Hypnosis is controlled daydreaming, controlled trance. You are gaining control not losing it.
One way to understand trance is as automatic behavior – when we are not thinking about what we are doing. There are good trances – zoning out as we run or get involved in a project – and bad trances – when we react with anger or addictive behavior.
But most trances are uncontrolled, triggered by something outside ourselves – an old song gets played on the radio and we are back in high school, someone questions our abilities or intelligence and we are back in grade school when we couldn’t answer the teacher’s question and the class laughed at us. Or maybe someone gives us “that” look and we are back on the playground feeling rejected or put down. You may not have registered these memories as thoughts but your body has registered them as feelings.
How often have you wondered and regretted an overreaction to something someone said or did? That behavior is the result of uncontrolled trance, perhaps the effect of unresolved trauma. Trauma does not have to be major to have an impact on how we behave. It can seem like a small thing – looking back. It can be as simple as feeling ridiculed by fellow students’ laughter when we made a mistake in class, or being called stupid by someone important to us. It could be feeling rejected when we made an attempt to connect to another human being.
What we can do in hypnosis is take back control. Take control of our reactions, our emotions, our life. What uncontrolled trance share is an emotion we don’t like or don’t want to deal with. It is an emotion that we have learned we can make go away, at least temporarily, by lashing out or smoking or eating or drinking or gambling or some other hurtful behavior.
It is important to understand that an emotion is a physical sensation tied to a thought. Perhaps an agitation coupled with the thought, “I can’t deal with this now,” or “I can’t bear any more of this right now.” We want to separate the sensation from the negative thought.
So the first thing hypnosis can do is to help us become more sensitive to your physical sensations. Over time, automatic or addictive behavior leads us to ignore our body’s messages. At some time in the past, we didn’t like what our body was telling us so we turned it off. We no longer wanted to hear what our body was telling us. We became insensitive to the feelings and sensations in our body.
But sensation is the language of our body. It is what anchors us in the present – what makes us feel alive and strong. Whenever we are feeling stuck or in a rut, it means we are replaying old memories and not hearing or responding to the ever changing, ever evolving, present time bundle of sensations that we are.
There is a whole universe inside of you. There is energy, precision, the miracle of life inside each and every one of us that can never cease to amaze us when we allow ourselves to experience it. When we get separated from that source of wisdom and energy, our lives become routine and without direction. But we have a choice. We can choose to give ourselves the time and space to recapture that amazement. Hypnosis is one way to do that.