Making Hypnosis Work For You

What can hypnosis do for you other than provide a fascinating new experience?

What can you gain from it?

The answer is that hypnosis can be used to improve your general functioning - to make you feel better mentally or physically.

Myths About Hypnosis

You may also be concerned about what hypnosis can do to you. Hypnosis is not in any way harmful, but it is completely understandable for a beginning hypnotic subject to have some reservations. You may want to ask a few questions to relieve your curiosity and allay your fears. The questions which follow are representative of those most frequently asked of hypnotherapists:

• When I am in a trance, can you make me cluck like a chicken? Bark like a dog? Act like a newborn baby?


• Will I tell you something I've never told anyone? Will I talk about things that are private?


• Could I stay frozen in one position and never come out of it?


• Could I harm myself?

What these questions are getting at is this: Can a hypnotist make you do something that is embarrassing, shocking or irreversible?

NO, you will not do anything you do not think is acceptable. That is, you cannot be made to violate your own values or accepted patterns of behavior.

It is important for you to remember that a trance state can be terminated by you at anytime. It is your choice to enter the trance state, and you can always choose to leave it. If you were left in a trance state by your hypnotherapist or by your hypnotic tape, you would either return to full consciousness on your own or enter a natural sleep and awaken after a pleasant nap. No one has ever disappeared for long.