Usually, hypnotic questioning serves to elicit the information more readily than can be done in the waking state, but the entire process depends on the development of a good client-therapist relationship rather than upon hypnotic technique and the hypnosis is essentially a means by which the client can give the information in a comfortable manner.
Hypnotherapy generates effective learnings that would not be possible except by prolonged effort in non-hypnotic therapies.
Successful hypnotherapy should be systematically directed to a re-education of clients, and the stimulation of their strongest desires to reorganize themselves to the realities of life and their ability to cope with the problems confronting them.
The most important thing a hypnotherapist can teach the client … is that they can trust their subconscious mind completely and rely upon it fully.
Hypnosis cannot create new abilities within a person, but it can assist in a greater and better utilization of abilities already possessed, even if these abilities were not previously recognized, and trance is used for the client to discover he can do things.
Hypnosis allows freedom and ease in structuring the therapeutic situation and renders the client’s feelings much more accessible. In a hypnotic state the client gains a more acute awareness of his needs and capabilities. He can be freed from mistaken beliefs, false assumptions, self- doubts and fears that stand in the way of his fullest participation in life.
Hypnosis enables clients to learn from experienced events, which they would otherwise tend to overlook or distort. Hypnosis allows the business of therapy to progress most efficiently toward the final goal of objective perception, acceptance and competence within a reality that previously had caused problems or symptoms.
Clients can meet their problems directly in the trance state and can be encouraged to discover new or more competent ways to cope with them.
Experiences can be created which encourage or demand a therapeutic response and communications can be offered which achieve an alteration in understanding and behaviour. In hypnotherapy the client can learn to look at things that are unpleasant – without fear, with a willingness to understand, and with a willingness to cope in new ways.
Re-education through hypnotherapy is a complex restructuring of subjective experiences that can be initiated very simply and then gently guided toward a therapeutic goal.
Essential elements are: clinical attentiveness to the client’s behaviour, a confident awareness that one can delay, even halt, and nullify hypnotically whatever is taking place, and postpone, modify or reinforce the structured situation leading to a therapeutic goal.
Then, as a result of some tangible performance, the client develops a profound feeling that, the repressive barriers have been broken, that the communication is actually understandable, and that its meaning can no longer be kept at a symbolic level.
It can enable clients to learn to trust, to communicate with, and to use that vast range of hidden resources stored within their own subconscious minds.
The most important thing a hypnotherapist can teach the client during the pre-induction, induction, therapy and programming phases is that they can trust their subconscious mind completely and rely upon it fully.
The trance offers both client and therapist a ready access to the client’s subconscious mind. It permits a direct dealing with those individual life experiences which are significant to the problems and which must be processed if creative results am to be achieved. Hypnosis gives prompt and extensive access to the subconscious.
