Doorway To Freedom

Today I’m going through another 3 of the most popular questions about Hypnosis:

1. Can I be stuck on hypnosis?

2. Can I be made do or say something I don’t want to in hypnosis?

3. Are hypnotizable people gullible people?

Hello, and welcome to Doorway to Freedom, my channel. My name is Penelope and I’m a hypno-psychotherapist. This is the second video of the series where I go through the most common questions about hypnosis. So I’m going to link the first video up here and down in the description below, if you want to watch that you can follow that link, and we’re going straight into three questions today in just a few moments.

So, our first question today is, ‘Is there a chance that I may be stuck in hypnosis?’ Now there is no such a thing for sure, simply because you need to remember that when we are in hypnosis, we are more suggestible. So if the therapist says ‘We’ve now come to the end of the session and you can come back to full awareness’ that’s what you will do. And usually what therapists do is, they will count you up or down from one to five or five to one and at each counting they will give you a suggestion to help you come back to full awareness slowly, so that you’re not shocked out of trance.

If you are listening to an audio recording, don’t worry about it because they all have suggestions at the end for you to come back to full awareness, and even if you were to fall asleep while listening to the recording, you will come back to full awareness.

If you’re doing a self-hypnosis session, all you have to do before you go into trance is giving yourself a suggestion to come back within a set amount of time. And it’s best for you to specify how many minutes, because the unconscious mind doesn’t do general suggestions. It’s best to have, two minutes, five minutes, and then after that amount, you can be sure that you will come back to full awareness.

Now, if you’re doing self-hypnosis for the first time, and you’re doing it by yourself, or even for the first few times, and you don’t trust yourself to come back to full awareness, which is normal, what you can do is you just put an alarm for yourself, so you don’t have to worry about it, and you’re able to relax and do your session. Of course, this is valid also if you have something to do after your session, you have to meet someone you have some work to do and things like that.

And our second question is: ‘Can I be made do, or say something that I don’t want to?’ Now, this is a big myth, and obviously it comes from learning hypnosis only through movies and entertainment hypnosis. Because really, when we see hypnosis from the outside as an observer it does seem as if someone is controlling our mind. However, there is nothing furtherst from the truth, simply because we can safely say that, all hypnosis is self hypnosis. Remember that if you don’t feel safe letting go and relaxing, you will not be able to enter a trance.

So all those people who are on stage performing, first of all they paid to be on the show, which means maybe even unconsciously, they’re hoping to be called on stage to perform, to be part of that group of people that are entertaining someone else. So once they’re on stage, they are already very suggestible and ready to enjoy themselves and make people have fun, but in a clinical setting, there is no such a thing as wanting to make the person in front of you do something that is against their best interests or against their values. In fact, if I was to suggest something that was against my client’s values, they would be instantly shocked out of trance and probably walk out the door without even saying a word to me. So it would be totally counterproductive to try and make someone do or say something that they don’t want to.

And our third and last question today is: ‘Are hypnotizable people gullible people?’ Now, first of all, this word ‘gullible’ has a very bad connotation to it. The right word is ‘suggestible’. Now out of all of 7 billion people in the world, we are all suggestible, to some degree or another. If you have feelings, you are suggestible, which is why advertising appeals to our feelings because our behavior is dictated by our feelings and our emotions.

So unless you’re dead, you are suggestible, right? And of course not everyone is suggestible at the same level: you would have the left-brain people who are less suggestible, simply because they’re more analytical, they like to dissect things to understand things better from a cognitive perspective. They are the people who like to plan, strategize to achieve their goals easier, or to find a better solution.

And then you have the right-brain people, who use their imagination more, they’re very good at visualizing things as opposed to analyzing and dissecting problems, and they also are people who tend to daydream a lot. They are more impulsive people, more emotional people. So we are all suggestible to some degree or another, so everyone can be hypnotized and everyone can get the benefits out of hypnosis.

This is it for today. Thank you for watching another video of mine. Please give it a thumbs up if you liked it and share it, and I hope to see you in my next video, where I go through another couple of questions about hypnosis. See you next time.