3 Types Of Hypnotic Trance In Hypnosis

(Video transcribed)

Today, I look at three types of hypnosis experience people can have.

Number one is what I call a relaxation trance or a relaxation experience, where you might deepen a client. You relax them so they feel relaxed, and then from there, we’re expected, “Okay, well, a client is relaxed. I’m going to use some suggestions to tell them to be a non-smoker, anxiety, or something like that.” But here’s the funny thing. Just because a client is relaxed does not mean you have complete access to the unconscious mind. Think about it like this. Have you ever been laying on the couch watching a movie and being really relaxed? Did you have a breakthrough? People say, “Well, hang on, Scott, no one was giving me suggestions.” What if you’re watching TV, and you’re in this place where you’re very suggestible, as it says you should be? Why are you not absorbing the suggestions on the TV, on the video?

You could also have a therapist do the whole relaxation thing, tell you the suggestions, and you come out the other side and you say, “Yeah, I felt really relaxed, but my problem is still there.” I’m not going to get into all the symptoms and scripts and all that sort of stuff. I’ve talked enough about that. So that’s the first type of therapy, our first type of hypnosis. That’s just relaxation.

The second type is what I call a dirty trance. So what do I mean by a dirty trance? Well, it follows the same timeline. You relax a client. You have them go deeper, do suggestibility test, stuff like that. Then you do the suggestions. But the problem with this is your client’s conclusions, their issues, their I-can’t-because-of-this-type thinking, their mindset. All the conclusions, all the experiences, all the years of having that problem, you essentially take them into a place where trance should exist, and what do they do? They bring in all that baggage with them. They bring in all of those what we call knots. They bring in all the conclusions, the issues, the emotions, and now this trance is basically, if you imagine, like a bubble. They’re sitting in this bubble called trance, with all their (excuse my language here) bullshit with them.

So no matter how many suggestions you throw at them, where do those suggestions land? They just bounce right off all the negative stuff. They bounce off the conclusions, the backwards rationalization, the emotions, the this-will-never-work-for-me, the doubt, the mindset. And then you pop your client out the other side, and they’re expected to have their breakthrough. But because of the dirtiness, so to speak, of the trance, all they’ve done is they’ve started the session with all their conclusions. They’ve gone into a place that is supposed to be trance, bringing in all those conclusions with them. What do you think is going to happen when they pop out the other side? Those same things are going to be there, if not worse, because sometimes when a client is relaxed or in a trance, it can exacerbate what already exists.

Now, think about that. It can exacerbate what already exists, meaning that the client goes into trance with all these doubts that this is not going to work. It will exacerbate. It’ll grow, so by the time they come out, now they’ve just concluded that “Yes, this did not work,” and adds another layer of complexity and knots onto things. That’s what I mean.

So we’ve got the relaxation. We’ve got the dirtiness trance or the dirty trance. What’s left? Well, this is where ACH comes in. Now, if you look back at just the start of this video, you notice how I’ve talked about you start a client with a relaxation. You do the suggestibility test. They walk down the stairs. They go deeper. They drift. Suggestibility test. You’re looking for certain phenomena to occur to let you know your client’s gone deeper, and then the therapists are supposed to do the therapy.

But like I said, if they concentrate on the therapy second, it just means they’re going to bring all this bad stuff into the trance with them. This is where ACH comes in, guys, and this is what we teach. We do the therapy first. Isn’t that strange? We actually look at it as we do the therapy first, so if a trance exists or a trance happens as a byproduct of collapsing those knots and doing the therapy, a client can now go into this trance place, and it’s completely clean. It’s like a fresh canvas, which means our client goes into this thing always looking for more positive stuff. It’s open. It’s open-ended. It’s open-minded. That’s why we do the therapy first. I don’t want my client going into this trance place, bringing all this crap along with him: the resistance, the negativity, the mindset.

Now, what’s really cool, and Erickson said this, but a lot of people don’t listen to this part, and he says, “Towards the end of my career, I stopped doing hypnosis,” and this is exactly what he’s talking about: everybody’s concentration on the hypnosis. You’ve got any more traditional trainings. What do they spend? You do a three-day training with them. Two-and-a-half days is just on the hypnosis part. Then half the day, I’m just giving some suggestions around symptoms, and you wonder why it doesn’t work. And they say, “Well, you’ve got to do it multiple times and audios and book work.” No, you don’t. If you get to the real root cause and have a breakthrough in the session, there’s no need for those other things we’ve talked about on other videos. So we like to do the therapy first.

What happens when you break down those knots and you do the therapy first? The byproduct of that is usually trance. And notice what I said here. Everyone thinks that if I do the hypnosis first, the byproduct of hypnosis is the breakthrough, but it’s not, because they remember. If you do the hypnosis part first and they’re bringing all their bad stuff with them, the byproduct of that is the problem gets worse. We exacerbate it. We talked about that, actually, before. So we like to do the therapy first.