With Your Permission (and Only With Your Permission), Part 1

(This blog was originally posted on January 20, 2014)

     If you do not want to be hypnotized—whether you do not believe that hypnosis will work for you or resist being hypnotized because you are afraid—you won’t be. I repeat the statement, “with your permission and only your permission” throughout the session to remind my clients that they can choose to be hypnotized and actualize their desired behavior changes. I also use my clients’ own words to reinforce their emotions, reasons and motivations for making these changes. As a certified hypnotherapist, I use hypnosis is a tool to help you change behaviors that no longer work for you and replace them with behaviors, strategies, etc. that you want and believe will improve your quality of life. During hypnosis, you are completely aware of everything going on around you. If you wouldn’t say or do something when you are completely alert, you would not and could not be made to do anything in hypnosis that opposes your beliefs, morals and ethical principles.

     Therefore, I tend to be very critical of how and why hypnosis is depicted on television and in movies: a protagonist is “commanded” to do something that is completely out of character; the hypnotist erases and then replaces a character’s memory with a new, fictitious personal history and personality; or a person is “hypnotized” to behave in a particular way simply to move the plot along. In these scenarios, the character is completely unaware that he has been hypnotized; he just carries out the hypnotist’s bidding and does whatever needs to be done to move the plot along. Imagine my surprise that I not only bought the hypnosis-ambush of a character in a popular detective series, but it made absolute sense why this scenario worked and was believable.

               

               

Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified hypnotherapist based in Southern California. She graduated with honors from the Hypnosis Motivation Institute in 2005. For more information about Calminsense Hypnotherapywww.hypnosis.edu® and to set up an appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.

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