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Hypnosis and the Alert State of Trance

By David Quigley

I hear a frequent complaint from many potential clients in my hypnosis practice. “What is hypnosis? Will I be unconscious? I don’t want someone controlling my mind while I am under!” Since I hear these remarks with such regularity I figured it was best to address the issue in an article.

Some kinds of hypnosis therapy do indeed depend on the client being in a deep nearly unconscious state of hypnosis. In this state the client lies silently with eyes closed and may appear to be sound asleep. This is a restful, soothing, and very blissful state in which the body is floating, the mind is drifting, and one is mostly unconscious of the hypnotist’s words. Such a state is sometimes referred to as somnambulism. This state is quite useful for hypnotic anesthesia in surgery and is an excellent state in which to deliver hypnotic suggestions, because it is a highly suggestible state. Since it is the state preferred by many clinical hypnosis practitioners, it is the one most often associated with the word “hypnosis” in the public imagination. It is indeed a state in which the client’s conscious mind is mostly gone, and the subconscious can be manipulated by the hypnotist’s words. The client often awakens with no memory of what happened, as if they were in fact asleep. Since most hypnotherapists who have proper training operate in an ethical fashion this should not be a big concern if you have checked their credentials.

Furthermore, it has been repeatedly documented that a hypnotized subject will never do anything to violate their internal ethical standards of behavior. As I have often said in my lectures, no one can be made to rob a bank in hypnosis…unless they are bank robbers looking to achieve peak performance in their field. A client reported to me that a hypnotist she had seen some years ago tried to feed her the suggestion in deep trance that she would find him sexually irresistible. She woke up immediately, furious, and walked out of his office.  So clearly your subconscious mind can keep you safe in a hypnotic trance. (You may have discovered however that drug and alcohol intoxication offer no such guarantees!)  In spite of these safeguards, however, many clients have difficulty surrendering their minds to a hypnotist’s powers by going into a deep state of trance.

In my work, which I call interactive process Hypnotherapy, I use a completely different form of hypnotic trance, which I call the alert trance. In this state, which is the type of trance used by many hypnotherapists, the client is in a state of expanded awareness, similar to meditation, in which the client is completely, acutely aware of everything that is happening in their inner world, although they may be largely unaware of the normal stimuli of their physical environment, like the sound of traffic outside or the buzz of a phone. In this relaxed but alert state, the client may experience very powerful memories that emerge from the subconscious mind, including early infancy, intrauterine, even past life memories. These memories may be accompanied by intense emotions, including such vigorous emotional releases as crying, screaming, and even striking out at the perpetrators of the past. Let me provide one example:

Mary (not her real name) begins in trance to relive a rape trauma in my Empowerment Intensive workshop.  Her body trembles with fear, hurt and rage. Then she picks up a proffered pillow and begins to strike it repeatedly while screaming at the perpetrator. Soon she is standing up and chasing her perpetrator, played by me, around the room. In moments she has pushed me down on the floor. (I am underneath a protective pillow) She screams and hits the pillow, then demands an apology. Then she falls into tears as she hears his apology and remorse in her inner mind.

At the end of this powerful journey, a fellow participant asked her, “Were you in hypnosis?” Her response was that she didn’t know. But throughout the process she could vividly experience the sound of the waves on the beach where this abuse occurred. She could even smell the salty spray of the sea and feel the sand between her toes. During the confrontation phase, she had felt waves of intense rage exploding out of her body in an uncontrollable surge of feelings, an experience unlike any she had ever known. More importantly, she felt a wonderful quiet peace inside her body when the work was done. A major release had occurred of feelings that had burdened her for years, feelings which she was completely unaware of in her conscious mind. During the session, at no time was she asleep or in any way unconscious. Nor did she ever feel out of control or experience any loss of memory of the trance journey. Instead every detail was sealed ecstatically in her mind. This is what I call the alert trance.

One might argue that this state may be an altered state, but is not a hypnotic state. One hypnotherapist pointed out to me that hypnosis is a word defined as a sleeplike state. After all, James Braid, the English physician who coined the term, created this word from the name of the Greek God Hypnos, god of sleep and dreams.

However, James Braid was a student of that father of modern hypnosis therapy, Anton Mesmer. As such, he was attempting to define the work of Mesmer in a scientific fashion, which he did by defining this altered state as one of suggestibility and relaxation. But he was never happy with this term precisely because he knew that this state differed from the state of slumber in many key respects. He even attempted to change this term when he saw how inaccurate it was, but it had already caught on in the language. In truth, Anton Mesmer’s hypnotic subjects frequently jerked, went into convulsions, danced, screamed, and were extremely active as their bodies and minds went through phenomenal healing experiences. Braid would have been well acquainted with these altered states. No wonder the word “hypnosis” could hardly have been meant to describe only a sleep like state.

However, the idea of the client being fully conscious in trance may have seemed strange to both Braid and Mesmer.  In the deeply repressed emotional environment of Europe in the late 1700’s, a century before Freud, the conscious minds of most Europeans were appalled by the kinds of “hysterical” (a favorite term in that time) emotional outbursts that characterized both Mesmer’s work and that of many hypnosis pioneers.  The Age of Reason, as it is often called by historians, was a time when emotions were the enemy and man’s reason was all that kept him out of the slobbering barbarianism of an earlier and darker age. So it was important that if a good citizen of this age of reason were to start trembling and screaming with rage that his or her conscious mind have no responsibility and no awareness of the process. This is one important reason why hypnosis has been associated for centuries with bypassing the client’s conscious mind.

Here in California in the 21st Century we westerners have begun to claim our right to have feelings and express them. Moreover, we have discovered, thanks in large part to another hypnotist named Wilhelm Reich, that we must release our buried emotions in order to restore health to our body and mind. And we have discovered that we don’t need to be unconscious in order to do it effectively! In fact in the alert state of trance we usually have more energy and clarity to do effective emotional release than in deeper states.  

And there is another advantage to the use of the Alert state of trance that other kinds of hypnosis cannot match. In this state I can teach my clients to do this healing process on their own, with the help of their own inner guides, on a daily basis. In trance with me the client is not just experiencing a healing journey, they are also learning in that alert state how to do these processes for themselves every day. In deep trance self hypnosis can be done only by lying down and going under while listening to a tape of suggestions created by the hypnotist. This is useful, but hardly as powerful as experiencing the kinds of deep healing journeys described above on a daily basis.

There is an old expression that works here: Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, feed him for a lifetime. When we hypnotists use the alert state of trance, we empower our clients to continue this powerful work on their own to create miracles of healing in their lives, as clearly demonstrated on our website. This is the way I learned to do hypnotherapy from one of the greats in the world of modern hypnosis, Randall Churchill. It is why at end of every journey I give the command: “You will remember every detail you need to remember of this experience. And you can return whenever you wish to this place inside, to continue the journey.”

Like my teacher, I also see value in the deeper levels of trance, which are very good for applications like surgical anesthesia, direct suggestion, and many other purposes. 

Some people are quite comfortable with this distinction between alert trance for process work and somnambulism for direct suggestion, but feel that process oriented hypnotherapy is in the realm of Psychology, and therefore should be practiced only by licensed therapists, psychologists, social workers, Doctors, etc. I feel this attitude is seriously in error.  First, while most hypnotherapists in my California home are trained in this kind of interactive work, psychologists, psychiatrists, or other licensed practitioners do not have this kind of training unless they take specific courses in these areas, and many have no such specialized training. Even the legal definition of a Psychologist’s practice never includes these kind of processes hypnotherapists use, like Gestalt, age regression, subpersonality work, etc. While many psychotherapists have excellent training and skills in this area because of specialized training, it is an area with which hypnotherapists are at least as likely to be familiar. In other words, you cannot assume that a psychologist’s license guarantees their effectiveness in hypnotic work. Nor that a hypnotist is by definition ill equipped to perform deep process oriented work. Instead whatever practitioner you see, you must ask about their training and years of experience in process oriented therapy…regression, gestalt, and other methods.  Remember that not all hypnotherapists have this kind of training either. Contact our Institute at www.alchemyinstitute.com or the National Guild of Hypnotists at www.ngh.org for a properly trained practitioner in your area.    

 

 

 

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