One of my favourite stories told by my hypnosis trainer (David) many years ago was that at one time when he was driving he came across a road accident (from memory I think it involved a motor bike) where he found the driver bleeding profusely. David knew the motor bike rider was already in an altered state of consciousness due to the shock of the accident and the subsequent pain from his injuries. The rider was bleeding profusely and it was of highest priority to stop the blood loss, so David touched the drivers arm and simply said – stop bleeding. The surprising thing was that the bleeding actually stopped right then and there! Even David was surprised though he had been teaching hypnosis for decades and understood the power of the subconscious mind. Until that time he’d never had this type of extreme opportunity to test what he knew would work, and thankfully it did. So how and why did this happen?    

When we are in shock, trauma, pain etc we shift brain wave patterns and enter an altered state of consciousness. In this state we become highly suggestible and that’s why it’s particularly important to watch what we say around people suffering chronic pain.

One way to relate to this is if you are a gardener, which I was for many years. Gardeners know that if we scratch ourselves while gardening we usually remain unaware of the scratch occurring at the time, or from experiencing the pain of deeper scratches, until we wash to clean ourselves up. That’s when the water stings the wounds which we don’t remember happening at the time. This is because our attention was narrowed to the gardening at hand, and when our focus is narrowed we can enter altered states of consciousness, or trance states, where we can experience a range of phenomena including anesthesia, time distortion, age regression, paralysis (as in stage hypnotist acts), somnambulism (sleep walking)  and an unlimited number of other phenomena.

Fortunately in clinical hypnosis we don’t have to be concerned with stopping blood loss! In a therapeutic setting our natural ability to enter altered states of consciousness is utilized to bring about positive outcomes such as improving sleep, losing weight, controlling anxiety/fears/phobias, focusing concentration, enhancing memory, creating behaviour changes and more.

Used correctly, hypnosis leads to powerful therapeutic results that give our life richer content, purpose and meaning by improving our behaviour, belief and confidence in ourselves.