Hypnosis and NLP

Hypnosis has been around since the dawn of time. We know that the Egyptians used a form of hypnosis but the earliest written texts dates back to Avicenna, who was an 8th Century Persian philosopher who documented the difference between hypnosis and sleep.

Franz Anton Mesmer is the name that people coin to hypnosis, in the form of Mesmerism, but Mesmer thought that by passing a magnet over the skin he could stop bleeding, but later found that a stick would do the same.

The 18th Century was a big time in the discovery of hypnosis with Mesmer and James Braid (who coined hypnosis as nervous sleep); James Esdaile who was a surgeon who operated on people in his “Mesmeric coma”; Ivan Petrovich Pavlov for his “classical conditioning” and Sigmund Freud for his early dappling with hypnosis before discovering psychoanalysis.

The 20th Century brought us the greats like Milton H Erickson, who hypnotised people whilst in a mild hypnotic state himself and Dave Elman, who as a showman created rapid techniques to induce a deep hypnotic state.

Walter Sichort was a children’s entertainer that discovered a deeper state of hypnosis and after his death, James Ramey repackaged into a commercial training course called Ultra Depth.

Hypnosis itself is a relaxing state of altered consciousness, where the conscious is distracted so the subconscious can be reprogrammed to hand patterns differently so a client can have the responses to an action changed so they either lose the pattern they have learnt and learn a new and better pattern or change the pattern to have a better outcome.

The deeper the state, the better the outcome can be. There is a technique that was trialled in Soviet Russia where a hypnotist took some clients into a regressed child state and asked the superconscious mind to give that “child” the gift of musical talents and when the client awoke, they could play a musical instrument perfectly that they previously were unable to play.

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)

Neuro Linguistic Programming was the brainchild of John Grinder and Richard Bandler in the 1960s and 70s. John and Richard sat down with every therapist at the time and extracted their skills to find out what worked, and compared them together to find out what was similar and different with each therapy. From this they created Neuro Linguistic Programming as a way to teach others the best of all therapies so they could use them to improve their clients.

What is NLP?

NLP is a short term goal-orientated and practical therapeutic approach to problem solving. Whatever problem you have, NLP can help.

Areas that can be helped include coping with stress/stress management, anger management, anxiety, improving performance, pain management, phobias; the list is endless.

There are many reasons why choosing to use NLP will improve your life. Problems can be explored and NLP techniques used to set you on a path towards achieving your goals. As well as noticing change in yourself, those around you in personal or professional capacities will notice changes too.

Everyone has all the resources they need to make positive changes in their life, NLP techniques are used as a tool to facilitate these changes, leaving you to concentrate on what you are thinking, feeling and any other sensory observations.

New patterns of behaviour are established and the NLP techniques learned can be used in other situations. So YOU become your own expert. This reduces the potential for reliance on the trained therapist which can be the case with other therapies.