have personally found that with hypnosis I can go back and "view" or "re-live" specific events in a clients life.
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With all due respect, you are misled or deluded. Memory simply doesn't work that way.

As a side note, possessives of common nouns do get apostrophes.
 
porch said:
Tell me more about this please?
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Money's description is bang on. The one drawback with this system is the need to traverse the route to find a specific item. If you need a system that will allow you to recall say, the 43rd item on a list directly, I would suggest peg words.

This basically works as follows:

Letters of the alphabet or small word fragments are associated with the single digit numbers 0 to 9. This is a phonetic system, so letters that sound similar are grouped together. For example, I use:

0 = s or z
1 = t or d
2 = n
3 = m
4 = r
5 = l
6 = ch, sh or j
7 = k or g
8 = f or v
9 = p or b

Now the harder part is you now have to form words using these letters and memorize them (the hard way) for the number of items you want to be able to remember. The first twenty-one words I use are:

0 = sea
1 = tea
2 = hen
3 = ham
4 = ear
5 = eel
6 = shoe
7 = cow
8 = ivy
9 = bee
10 = toes
11 = tit
12 = ton
13 = dime
14 = tear
15 = doll
16 = dish
17 = duck
18 = dove
19 = tap
20 = nose

I have memorized words (more importantly the images associated with those words) for the numbers up to 99 and the double digit groupings 00 to 09.

To apply the system to a list of things you want to remember you take the first item on the list and make a vivid image with the word you use for zero, which for me is ‘sea’. The next item on the list is formed into an image with ‘tea’ and so on.

When I want to be able to recall say, the 15th item on the list, I bring the image of a doll to mind (my peg word for 15) and the item on the list (or my imaginary prompt for it) is also present in the image. The trick is to form vivid and bizarre images, as these will be far more memorable.

I hope I’ve made some sense, but even if you’re confused there are plenty of pages on the web that explain the system better than I probably can. Just google ‘peg words’.

A word of warning: Once you’ve got your letters and words in your head, don’t look at anyone else’s system. You’ll get confused!

Using the peg word system you can memorize a deck of cards and get people to ask you to name, say, the 23rd, 37th and 16th cards in the deck. This is a little trickier, since you have to convert the cards into images that can be combined with the images you use for the numbers 1 to 52. There are various ways to do this, but I convert the cards into a 2-digit number and use the words and images I’ve already memorize for the peg word system.

Yes, I know, I’m a really sad person.
 
Hypno-Rick said:
Hypnosis has been a hobby for many people for hundreds of years. These day's it is a full time career for thousands of highly trained, dedicated people.
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And the same can be said for acupuncture, astrology, palmistry, hunting for the Loch Ness monster and football. Do you think that they magically become real just because a few people believe in them?
 
Joe,
In regards to the memory issue. I have experienced this personally and have worked with many clients whom I have helped them regress back. The subconscious mind remembers 97% more then the conscious mind. Better said, the conscious mind only remembers around 3% of what you experience using all your senses. The subconscious mind remembers the other 97%. I'm not going to argue with you about it, and if you want to think I'm deluded that's fine. But a lot of people have experienced it and it has changed their lives. Don't knock it until you've tried it.
 
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