Hypnosis: the myth, the truth and some irrelevant information

Hypnosis is a very fascinating term and much of the credit goes to the horror movies and crime fantasies in which we’ve seen people doing strange things, things opposite to their basic nature like killing someone or forgetting all the information regarding some event.

I can just say that it’s all loads of crap and call it a day but that would not satisfy the curiosity that if it’s not what’s portrayed then what is it?

To be precise nobody is conclusive enough as to what happens in the state of hypnosis, is it a state of trance? or just a deep relaxation mode or is it a dreamlike state? but what we can say conclusively that it’s a state of suggestibility and that state is slowly attained by the cooperation of both the client and the therapist.

We’ve all seen it somewhere that the hypnotherapist says that focus on the circle, (square or unicorn) that obnoxious moving thing and then he/she says “now your eyelids are getting heavy”. Well of course they are getting heavy because of you focusing on a complex visual stimulus, but what has happened in between is that you’ve accepted his suggestion to look at the object, breathe slowly and then your eyelids get heavy of natural reasons.

So we can say that hypnosis is a heightened state of suggestibility wherein you follow some of the suggestions, get relaxed and then other suggestions follow.

But to follow or not to follow entirely depends on the person, ON YOU. That means you’ll not commit any criminal activity if you don’t intend to you’ll not even forget an event. So what about the people in the club that do weird things, they’re staged or intoxicated or both, Hypnotherapy is just like any other therapy used.

Though there are some problems associated with it just like there are limitations with any therapy. One of its major limitation is that if the person gets open to suggestions some memories get fabricated as well. But the hypnotherapists counter it with the argument that memories get constructed because the person wants that either consciously or unconsciously.

I would conclude this with a definition for you to brood upon given by Erickson he defined it “ as an artificially enhanced state of suggestibility resembling sleep wherein there appears to be a normal, time limited and stimulus limit dissociation of conscious and subconscious elements of the psyche”

 

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