Are Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy the same thing?

In my experience apart from the roots they ‘appear’ to have come from and the goals to which they are used – the two are very often entirely different.

It’s rather like asking if English Football and American Football are the same. And the answer to that has to be – well they are both games where as Patch Adams says, “You watch a load of millionaires playing with their balls.” That and the fact they both use the word Football.

On the whole people who are trained in hypnotherapy who come to my classes in hypnosis have largely never seen or used hypnosis. That is they do not induce, test by challenging the state and verifying full acceptance of suggestion and use direct suggestion to create a revised belief behaviour pattern in the Manipulated Subject. [ I have no problem with that term because it's a term that fits what Hypnosis does. ]

It’s also my experience to meet more people who have been to hypnotherapy and been dissatisfied that they never ‘felt hypnotised’ nor were they convinced that hypnosis had occurred.

However manipulation – skilful or artful management – isn’t an acceptable term in hypnotherapy because the two techniques and processes are not the same. In real Football a ‘penalty’ is a set free kick taken 10 yards away from the goal towards a goalkeeper and it is KICKED. In American Football a penalty is something entirely different even though the word is the same.

There is a huge difference I think between the term “Trance” when used by a hypnotherapist and that used by the hypnotist. Not because there is more than one trance but because the methods are so different the relaxed Trance state is the target in hypnotherapy. In hypnosis it only happens as a consequence of how the hypnotist is working.

I’m often asked what is the difference between a hypnotherapist and hypnotist and usually explain it this way:

A hypnotherapist will get you to relax and then perform the point of the exercise which is to use Psychotherapy of some description to enable your mind to make changes over a period of time.

A hypnotist bangs you under and tells you to stop it and do something better.

Now before you all start jumping up and down I personally have no problem with hypnotherapy and have no doubt it can and does work. I have no problem with psychotherapy. I have no problem with NLP [ it just makes me laugh a lot ] I even have no problem with American football of which I am an avid if only part-tim fan, even though there are too many players, too much ‘armour’ and it’s way more complex and complicated than is necessary for a sport. But the analogy between that and Hypnosis is spot on for me, because in English FOOTball the ball HAS to be kicked with the Foot.

So Hypnosis – the art of creating an entranced mesmeric state and formulating and delivering of direct suggestions which may Not be used therapeutically or remedially at all.

And Hypnotherapy {Relaxatherapy} – the technique of using psychotherapeutic approaches whilst the recipient is relaxed.

So although not entirely different fields of endeavour, hypnosis and hypnotherapy are very often entirely different in method, technique and experience, with a similar name.

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Hypnosis Does Stuff In The Brain – Official

Personally I’d always thought that if I give someone the suggestion they are “stuck” to thing, on things, in certain positions, that it was some sort of preternatural glue that clamped down on their limbs and sapped the will of movement from the little people who live in our bodies cells. I never for one moment thought the Brain would be involved!

Last year though when most people were laying on beaches getting skin cancer a group of researchers from the Neuroscience Centre and Medical School at the University of Geneva designed an experiment to assess motor and inhibitory brain circuits during hypnosis-induced paralysis. Basically this means getting stuck.

ScienceDaily reported it. (June 25, 2009) The study, published by Cell Press in the June 25 issue of the journal “Neuron”, uncovers the influence of hypnotic paralysis on brain networks involved in internal representations and self imagery.

So there you go. It’s official. Just as when you depress the accelerator pedal in your car the engine responds by working harder, give the mind a suggestion for a physical response and the brain and central nervous system works.

Research on the art of hypnosis like this always makes me smile. We human beings have this amazing capacity for researching and stating the bleeding obvious as if it’s some ground breaking cutting edge discovery. Sadly for the hard of thinking it is.

The connection between the Mind Brain and body is pretty much obvious to most people over the age of around seven. You think, “Pick the spoon up,” your brain takes in some data from your eyes and ears, does some quick calculus and then signals all sorts of bits of your neurology and musculature to take the required action and the force being with you, the spoon up is picked by your fingers.

The amazing thing with this research though is that the conclusion was reached that the suggestion to be cataleptic actually doesn’t stop the motor cortex from working, it just stops the thought to move working.

I guess this is sort of important for you if you don’t know about hypnosis and think we all have rotating eyeballs and eat babies. It means that even though you won’t be able to drop the spoon if given the suggestion not to, you will be able to when given the suggestion that everything is back to normal. And that’s because hypnosis works through your brain, not the other way around.

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SEX Hypnosis

It had to happen sooner or later. Erotica Hypnotica is now available on the InterWeb and you don’t need to pile up your swinging watches to reach the top shelf.

I’ve just discovered a fast growing social network for hypnotists and hypnotees, maybe hypnoholics, all to do with the erotic side of our imaginative and creative selves which of course you know I am interested if you’ve downloaded my audio entitled “Tantric Sensuality” from my Auto Self Suggestion System.

The site is called Inraptured and is far from the sleazy place some people would have you think it is.

Now, where is that brown Macintosh?….