About The Shared Experience Of Hypnotic Trance, By Eric Greenleaf, PhD

f you’ve ever experienced hypnotic trance, you’ll be familiar with the idea that when I hypnotize you and when you hypnotize yourself and when you hypnotize each other, you will develop a kind of expectant attitude and a pleased and positive attitude towards the automatic process of response in your body and in your feelings and in your thoughts—that automatic process of response which is grandly referred to as the unconscious mind.  Essentially, the process is comprised of things that you are unselfconscious about, like twitches, movements, links, the distraction and focus of visual attention and emotional attention, the way your thoughts stream happily around all sorts of continents of experience, and the general ways in which I or you automatically conceive of or experience what we think of as the world—what people refer to as metaphor.

So if I say to you, “I love my wife,” and you know that I mean it, you still don’t know what in the world I mean by those words; yet we can have a very pleasant conversation about my love for my wife without your knowing very much about her or about me or about what you would think of as the dynamics of our relationship.  And, the automatically induced feelings which you have when I say that phrase, depending on your own individual experience of life, can be an element of an hypnotic trance we may experience together.

So you might think loosely about hypnosis as though you imagined it were a sort of conversation between us; and a kind of conversation that allows our experience to imitate, while sitting or moving around, or speaking or lying down, or later on or while asleep or while dreaming later tonight, any of the possible human experiences:     physiological, emotional, spiritual, oriented toward reflecting upon the past or looking into the future.  The idea that you can take any element of experience and have a conversation about it that induces a state of calm, focussed attention or of spontaneous action and feeling, is called utilization.  And the simplest form of utilization, which everyone is familiar with, is the old-fashioned but still used device of having someone stare fixedly, as you may be right now, and then to have you stare fixedly at an object until your eyes begin to blink and so on.  The “stare fixedly” is something you do naturally anyway if someone is speaking:  You stare fixedly, and your mind wanders:  Your ears are open, your eyes are open or half closed, and your mind is in Peru perhaps; and your feelings can be anywhere.  Your mind may be in the past or in the future, but you will rarely, rarely, rarely be all here as I am speaking.  So the idea would be, when working with patients in hypnosis, to use what is already occurring, what is naturally occurring—whether you think of it as a personality trait, or a symptom, or a way of being, or a spiritual orientation or an emotional mood—to help the person you are working with explore herself and resolve difficulties and find a way out of the jam that she’s in.