Woman: And what if her breathing doesn't change when I change mine? Does it mean she is indeed in a physiological sleep state?
No. You can gain rapport with people who are in a physiological state of sleep. The difference is that you have to spend more time following them before you attempt to lead. If you attempt to lead and you do not get the response, take that as a statement that you didn't pace long enough; go back and pace longer.
People who arc asleep do respond, but more slowly and less overtly. The same is true of people in an anesthetic sleep state during opera: lions. Many doctors think that their patients are completely out when they are on the operating table. It's just not true. People accept post–I hypnotic suggestions under anesthesia faster than they will just about any other way. Just because their eyes are closed and their conscious minds are zonked, doesn't mean their ears don't work.
Once I worked with a woman who was living a very wild and rowdy life. Some of the things she was doing were destructive to her, so I was trying to get her to change. I worked with her for a while and couldn't make sense out of what she was doing. Finally I turned to her and said emphatically "Look, you absolutely have got to stop living wildly like this. It's not doing you any good, and it's just a waste of time. And what makes you do it?" Immediately her nostrils flared dramatically, and she I said "Oh, I'm really dizzy!" I asked "What do you smell?" She sniffed again and said "It smells like a hospital." I asked "What about a hospital?" She replied "You know that ether smell?" It turned out that some time earlier she'd had an operation. She'd been anesthetized, and since the doctor "knew" that she wasn't there, he talked freely. He looked at her insides and said "It looks terrible. I don't think she's going to make it for very long."
She did make it. Sometimes it's nice to be wrong! However, somehow or other she got the idea that the doctor's statement meant that she wasn't going to make it after the operation, not that she wasn't going to make it through the operation. The statement was ambiguous; the doctor hadn't specified "If you make it through the operation, everything will be fine." His statement didn't get sorted out in any meaningful way; she just responded to it. She came out of the operation thinking that she wasn't going to live very long, so it didn't concern her that some of the things she was doing were self–destructive.
Martha: When we did the exercise, and I was going into a trance, some part of me wondered "Am I really in?"
Right. And now we are talking about the whole interesting area called "convincers." The thing that convinces Martha a bout the experience of hypnosis will be different than what convinces Bill or someone else.
Martha's Partner: I'm really curious about that. Her eyes dilated and closed, but later she said that she had an internal dialogue going on the whole time. So that's not a somnambulistic trance state, right?
Different people have different understandings of somnambulistic trance. There isn't any way I know of defining it for all people. Generally people are convinced that they are in a trance when they experience something very different from their normal state. One person's normal state may be another person's trance. For a person whose consciousness has been specialized into kinesthetics, the con–vincer will probably be a set of visual images that are vivid, colorful, and stabilized. A person who hasn't had a body sensation in thirty years will probably be convinced by an experience of detailed and strong kinesthetic sensations,
Man; I heard you say earlier that if someone has been in a somnambulistic trance, she will not have any conscious memory of it.
Right. Typically when you alter a person's consciousness that radically, when she comes back somebody in the audience will ask "Were you in a trance?" and she'll say "Oh, no! I knew what was going on the whole time." If you then mention some specific activities she carried out, she will say "I didn't do that! You're kidding!" That is, she has complete amnesia for a large segment of that trance experience. To assist that person in being subjectively satisfied that she was in a trance, I often set up a post–hypnotic suggestion that I will trigger by kinesthetic cueing. I'll have it be something obvious and inexplicable like taking one shoe off. That way she will notice that something has happened for which she has no explanation.
You can also find out in advance what a person's "complex equivalence" for trance is: what specific sensory experiences would constitute proof to her that she was in a trance. Then you can develop that kind of experience for the person.
Actually, for the purpose of personal change, it's irrelevant whether the person believes that she has been in trance or not. If you can achieve an altered state and use it to help the person make appropriate changes, that's all that matters.
When you have thoroughly learned about hypnosis, you will find that you will never again have to do any "official" trance inductions that your clients will recognize as such. You will be able to induce altered states naturally, and you will be able to utilize them to achieve changes without the person consciously realizing that anything like "hypnosis" has ever occurred.
Anchoring Trance Stales
For those of you who are not familiar with the term "anchoring," we want to give you an idea of what it is and how you can use it. Anchoring is already written up in detail in our book, Frogs into Princes (Chapter II), so we won't repeat that information to you now. However, we do want to talk about anchoring as it relates to hypnosis.
Every experience includes multiple components: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory. Anchoring refers to the tendency for any one element of an experience to bring back the entire experience. You have all had the experience of walking down the street and smelling something, and then suddenly you are back in another time and place. The smell serves as a "reminder" of some other experience. That's an anchor. Couples often have a song that they call "our song." That's an anchor too. Every time they hear that song, they re–experience the feelings they had for each other when they first called it "our song."
Many of the inductions you just did made use of anchoring. When you helped your partner access a previous trance experience, you were making use of anchors that were already set up in that person's experience. If you asked your partner to assume the same body posture she had during a trance experience, to hear the sound of the hypnotist's voice, or do anything else paired with trance, you were using naturally occurring anchors.
If a person can tell you what her experience of trance is in sensory–based terms, you can use anchoring to construct that state for her. All you need to do is to break down her experience of trance into its component visual, auditory, and kinesthetic parts.
If you start with visual, you can ask "How would you look to other people if you were in deep trance? Show me with your body here. I'll mirror you so that you have feedback about what you're doing, and you can adjust your body until what you see looks right." When she tells you it's right, you anchor her with a touch or a sound.
Next you find out if she would be making internal images, and if so, what kind. If her eyes are open in deep trance, ask her what she would be seeing on the outside. As she accesses the answer, you anchor her state.
Then you go on to feelings. "How would you feel if you were in a deep trance? How would you be breathing? Show me exactly how relaxed you would be." When she demonstrates how she would feel, you anchor that state.
That leaves the auditory component of "deep trance" to be anchored. You could ask her if she would be aware of the voice of a hypnotist, and what that would sound like. Then find out if she would have any internal dialogue or sounds in deep trance.