Healing and Hypnotherapy Volume 5, Issue -2, 1 August 2020 | Page 10

Children experience hypnotic deepening during a mesmeric story, even
though the person reading it probably has no such intentions. The deepening
happens as a consequence of the story and the way it is told.
I don’t tend to use too much psychobabble with my clients either, unless they
talk like that naturally and my talking like that will actually build better rapport
with them.
When we watch a movie, we don’t want to see the cameras, the director, or
bored extras standing around. We want to experience the movie without the
clunky workings of the movie being too obvious. Clunky ‘convincers’ or
obvious deepening techniques can mess with the immediacy of the hypnotic
experience.
I don’t want to be too clunky with clients. I want them to feel as if we’ve simply
had a conversation, part of which may have involved them relaxing deeper
than ever before or even switching off sensation to control pain.
But I think it can be really useful to learn deepeners and lots of very formal
hypnotic inductions. And having an air of the dramatic can be useful for some
clients.
If we can assimilate that kind of training into a conversational, natural and
naturalistic communication with the client and tailor our inductions to match
their specific and maybe unique interests, then we are being respectful of
them as a person.
Even with a very methodical protocol like the Rewind technique, to some
extent we can match the method to the interests and pre-existing resources
of the unique client.
Many hypnotic inductions are one-size-fits-all, and many of them still work,
but if we understand the components of trance induction then we can tailor an
induction to suit the needs of the unique client in front of us, and this makes
therapy more creative for us and more special for them.
Certainly, I sometimes like to have a client become more profoundly
abstracted, to forget me and the room consciously and to travel further
inward, to ‘go deeper’. But I like to do this seamlessly.
And generally speaking, just as people allowed to sleep will naturally go
through the phases of sleep, letting someone spend some time in trance will
also encourage a deepening of that trance simply because they have the
space to find that depth of trance. To use another metaphor, water will find its
way down the mountain side if allowed to do so.