The Post-Hypnotic Suggestion

(This blog was originally posted on September 26, 2017)

When I work with my hypnotherapy clients, I give a lot of suggestions during the session. Some of those suggestions happen at the very beginning of hypnosis. For example, I will tell a Physical suggestible client: “You are allowing your eyes to close.” Or I might say to the Emotional Suggestible person, “Right about now you are noticing that your eyelids are feeling verrrrrrrry heavy.” The content of the suggestions I use to facilitate the client’s desired behavioral changes will depend on the person’s therapeutic/self-improvement goal and his or her suggestibility. I also include two specific post-hypnotic suggestions during the session.

The first is the post-suggestion to re-hypnosis. This is what enables the client to easily, comfortably re-enter the hypnotic state in future hypnotherapy sessions whenever a specific word/phrase or physical trigger occurs: the words “deep sleep” and me snapping my fingers or touching the client’s forehead. I include the phrase, “Each time deep sleep is suggested to you for the purposes of hypnosis, with your permission and only your permission” to ensure that this state will be induced only in the context of hypnotherapy. When I work with children/teens I make it clear during the cognitive (alert) and hypnosis portions of the session that only the hypnotherapist can induce the hypnotic sleep, not a parent or sibling, etc. Similarly, when I use hypnosis to help a pregnant woman and her birthing partner prepare for childbirth, I include a similar caveat. For example, the client will not be suggestible to doing anything that is not relevant to relaxation and aspects of the birth process.

The second post-hypnotic suggestion I use is called the post-suggestion to reaction. This is a specific suggestion that activates a desired behavior change when the client is no longer in hypnosis and has returned to an alert and aware state. For example, I might suggest to a client to wants to feel more relaxed and confident when speaking in public begins to notice a specific color that represents relaxation and calm everywhere around him, all over the environment. Furthermore, every time the person sees this color, he immediately feels completely confident, relaxed and in control of his response to every situation and can express himself and his ideas easily, comfortably and confidently.

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 Hypnotherapy® and to set up an appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.

© 2017

Lost...and Found

(This blog was originally posted on September 22, 2016)

Photo by Rick Hustead

 

There is a platitude about never really losing something that truly belongs to you. If it is truly yours and you are meant to have it, eventually, that object or person or pet will return to you. In the past 36 hours or so, three things I truly believed were gone for good returned to me in the most unexpected ways.

The first was a quote: “You don’t do that to people, you don’t do that to people, you don’t do that to people!” The line just popped into my head one night earlier this week and I had no idea why or where it was from, but the quote was so familiar. I tossed and turned for about an hour, wondering who said it, where had I heard or read it? Maybe it was from one of my favorite movies, Truly, Madly, Deeply? No. I have seen that film and many times and read the screenplay; I know the dialog for all the key grief scenes practically by heart, and that line wasn’t in any of those scenes. Finally, I did an Internet search and found a scene from Grey’s Anatomy that had a similar line. Similar, but not the same…. So I put the line out of my mind and went about my day. When I woke up the following morning, the answer to my quote puzzle was solved: the line was from a scene in Circle of Two, a 1980 film starring Tatum O’Neal as a sixteen-year-old girl who falls in love with an artist portrayed by Richard Burton. (FYI: The scene in which O’Neal says this line is at 1 hour 28 minutes into the movie.)

The second item I found was a notebook that contained notes I took during Charlotte Dujardin’s dressage symposium at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center in March 2014. Earlier this year, I reorganized my room and packed away a lot of magazines and other items to store in our loft. The notebook “disappeared” around then. From time to time I considered climbing up to the loft to go through those boxes and look for the notebook; but as the months passed and the weather got hotter I just put it off. I knew it had to be somewhere in the house. Sure enough, when I was sorting through some notebooks for inspiration for a new blog I happened to glance at the corner of my bedroom and saw the notebook. It was on the floor next to a bookcase and probably had been there all along, I just never noticed it before. I quickly picked it up and placed it next to my computer; I referenced some of the notes in yesterday’s blog about the Olympic gold medalist’s tips for training a young horse for dressage.

I found the third item this evening. Actually, there were two items, but I didn’t know I was looking for the second one—which I found first—until I discovered it. When I started to become involved in advocating against cetacean captivity, I wanted to work on a counted cross-stitch pattern of orcas (killer whales). It was strange to me that even with the popularity of Blackfish and growing awareness about the plight of these animals at marine parks, there were no embroidery kits or even patterns of the mammals. I looked on-line and inquired about these kits at every craft shop I could find on San Juan Island, Washington, where I attended the Superpod 5 event in July. As it turned out, I actually had a pattern in a collection of embroidery designs of wild animals tucked away in a box in my closet. I’m sure I purchased the book for the patterns of grizzly bears and grey wolves, and it probably had been languishing in that box, never opened, for at least ten years.

The amazing thing to me was that I only found the patterns because I was desperately searching for something else. Last weekend, I noticed that a small plastic horse I displayed on top of my dresser was missing. My mother gave me the horse to celebrate when I bought my first real horse, Geeves, in 2004. Both my mom and my horse have since passed away, and the sudden disappearance of that little horse really upset me. So this evening I started pulling boxes out from beneath and beside the dresser in case the horse fell behind or even into the items I was storing. (This was when and where I found the orca pattern.) What if I knocked it into one of the dresser drawers? I wondered. Ta-da! When I opened the one in which I store my t-shirts, I could see four tiny plastic hooves sticking up.

My hypnotherapy training really helped me find these items because it allowed me to relax and allow the inspiration and items to come to me rather than slip into a frantic search mentality. I was able to engage the logic/will-power/reasoning/decision-making faculties of my conscious mind to strategize about where I should start looking: Where was the last place I saw the item/heard that line? But I also knew that when the item didn’t appear after a reasonable time of searching, the best thing to do was stop the active search and allow my subconscious mind to do the heavy-lifting part of this work. The conscious mind can only store a limited amount of information at any one time, but the SCM holds millions of message units just waiting to be re-discovered. I just needed to be patient, relax, wait and let the treasures return to me.

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 Hypnotherapy® and to set up an appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.

© 2017

Thoughts for the Day

The Sun and its satellite moon during the 2017 eclipse, Southern California

Photo by Sara Fogan

     Every now and then I like (and need) to take a few moments and remind myself about what is really important to me, in my life. If you follow me on my Calminsense Hypnotherapy Facebook page you may have seen some of these quotes before on this page, or will in the future. Many of these Quotes of the Day are beautiful examples and illustrations of the work I do as a hypnotherapist, so I will probably draw on them in future essays.

• “What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out.” – William Wordsworth

• “Surround yourself with only people who are going to lift you higher.” – Oprah Winfrey

• “100% of the shots you don’t take don’t go in.” – Wayne Gretzky

• “Success comes to those who work hard on achieving it.” – Lolly Daskal

• “Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals.” – Henry Ford

• “Don't expect to get what you want - if you don't know what you want.” – Bille Baty

• “You can't change the past, but you can ruin a perfectly good present by worrying about the future.” – Unknown

• “The secret of happiness is freedom; the secret of freedom is courage.” – Carrie Jones

• “The most important persuasion tool you have in your entire arsenal is integrity.” – Zig Ziglar

• “With realization of one’s own potential and self-confidence in one’s ability, one can build a better world.” – Dalai Lama

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 Hypnotherapy® and to set up an appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.

© 2017