Best Hypnotic Suggestibility Test For Hypnosis Clients

(Video transcribed)

Next question is, “Scott, what do I do if suggestibility test fails? I use the typical finger lock, but I’m finding most of my clients it doesn’t work for. What was your favorite suggestibility test?” Okay, so this is a good question. Suggestibility tests, I never use them, ever. Like not once. Because I realized this, and I’ve mentioned this on videos before, all clients can go into trance. So what are you testing for? And again, you’re running into one of the issues of what if my client’s suggestibility test doesn’t work? What do I do? Stop using them. What are you testing for? It becomes a sort of waste of time, becomes a non-sequitur at that point. Because… Let’s look at where our client’s problems exist in the first place, and this as well.

You want to be concentrating on your clients’ breakthrough, not how deep they go into trance or how well they go into trance, or how quickly they’re going to trance. Separate those two things, okay? I think everybody spends far too long with trance techniques, confusion techniques, techniques that do the trance thing, because that’s the fun, egotistical, [inaudible 00:01:13] way, I used to be like that too, instead of concentrating on the therapy. So when concentrating on the therapy, you do want to go into a session with the understanding that clients had to have gone into trance to create the problem in the first place. Bar none. Every problem is created by going into trance. Let’s say, for example, you are walking down the road, you’re a bit younger, let’s say you’re 10 years old, and you walk down the street, you are on your way to school, you’re not concentrating, you’re just walking, and a dog jumps out, scares the bejeezus out of you, barks, your neurology spikes, and instantly your mind goes blank. It’s like the fight or flight thing. It can happen just in a second.

So when the fight or flight kicks off, that’s trance, because now your mind is trying to figure out, what’s the best thing to do? Do I fight this enemy or do I run away? Now, hopefully you would run away. But at that point, that’s when the unconscious mind, if it decides to and happens like in a spare of a moment, if it decides in order to keep you out of harm’s way and keep you healthy, which is what the unconscious mind tries to do, it may create a conclusion.

And that’s what a problem is, it’s just the wrong conclusion. It’s a conclusion that works for you at that time, but not necessarily when you’re older. Creates a conclusion that all dogs are bad, stay away from dogs. And that gets locked off quickly, like pure unconsciousness. And now you walk through life experiencing the symptoms of having a phobia of dogs, not liking animals, not liking people who have animals, not wanting to watch movies if there’s an animal. Any number of symptoms, because the unconscious mind has concluded that that was the best thing for it to do, to keep you away from a barking dog because it scared you. So in order to create that problem, that blankness in your mind, that’s the trance thing we’re talking about.

So with suggestibility tests, if you don’t believe that all clients had to go into trance in order to create their problem, which theoretically they had to have, just like you have, just I have, it means that now you are testing for something that already exists. And yeah, that’s what I would like to know. What do you do if it fails? How do you get out of that? I wouldn’t even have… I don’t even have a suggestion for you. For number one, you don’t need to do it. I don’t see the point, the finger lock, walking down the stairs, imagination. It proves nothing. It has nothing to do with the therapy and the trance, it proves nothing, so stop doing it. That’d be my only suggestion. If you’re finding that it’s not working, don’t do it. Just realize a client had to go into trance in order to create the problem, just like a client has to go into trance in order to solve the problem.

So just make an assumption, and this is a generalization that I think you can live with. And I’ve talked about not creating any conclusions going into therapy with my clients, but this is the one conclusion I guess I did have to make is that all clients have going into trance. I don’t care how deep, I don’t care how fast, I don’t care when or how, I don’t care about any of that stuff. I know eventually they will. Because if I talk about the problem enough, which exists unconsciously, they have to go into trance in order to retrieve that information. Thus, by doing the therapy and understanding the parameters of the problem, they had to go into trance. But that’s another video for itself.

But hopefully you see my point. Just don’t do them. Get away from the traditional stuff, the suggestibility tests, the eye closure, eye catalepsy, all that sort of stuff. That means nothing in the context of actually doing real therapy with clients, and you’ve already found a problem with it. So if you ever find problems with things, in the more traditional sense, get rid of them. Do something else, try something else, and see if that helps. That would be the only suggestion for that.