Healing and Hypnotherapy Volume 3, Issue - 6, 1 December 2018 | Page 10

Saturday, 24 November 2018
notice no faster than you feel ready to become aware that your hand is
slowly rising….."
• Resistance:
Erickson recognised that many people were intimidated by hypnosis and
the therapeutic process, and took care to respect the special resistances
of the individual patient. In the therapeutic process he said that "you
always give the patient every opportunity to resist". Here are some more
relevant quotes pertaining to resistance:
Whatever the behaviour offered by the subjects, it should be accepted and
utilised to develop further responsive behaviour. Any attempt to "correct" or
alter the subjects' behaviour, or to force them to do things they are not
interested in, militates against trance induction and certainly deep trance
experience.
If the patient can be led to accept one suggestion, they will more readily
accept others. With resistant patients, it becomes necessary to find a
suggestion that they can accept. Resistance is always important, and
should always be respected, so if the resistance itself is encouraged, the
patient is made to feel more comfortable, because they know that they are
allowed to respond however they wish.
Many times, the apparently active resistance encountered in subjects is no
more than an unconscious measure of testing the hypnotist's willingness to
meet them halfway instead of trying to force them to act entirely in accord
with his ideas.
Although the idea of working with resistance is essentially a hypnotic one, it
goes beyond hypnosis and trance. In a typical example, a girl that bit her
nails was told that she was cheating herself of really enjoying the nail
biting. He encouraged her to let some of her nails grow a little longer
before biting them, so that she really could derive the fullest pleasure from
the activity. She decided to grow all of her nails long enough that she might
really enjoy biting them, and then, after some days, she realised that she
didn't want to bite them anyway.
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