Stress Inductions
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The following are notes referencing several stress inductions that I presented at the February 2005 ABH conference in Newport Beach.  You can order that lecture through their recording house, Gayle Ackerman Communications in Tustin, CA at http://www.gacrecordings.com/pdf/abh2005.pdf.  This particular lecture is entitled Erickson's Classic Inductions and is available on two CD's at $9 each.  It is lecture number twenty.

This is an initial induction strategy that you can use as a hypnotherapist to achieve a surprisingly deep trance state.  It is called a stress induction because all of all the things the subject has to think about.  The more he has to think about, the more he wants to escape the whole process, which is his motivation to go into hypnosis so that the goal is achieved and you will leave him alone.  

Representational systems are the five senses.  People tend to favor a representational system as they experience life.  The brain stores memories according to representational system.  Once you know which sense was dominant during an experience, you have a map that enables you to access that experience in your client's subconcious mind.  For instance, a lot of people sought help after the big Northridge earthquake in 1994 here in Los Angeles.  The earthquake happened in the middle of a moonless night.  There was nothing visual about it unless someone awoke at the first rumbling and turned on a flashlight.  Most people experienced the earthquake kinesthetically as they were tossed around in bed and auditorially as they heard things crashing.  The best access into the trauma as it was stored in their brains was to talk about feelings and sounds.

If you are not familiar with establishing rapport, mirroring, and pacing, you will be thrilled to discover the world of neuro linguistic programming, also known as NLP.  Go on Amazon.com or AddAll.com and order Trance-Formations by John Grinder and Richard Bandler.  If you can't find Trance-Formations, then get Using Your Brain for a Change. 

If you need more information about how to detect whether a subject is an extrovert or introvert, read my article on Couple Counseling.  Knowing the subject's suggestibility enables you to offer suggestions in a manner that is not threatening to the subject's subconscious mind.  My article also contains the suggestibility questions that you may need.

The reason that you want to ask the subject What will be different once the hypnotherapy has worked? is because it forces your subject to create the outcome in his subconscious mind in order to answer you question.  This creates a path of least resistance and helps eliminate resistance to your suggestions.

32 Steps

1)    Conduct intake.  Pay attention to the subject's primary representational system.  Ask him why he has chosen hypnotherapy.  Note what techniques he likes and doesn't like.
2)    Establish rapport as subject talks about his issue, i.e., subtly mirror and pace the subject's breathing, head nods, and eye blinking.  Start to form an opinion on the subject's suggestibility as to whether he is an extrovert or introvert.
3)    Ask the subject, What will be different once the hypnotherapy has worked?
4)    Write down his responses in a way that they then become suggestions, changing any negatives into positives.  For instance if the client said "I want to lose 20 pounds," reword that to "I weigh _____ (filling the blank in with the desired weight)."
5)    Explain the Theory of the Mind.  Don't be concerned with the accuracy - this is to create overload.  The Thory of the Mind is detailed below.
6)    Position the subject, i.e., feet flat on the ground, right arm on the table so that his elbow is comfortable and he can see his fingernails.
7)    Describe the effects of hypnosis, i.e., several breathing changes and dryness of mouth.
8)    Create a path of least resistance by directing the subject through the "dry run" where he purposely lifts his hand to touch his fingertips to his forehead.  Notice how he touches his forehead, i.e., whether he pivoted his wrist or not.
9)    Ask subject to stare at his fingertips and ask him suggestibility questions.
10)    Talk about the lemon imagery to create gustatory overload.
11)    Instruct the subject to not purposely move his hand up.
12)   Explain that you will be using present-tense verbs only.  Demonstrate to the subject how you can only drop your pen when you say I am dropping my pen as opposed to I am going to drop my pen.
13)    Use misdirection, i.e., even as you are staring at your fingertips of your right hand, your mind can still be aware of how differently your left hand feels, perhaps cooler, heavier or numb.
14)    Explain how the eyes like to do what is called dart and leap.  Explain how the mind kicks up the hearing when vision is curtailed as a defense mechanism.
15)    Tell the subject that he will develop this technique for himself more fully if he imagines his hand lifting and recalls the feeling of his fingertips touching his forehead during the dry run.
16)    Point out any breathing change and remind the client that since his mouth will get dry as part of the process, it is important that he swallow in order to stay comfortable.
17)    Patter about lifting, rising, higher and higher.
18)    Suggest that his elbow is pushing down.
19)    Suggest the magnetic pull from his front lobe of his brain to his fingertips, much like a fisherman reeling in a fish.
20)    Continue with more patter.
21)    If the client touched his forehead with the fingertip pad(s), add a suggestion about the wrist rotating at the time the arm has lifted where the wrist would start to turn.
22)    Set up the reward for when his fingertip touches his face, i.e., and soon your fingertips will touch your face, and when they do, you will be able to really let go, knowing that you have finished with the hard part of our work.
23)    Conversion to hypnosis - you lightly tap his fingertip to his forehead just before he touches it.
24)    Instruct client to let his hand become heavy and drop his arm, trusting you to catch it.  Then conduct arm stiffening exercise.
25)    Offer a challenge to the subject that he "try" to bend his arm.
26)    1 - 2 (take hold of wrist for shock-effect and lift) - 3
27)    Drop right arm and lift and drop other arm.
28)    Hand on shoulder and count down from 10 to 1 on subject's exhalations.
29)    Offer suggestions for future use.
30)    Instruct subject on how to use the count of 1 to 5 for mental protection.
31)    Assign homework, i.e., writing "I will release self-doubt in my early morning dreams" in cursive just before going to sleep.  It should be written just one time every night for 21 days.
32)    Bring subject out of trance.

I just noticed a couple of mistakes in the script I gave you, so here are the corrections. 

In the paragraph about placing your hand on the subject's shoulder, I typed arm instead of hand.  It should correctly read: I am now going to put my hand lightly on your right shoulder as I count backwards from ten to one.

In the paragraph regarding the homework where it reads I am releasing self-doubt in my dreams in bold script, I left out early-morning from the statement.  It should correctly read: I am releasing self-doubt in my early-morning dreams.

If you are as fascinated by the whole extraversion/introversion thing as I am, you might want to buy my short course on Couple Counseling as I cover it very fully as an integral part of resolving marital conflict.  Go back to the Home page and then click on the Member Services button and then click on the Discounts button. 

THEORY OF THE MIND
  1. The Conscious mind comprises 12% of memory.  In simplest terms, it includes everything we remember.  A lot of what we remember contributes to our behaviors, decision-making processes, stuck-trauma, reactions, responses, etc.  The conscious mind is needed during hypnosis to process language.  People often expect to be somehow unconscious during hypnosis, but the opposite is true.  The conscious mind works more effectively during hypnosis.  The senses are hyper-alert. 

  2. The subconscious mind comprises 88% of memory.

 

III. The Critical Area of the Brain a/k/a Critical Faculty a/k/a Ego is a system of beliefs assembled between en utero and seven years of age.  It interacts with both the conscious and subconscious minds. It’s purpose is to insure your physical survival and to reject new experiences and beliefs. It is suspended during hypnosis.

  1. Fight or flight. Primitive man’s two of three instincts for survival. Man fights when he calculates he has greater strength and agility. Man flees when he has greater speed and sensory powers.
  2. Playing dead. When fight or flight are not options, primitive man played dead, i.e., when into hypnosis.
  3. The Pain/Pleasure Principle. Pleasure is defined as that which is known and pain as that which is unknown and therefore a physical or psychological threat since it has never been experienced before. Humans and other organisms will innately choose pleasure over pain.
  4. The Primitive Brain or Reptilian Brain is concerned with our basic needs of comfort and survival.

  5. Message Units are bits of information perceived by the senses and/or mind coming from the environment, the physical body, or the memory.
  1. Hypnosis is created by over-stimulating the conscious mind and thereby creating a threatening situation. The options of fight/flight are eliminated.  The Primitive Brain signals play dead, which suspends the Critical Faculty.

FINGERTIP FOCUS INDUCTION
  1. Place your feet flat on the floor. Hold up one of your hands so that your fingertips are even with your hairline. You can prop your arm up on a table or chair arm if you wish. Test the distance and height by touching your fingertips to your fore-head. Your hand should be about 8" away. Straighten your fingers close up any gaps between your fingers. Stare at the tip of your middle finger and notice your breathing. Since your flight response has been disengaged (feet flat on the floor) as well as your fight response (in that you have suspended movement of one of your hands), and your primary defense mechanism (your eyes are focused on your fingertip), your mind will seek to escape by playing dead. You will know when this has happened as your breathing will change and your mouth will become slightly dry and you will need to swallow.
  2. Imagine and concentrate on your fingers spreading and jerking and pulling further apart. Imagine wedges sliding down between your fingers. Spreading and jerking and pulling further and further apart. Think about that 88% of your mind direct-ing your hand.
  3. Tell yourself that the more your fingers spread and separate, the more your hand is drawn closer and closer to your face. Become aware of your forehead. The frontal lobe of your brain naturally draws to you that which you are focused upon. Feel the magnetic pull of your brain upon your fingertips. It works in the same manner as driving in the direction that you are looking. Repeat the words inwardly, "spreading, separating, pulling," to stimulate the 88% of your mind to separate your fingers causing your hand to come closer and closer to your face. Stay focused on the tip of your middle finger. As you continue to focus your concentration, the energy of your concentration completely fills the tip of your finger and spreads into the adjacent fingers. Do not purposely spread them, just imagine them spreading to release the intensity. It may feel as though you want to shake out the excess energy, but instead of shaking your hand to relax it, just let the intensity build, causing your other fingers to pull away. It will feel like little jerky movements. The more your fingers separate, the closer they move towards your face, and you’ll notice they may start to curl forward.
  4. Close your eyes and see your hand in your mind’s eye. If your mind starts to wander, open your eyes and intensely focus on the tip of your finger. Imagine your fingertips touching your face. Tell yourself, "Now my fingertips are coming all the way to touch my face. All the way."
  5. And very soon your fingertips will touch your face, and stick to your face and when they do, take a deep breath and tell yourself, "deep sleep." Feel the words deeply relax you.
  6. Count backwards from five to one and at the number one let your hand that is touching your face become like dead weight and drop heavily into your lap taking you down into a very deep state of relaxation.
  7. Give yourself the following affirmation: "Hypnosis and I are one." Imagine yourself feeling fulfilled and happy every time you work with hypnosis, be it for yourself or others.
  8. Know that anytime you want to enter this deep state of relaxation, all you have to do is focus on your fingertip until it touches your face, take a deep breath, tell yourself "deep sleep," and count downwards from five to one. The numbers five to one symbolize an open, receptive, yet protected space.
  9. When you are ready, count up from one to five, and at the number five, open your eyes, feeling wide-awake and very refreshed.

Summary for Body Coordination Induction: Arm Raising

Seat the client with his right arm resting on a table next to the chair, his left arm at his side inside the chair, and his feet flat. The table needs to be able to straddle the front right corner of the chair so that the resting hand is in front of his chest.  Adjustable computer tables work great as they are usually open on one side.  His entire forearm should be able to rest upon the table so that his elbow will be supported when he raises his arm and he can still see his fingertips.  The idea is to cause the client’s subconscious mind to raise his entire forearm bringing his hand to his face so that his fingertips touch the center of his forehead.

Spend some time talking with your client about his expectations of the experience of hypnosis.  Offer him some possibilities of what he is likely to experience while hypnotized.  This will create an overload of information entering his conscious mind, which will cause the fight-flight response.  His mind will also register that he can’t fight you because he is supposed to keep his arms positioned where you indicated, i.e., right arm resting on the table for the time being and the left arm inside the chair next to his body.  His mind will also register than he can’t flee because he is supposed to keep his feet flat on the floor.  His only remaining self-protective response is to play dead, i.e., enter the first stage of hypnosis.

During this intake portion of explaining what the experience will be like, you, as the hypnotherapist, have an opportunity to establish rapport by subtly mirroring and pacing the client’s breathing, head nods, and eye blinking. You also have an opportunity to assess the client’s primary representational system, i.e., does he use words that are more visual, auditory, or kinesthetic.  The intake also gives you an opportunity to discern whether your client is more extraverted or introverted in his suggestibility.  This is important as extraverts will maintain an open-eye visual connection with their hand in order to stimulate its lifting, while introverts do best with their eyes closed while they sense their mind sending signals to their body.  Introverts can imagine that they see their hand lifting.

Offer the client an explanation as to why hypnosis works.  Continue to explain that the subconscious mind receives instruction through his senses and that he can discover this for himself by making a little movie for his mind using the senses of sight and touch.  This is known as the dry run during which you position his hand and ask him to purposely bring his hand up in slow motion to touch his fingertip to his third eye area.  This creates more overload which will lead to a greater trance depth and it gives the client’s subconscious mind a sense of what it is expected to do.  The dry run becomes the path of least resistance.  The client should have his eyes open if he is an extravert and his eyes closed if he is an introvert.  If you find that during this induction, the client’s hand just won’t budge, you probably have an introvert who needs to close his eyes to let go of the reality of his hand being down on the table.  It’s also possible that your client needs more logic as to why this will work so that he can explain it to other people later in defense of why he let go and allowed himself to be hypnotized.

Notice how the client touches his forehead, i.e., with his fingertip pads or with his nails. You need to know how to word your patter as to whether or not to include suggestions of rotating, turning, and pivoting of the wrist for him if he touched his forehead with his fingertip pads instead of the top of his finger (fingernail).

After the client has very slowly lifted his hand on purpose to touch his forehead, watch carefully to observe how he returns his hand to the table.  If it is quick and smooth, he’ll need a lot of coaxing to enter hypnosis.  If it is slow and a little jerky, he is already in a trance.

Now ask your client to stare at his fingertips for about thirty seconds.  Then ask him whether or not he can still see his hand or is it more imagined?  Ask him whether he can imagine his hand getting bigger or smaller or appearing bright green.  Extraverts usually can see their hands with their eyes closed, but can’t imagine it changed.  Introverts have trouble with the word see, but can imagine their hands, and even change it in the imagined state.  If your client seems to be an extrovert, ask him to open his eyes and to continue staring at his fingertips.  If your client seems to be an introvert, ask him to open his eyes one more time and to really notice all the details of his hand.  Give him another thirty seconds with his eyes open, then ask him to close his eyes and leave them closed until his subconscious mind lifts his hand causing his fingertip to touch his face.

Regardless of suggestibility type, tell your client to stay silent during the arm-raising portion so that his subconscious mind will more fully engage.  He can answer any questions that you may ask by nodding his head up and down for yes or shaking his head from side to side for no.  Now not only is his fight instinct disengaged, since his right arm is having to participate in the arm raising activity, and his flight instinct disengaged, since he has to keep his feet flat on the floor (the client should not recline for this induction until his fingertip has touched his forehead), but now his eyes and voice are unavailable to him as defense mechanisms.  This will cause his reptilian brain (the part that is in charge of basic survival) to feel threatened and signal play dead.  You will know when that has happened as the client slows down his respiration causing his to need more oxygen and he therefore has to take a really deep full breath every so often.  Also his mouth will get dry and he will need to swallow to stay comfortable.

You will notice in the script that various sensations are mentioned that the client is likely to experience. This is an indirect suggestion to the client that he experience those sensations and it misdirects his attention away from his concern about whether or not his hand is responding.

It is important that you use present tense very about what the client’s arm is likely to do as his subconscious mind most easily responds to a suggestion in the here and now.  Be sure to speak to your client as he inhales.  This is a stress induction, not a relaxation induction.  Always speak on the inhalation to activate and on the exhalation to relax.

When the client is close to touching his forehead, you are going to use a shock induction technique in that you are going to surprise him by tapping his fingertip to his forehead when he is expecting to touch it there himself in a few moments.  If your client is an extrovert in that you have chosen to have him raise his hand while his eyes are open, you need to give him a suggestion to close his eyes as they get close, say within a couple of inches.  You can say, And now shift your focus from your eyes to your inner eye ... your third eye ... by closing your eyes now and seeing your fingertips in your mind’s eye.

It is important that the client touch his fingertip to his third-eye area as there is a hub of nerves there that affect the limbic system that engages hypnosis.

When you tap the client’s fingertip to his forehead, snap the fingers of your other hand and say the words deep sleep out loud as a command.  This conditions your client to respond to future finger snaps and the words, deep sleep, as a suggestion to go to this same level of depth.  I use deep sleep as the command since the media has done such a great job of creating an association of hypnosis with these words.

After the client has touched his forehead with his fingertip, or rather, after you have shocked him by touching his fingertip to his forehead, this is the perfect opportunity to offer him a reward for all of his work.  Give him the suggestion that now that he has done the hard part (inferring the rest is easy), he can go way down deep as you count down from ten to one or whatever deepening technique you prefer.

A Few Final Tips

1)    Never underestimate the power of suggesting to your subject that he pretend to be hypnotized.
2)    Always use the word try when you employ a challenge.  The subject will not be able to do what he is instructed to try.
3)    The subconscious mind can be manipulated into a deeper state of brainwave activity by asking the client to imitate stage three hypnosis, i.e., somnambulism, by suggesting that he close his eyes and imagine looking up at the moon or the stars on a very dark night without tilting his head back.  The act of moving the eyes up as though trying to see the eyebrows causes the shift from alpha to theta.