Doorway To Freedom

This is the first part of a series of videos in which I answer the most common questions people have about hypnosis. There are still many myths and misunderstandings about hypnosis and it’s a shame that despite the research made, knowledge about hypnosis is far from being public.

Hello, and welcome to my channel again, my name is Penelope from Doorway To Freedom and I’m a hypno- psychotherapist, and this week I’ve thought of creating a mini series where I go through the most common questions about hypnosis. Because to be honest with you, the knowledge of hypnosis is around for centuries at this stage and especially in the past 50 years, it has been well researched and studied even scientifically, yet there is no knowledge about it out there.

There is no public knowledge about it and this is in real shame because hypnosis is a great tool with huge potential for healing from emotional issues, from issues that are typical of the human mind. And so I just want to make this public because it really is a shame that not more people take advantage of it. And I don’t mean like, not more people that go to therapy, because therapy is not really for everyone, not everyone is at a stage in life where they are ready for therapy, they are ready for change, and maybe they’re not ready financially.

However, because hypnosis is a natural state of the mind, that the mind does itself and that each and every one can actually take control of, and use it to their own advantage, I don’t see why people should not know about it and how to use it for themselves without having to necessarily go to hypnotherapists, to help themselves with whatever issues. Of course, there will be some issues that you might need to go to a professional, however, there are plenty, plenty of techniques that you can use in hypnosis that will make all the difference in your life.

So enough of this rant, I’m going to go through three of the most common questions today. And it was started just in a few moments.

So the first question today is: ‘What does it feel like to be hypnotized?’ Now you’re probably thinking, well, would the first question not be ‘What is hypnosis?’ But the thing is, I already created a video about what is hypnosis where I go into very much detail about it, so I’m not going to repeat myself. I will just leave a link down below and I will try and stick it somewhere here on the screen. And you can go and watch that one afterwards, if you’re interested.

So let’s answer, ‘What does it feel like to be in hypnosis or to be hypnotized?’ Because hypnosis is in relaxed state of the mind, what it feels like to be in hypnosis is, you feel very relaxed and therefore people totally enjoy being in hypnosis. Now, of course there are sometimes, or some people that don’t quite enjoy being hypnosis, but the only reason why that is, is that it’s probably the first time or the first few times that they’re doing it, and whether they’re doing it by themselves or they are with a therapist, they don’t trust the process.

They probably don’t know about it. And all they rely on is what the therapists tells them. And obviously, especially if it’s the first time that they’re going, that they’ve seen the person, they are basically with a total stranger. So there’s probably very little rapport yet. And therefore, they’re obviously anxious about hypnosis and what’s going to be like, what’s going to happen. Will I be doing it right? And what if I’m not doing it right? What if the therapist is not happy with me, the way I do it, there’s a lot of things going on into someone’s mind when they have never done hypnosis before. And obviously many of these questions will be there, even if someone is just listening to a hypnosis audio by themselves, it’s just not easy the first time, at least the first time to feel totally relaxed.

I remember when I did it the first time, I was totally stressed out! I was in a group and the hypnotherapists was asking people to volunteer to do hypnosis. And I kept saying to myself, every time he was asking for a volunteer, that I’ll be going next time, I’ll be going next time, but it never happened and eventually after four or five volunteers, he said, ‘Let’s do a group session’ so I felt like I had no options and I went with it. And after about 10 seconds of realizing that nothing was going on, I was able to relax and enter a trance, even though I’d never done it before. And so I felt quite foolish afterwards, so don’t worry about it gets better as you do it.

So let’s have a look at the second question now. So ‘Will I be aware of what’s going on when in hypnosis? Hypnosis is a state of altered awareness, which means you are aware and therefore, you know exactly what’s going on during the session, whether you’re doing it by yourself or you with a therapist. The thing is that what happens when you enter hypnosis, is that there is a shift of your attention. When we are awake we can easily be distracted that everything that goes around, because we are very alert and in a way we are hyper-vigilant. However, as we relax and enter a state of hypnosis, we let go of things and our focus shifts from the outside world to our inner world, we become very aware of our bodily sensations and of our feelings and of what’s going on in our mind. What that means is that whatever goes on outside of us, even outside of the room, doesn’t really bother us. It doesn’t interrupt our focus. We can just simply hear it, register it and let go of it.

The last question today is: ‘Will I remember anything after having been hypnosis?’ And again, the answer is, we are not going unconscious when we are going into hypnosis, so we do remember most of the session, no matter what kind of session it is, however, the more we do hypnosis, the more easily we can forget parts of the session. The reason being is that as we get more familiar with the process and with the therapist, in the case of having a session with a therapist, the easier it is for us to relax, and the more we are able to relax, the deeper the trance will be, and therefore we will forget more easily parts of the session. And the reason being that once we’ve reached a certain level of depth in hypnosis, we are almost going to sleep. And just like when we sleep, we dream. And then afterwards, we only remember bits and bobs of the dream and sometimes we don’t remember it at all. That’s what happens when we reach that level of hypnotic trance, however, it is very unlikely to not remember anything about the session.

So this is it for today. I hope you enjoyed this video, that you’ve learned something new and feel free to just comment down below. You might have some questions that you would like me to answer. Your question might already be in my plan to answer it, but if it’s not, I will gladly include it in one of my next few videos. So thank you for watching today and I’ll see you in my next videos.