Self-Hypnosis For Dummies E-Book

Mike Bryant

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 487

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Self-Hypnosis For Dummies is your hands-on guide to achieving your goals using hypnosis.

Whether you want to lose weight, overcome anxiety or phobias, cure insomnia, stop smoking, or simply stop biting your nails, this guide has it covered! The reassuring and straight-talking information will help you harness the power of your mind and re-train your subconscious to think in more healthy and constructive ways, and to overcome specific issues, such as anxiety and paranoia, and break bad habits, such as smoking.

The easy-to-follow style will guide you through every step of the process, empowering you to take control and start making changes right away.

Leseprobe

Self-Hypnosis For Dummies®

Table of Contents

Introduction

About This Book

Conventions Used in This Book

Foolish Assumptions

Why You Need This Book

How This Book Is Organised

Part I: Identifying Your Needs and Preparing the Way

Part II: Training Your Mind with Self-Hypnosis

Part III: Improving Your Outlook with Self-Hypnosis

Part IV: Overcoming Problems with Self-Hypnosis

Part V: The Part of Tens

Icons Used in This Book

Where to Go from Here

Part I: Identifying Your Needs and Preparing the Way

Chapter 1: What Is Self-Hypnosis?

Understanding Self-Hypnosis

The ins and outs of self-hypnosis

Finding out how to induce hypnosis

Delving into your unconscious mind

Scoping out the uses of self-hypnosis

Seeing How Self-Hypnosis Works

Using suggestibility

Working with dissociation

Building on post-hypnotic suggestions

Reassuring Yourself About Safety

Staying in control

Deciding when to stop hypnosis

Knowing you always wake up

Chapter 2: Getting Your Mind and Body Working Together

Exploring the Mind–Body Conundrum

Approaching the Holistic vs Medical Debate

Helping the Mind to Heal the Body

Engaging your central nervous system

Being sympathetic to your nervous system

Experiencing Visualisation

Seeing how everyone can visualise

Adding extra senses to deepen your experience

Creating a safe place in your mind and body

Chapter 3: Using Self-Hypnosis to Achieve Your Goals

Clarifying Your Goals

SMARTening up your goals

Deciding on your steps to success

Scoring the self-exploration goal

Striking the problem-solving goal

Waving a Magic Wand to Manage the Magic of Goal Setting

Questioning the magic wand question

Freeing yourself with the magic wand

Achieving Your Goals

Keeping your success in mind

Jumping the hurdles

Travelling in time

Putting Everything Together

Maintaining Your Goals After You Achieve Them

Ensuring you’ve got what you want

Staying positive

Practising to make perfect

Creating new goals

Chapter 4: Resisting Resistance and Avoiding Relapse

Understanding How You Block Your Own Needs

The secondary gain conundrum: The ‘benefits’ of keeping the problem

Pedalling through the cycles of awareness and addiction

Helping yourself to remove obstacles

Countering Your Inner Critic

Imagining your inner critic and speaking its language

Empowering yourself

Creating good images for body themes

Countering ‘I am bad’ themes

Using Your Critic to Achieve Success

Challenging unhelpful beliefs

Using your mistakes to your advantage

Finding healthier alternatives to problems

Part II: Training Your Mind with Self-Hypnosis

Chapter 5: Entering a Hypnotic Trance with Traditional Self-Hypnosis

Looking at Traditional Self-Hypnosis Techniques

Setting the scene

Focusing on eye fixation

Relaxing progressively

Investigating Different Ways to Induce a Trance

Being hypnotic

Remembering past relaxed states

Understanding Vogt’s fractionation

Rising to the challenge with arm levitation

Picturing your favourite place

Chapter 6: Working with Words: Becoming Your Own Recording Star

Scripting Your Success

Formulating your focus

Attending to structure

Getting help with what to say

Creating key phrases

Speaking ‘Hypnotese’

Being positive with what you say

Reframing your words

Being specific

Modifying scripts to suit your needs

Using Your Voice to Best Effect

Making your voice interesting

Choosing between authoritarian and permissive voices

Recording Your Scripts Electronically

Finding the right equipment

Using recording equipment

Using recording software

Chapter 7: Consciously Directing Your Unconscious

Understanding Your Nervous System

Appreciating your autonomic nervous system

Following the unconscious connection to your nervous system

Looking at the Importance of Breathing

Breathing your way to relaxation

Slowing your breathing to trigger trance

Conceptualising Your Unconscious Thermostat

Adjusting your unconscious thermostat when you’re stressed

Controlling your health thermostat

Chapter 8: Using Unconscious Self-Hypnosis

Introducing Unconscious Self-Hypnosis

Understanding Amnesia

Speaking to your unconscious

Remembering your dreams

Doing self-hypnosis without realising you’re in trance

Daydreaming more often

Turning on Unconscious Self-Hypnosis

Using Anchors to Secure Positive Thoughts

Using metaphors to trigger unconscious self-hypnosis

Developing useful scripts

Part III: Improving Your Outlook with Self-Hypnosis

Chapter 9: Putting Paid to Panic, Anxiety, Phobias and Fear

Foiling the Fear Factor

Understanding your body’s unique responses

Safely going into trance

Reducing Anxiety

Exploring methods to reduce anxiety

Monitoring your success

Optimising your performance

Overcoming Your Fears and Phobias

Understanding the emotional component of your phobia

Unpackaging your fears

Successfully facing your fear or phobia

Chapter 10: Signing Up to Self-Esteem

Developing Greater Self-Love

Accepting yourself

Enjoying the healthiness of being ordinary

Coping with Your Worst-Nightmare Situations

Using self-hypnosis to feel stronger

Problem solving with self-hypnosis

Resolving Conflict with Self-Hypnosis

Using self-awareness in the fight against conflict

Using your magic wand to achieve the unbelievable

Taking the ‘win–win’ approach to conflict

Chapter 11: Minimising Pain

How Hypnosis Can Control Pain

Safety First!

Understanding Your Pain

Characterising your pain

Using scales to rate your pain

Looking at Different Types of Pain

Seeing that Pain’s Subjective

Strategising Your Way to Pain Management

Visualising your relief

Manipulating your pain

Numbing your pain

Chapter 12: Ironing Out Anger

Calmly Understanding Your Anger

Finding out how anger works for you

Judging when anger’s inappropriate

Defining Your Anger Triggers by Keeping a Diary

Creating your anger diary

Using your diary to change your anger

Being Assertive with Your Anger

Using your anger constructively

Stopping before the flashpoint

Changing your angry behaviours and thoughts

Chapter 13: Overcoming Insomnia

Investigating Insomnia and Sleep Disorders

Defining different types of sleep disorder

Uncovering the causes of sleep problems

Sussing Out Your Somnolent Solution

Keeping a sleep diary

Watching what you eat

Discovering how much sleep you need

Practising Practical Sleep Strategies

Becoming knowledgeable about sleep

Increasing your social support

Using medication for sleep problems

Using self-hypnosis to improve your sleep

Part IV: Overcoming Problems with Self-Hypnosis

Chapter 14: Quitting Smoking

Understanding Your Smoking Habits

Getting to grips with the quit cycle

Working out when you smoke

Understanding the difference between need and habit

Preparing to Quit

Advertising you’re a smoke-free zone

Positively dumping the paraphernalia

Using Self-Hypnosis to Stop Smoking

Preparing to become a non-smoker

Becoming and remaining a non-smoker

Handling temptation

Inhaling healthier habits

Chapter 15: Keeping a Handle on Your Drinking

Understanding Your Emotional Need to Drink

Thinking about how you feel about drinking

Facing up to your feelings

Discovering Your Drinking Patterns

Working out how much you drink

Focusing on factors that affect your drinking patterns

Working out what type of drinker you are

Lone drinking

Binge drinking

Using Self-Hypnosis to Reduce Your Drinking

Establishing your drinking goals

Thinking through self-hypnosis scripts for your drinking

Decreasing your drinking

Going for total abstinence

Chapter 16: Controlling Your Eating Habits

Chewing Away at Why You Eat

Understanding emotional hunger

Understanding physical hunger

Knowing whether to drink or to eat

Digesting Diets

Seeing how diets can help – or not

Cooking up a healthy diet

Changing Your Mind to Change How You Eat

Homing in on helpful healthy eating strategies

Changing how you feel about your body

Enjoying your menu of success

Chapter 17: Fostering Good Relationships

Turning ‘Me-Me-Me’ Into ‘Us-Us-Us’

Practising communicating and listening skills

Looking outwards to pull your relationships together

Developing emotional intelligence

Practising self-monitoring

Focusing on others

Changing Yourself to Change Others

Stimulating the stimulus/response

Looking in the mirror

Listening to yourself

Being bravely in control

Confidently Attracting a New Partner

Looking at people you admire

Developing a sense of humour

Becoming charismatic

Part V: The Part of Tens

Chapter 18: Ten Creative Ways to Enter Trance

Boring Yourself into Trance

Confusing Yourself

Reading a Novel About Your Life

Staring into Space

Using Your Own Resistance

Time Machine Part One: Imagining the Future You Stopping By for a Chat

Time Machine Part Two: Imagining the You-Before-You-Had-the-Problem

Tuning into Your Favourite Television Channel

Using Your Senses to Deepen Self-Hypnosis

Levitating Yourself into Trance

Chapter 19: Ten Ways to Know You’re in Trance

Your Breathing Slows

Your Experience of Passing Time Changes

Your Eyes Move Beneath Your Eyelids

You Feel Pleasantly Lethargic

Your Heart Rate Slows Down

Your Mind Drifts and Wanders

Your Mind Goes Blank

Your Muscles Feel Heavy

Your Muscles Twitch

You Think You’ve Fallen Asleep

Chapter 20: Ten (Or So) Reasons to Seek Professional Help before Trying Self-Hypnosis

Anxiety and Panic Attacks

Confidence Problems

Depression

Eating Problems and Weight Loss

Infertility

Insomnia

Phobias

Physical Pain or Discomfort

Problem Drinking

Sexual Problems

Smoking

Appendix A: Self-Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy Resources

United Kingdom

United States

Canada

Australia

The Handbook of Hypnotic Metaphors and Suggestions

Scripts and Strategies in Hypnotherapy: The Complete Works

More Scripts and Strategies in Hypnotherapy

Appendix B: About the CD

Self-Hypnosis For Dummies®

by Mike Bryant and Peter Mabbutt

Self-Hypnosis For Dummies®

Published byJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd The Atrium Southern Gate Chichester West Sussex PO19 8SQ England

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About the Authors

Mike Bryant is a Hoosier from Indianapolis who has lived in England since 1984. Mike is also qualified psychiatric social worker, counsellor, and hypnotherapist.

Having worked in both America and the United Kingdom as a counsellor and mental health professional, Mike was a consultant for the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, advising NHS Trusts across the UK, and now works as a Mental Health Act Commissioner for the national Care Quality Commission.

Mike has also worked as a clinical supervisor to both counselling and hypnotherapy training organisations and is currently a part-time staff counsellor at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Mike currently lives in London with his wife and family and has a private practice as a counsellor and hypnotherapist. You can find more information about Mike’s clinical practice at www.mikebryant-hypnotherapy.co.uk.

Peter Mabbutt is CEO and Director of Studies at the London College of Clinical Hypnosis (LCCH). He lectures extensively throughout the UK and the Asia Pacific region to students of hypnotherapy, the medical profession and the general public. Peter also makes regular appearances on radio promoting and discussing hypnotherapy.

Peter is responsible for the development of the LCCH’s core courses that lead to the award of a Masters degree. With his colleagues he has introduced many new techniques and subjects to the curriculum, ensuring that it continues to meet the needs of the modern-day hypnotherapist.

Peter has a background in psychopharmacology and co-authored a range of papers on tranquilisers, anxiety, and learning and memory. He was involved in the development and management of several innovative international research projects designed to further understanding of the neurological and psychological basis of hypnotherapy. Peter has specialist interests in the mind-body connection, pain management, lifestyle improvement, performance enhancement, the treatment of trauma, and cardiovascular hypnotherapy.

Dedication

From Mike Bryant: I would like to dedicate this book to my girls: my wife Toni, and my brilliant, beautiful daughters Jodie and Jessie.

From Peter Mabbutt: I would like to dedicate this book to my partner Steven Winston. A big thank you for the past 10 years. Here’s to our future together.

Mum and dad, watching from above, thanks for all the happy memories.

Authors’ Acknowledgments

From Mike Bryant: I would like to thank my clients and supervisees who have provided a two-way learning process for me. I owe them a great deal in my development as a clinician, trainer, and author.

Many thanks to Nicole at Wiley for pitching this book and helping it to fly. Much appreciation also to Mario, Ogun and Nelson for their encouragement.

Peter, many thanks for bringing your expertise and humour to this project. It was great fun working with you.

From Peter Mabbutt: ¡Hola! to my sister Nadine and all the clan in sunny Españia. Thanks to my ‘other’ family of Sandra, Gerald, Andrea Winston and Veronica Fernandez for continuing to put up with me. To my own family, Linda, Barrie, Barry, Gillian, Anna, Sally and Sam a big hallo again.

Elijah and Dalya Winston, you are now at that age when you will be doing your utmost to ensure that your parents and I require prolonged therapy. Do your worst, kids – we can take it!

Sara Winston Fernandez, a true personality in the making. So young and yet so bossy and with the innate ability to make us all smile and laugh. Thank you.

Here’s to the newbies: Sheila Menon, Principal of LCCH Asia Pacific, many thanks for the opportunities and doors opened and for becoming such a good and close friend - oh, and for our gin and tonic post-lecturing debriefs in various hotel bars across Malaysia and Singapore! Allan Dodgeon, media mogul and radio raconteur, thanks for bringing hysterical laughter into the serious business of work and for the incredible friendship that grew from a Tweet.

I would like to say a big thank you for all the support and encouragement given to me by my colleagues past, present and future at the LCCH right across the globe.

A big thanks to Nicole, Simon and all at Wiley who made this possible, you really made a challenging process such a breeze.

And Mike, it’s always a pleasure working with you. We have another one under our belt. When do we start the next?

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Introduction

Hypnosis brings to many people’s minds images of mysticism and thought control, enclosed in a veneer of magic, wielded by sinister Svengali types who have dark ambitions as they take control of their poor victim! Thankfully this is a wild and fanciful notion that has absolutely nothing to do with reality. As you get to know and understand hypnosis and self-hypnosis, you find that the technique has a focus that’s firmly based on helping you regain control of an area of your life where you perceive you’ve lost control – a far cry from the fiction of Svengali.

People come to self-hypnosis for a variety of reasons. You may be reading this book because you want to take control of stress and discover how to relax. Maybe you’re seeing a hypnotherapist and you’re asked to practise self-hypnosis as a homework assignment. Maybe you simply want to make a change to some aspect of your life and you’ve heard how powerful and effective self-hypnosis can be. Or maybe you’re a student of hypnotherapy who wants to find out more about the ins and outs of self-hypnosis. Whatever your reason, this really is the book for you. Read on to find out why.

About This Book

Self-Hypnosis For Dummies helps you understand the realities of self-hypnosis. As you read this book you can discover how self-hypnosis maximises your own innate ability to change, and how you can use self-hypnosis to help overcome a wide variety of anxiety, emotional and behavioural issues, while at the same time promoting a healthy lifestyle, well-being and an inner sense of positivity.

Despite some of the seemingly miraculous outcomes some people achieve using self-hypnosis, in this book we focus on reality as we show you how self-hypnosis can help you achieve what you want to achieve while making you aware of its limitations. Of course, we give advice on how to overcome these limitations by getting further professional help.

This book gives you both a technical and a practical grasp of self-hypnosis, focusing primarily on practical aspects. After all, self-hypnosis is a very practical subject. You can find exercises, hints and tips that allow you use self-hypnosis as a means of taking control, bringing in changes that enable you to lead a more satisfying life.

Conventions Used in This Book

To help you navigate through this book, we’ve set up a few conventions:

Italics give emphasis and highlight new words or define terms.

Boldfaced text indicates the key concept in a list.

Monofont denotes Web and e-mail addresses.

We (the authors, Mike and Peter) use the pronoun ‘we’ to signify both of us or ‘one of us’ followed by ‘(Mike)’ or ‘(Peter)’, depending on who the author writing that particular paragraph is.

Also, when speaking generally we use the female pronoun ‘she’ in odd-numbered chapters and the male ‘he’ in even-numbered chapters, just to be fair to both genders.

Foolish Assumptions

When authors write books they tend to do so while holding on to several assumptions about their prospective readership. We, the authors of this fair tome, are no different and we’ve made the following assumptions about you and your reasons for parting with your hard-earned cash in order to read what we have to say. At least one of the following applies to you:

You’re interested in hypnosis and want to find out more about a very fascinating subject, yet you don’t want to plough through something more technical.

You want to practise self-hypnosis because you want to make some kind of change to your life.

Your hypnotherapist has suggested that you use self-hypnosis to aid your treatment programme.

You already practise self-hypnosis and want to make sure that you do so properly.

You’re a trained therapist or are training in hypnotherapy and want some new tips to give to your patients.

Why You Need This Book

Self-hypnosis is a wonderful way of helping yourself to take control of your own life, making those tweaks and modifications that you’ve always wanted to make but were perhaps unsure of the best way of doing.

As practising hypnotherapists we understand the challenges some people face when carrying out self-hypnosis. This book, like all For Dummies books, is written in a people-friendly way that helps you to do the following:

Understand the reality of self-hypnosis.

Overcome any challenges you may have had when practising self-hypnosis previously.

Work through simple and effective exercises as you bring about self-insight and change.

Remember, you’re a goal-directed being. That means that your behaviours, anxieties, problems and successes, and the way you handle your emotions, are heavily influenced by the way you think. As you read this book you see how to focus your mind in a positive way, getting a good and realistic handle on your thinking as you bring about change to your life.

How This Book Is Organised

As this is a For Dummies book, you don’t have to read the whole book from cover to cover in order to get the most out of it.

We’ve split this book into five parts, each broken down into its respective chapters. Each chapter’s a story in its own right that you can read alone or in conjunction with others. We reference information you can find in other chapters, maybe directing your attention towards specific parts of those chapter in order to make the most out of what you’re reading.

Part I: Identifying Your Needs and Preparing the Way

This section provides the foundation on which self-hypnosis is based. We break down any barriers of misunderstanding by defining what self-hypnosis is. We then look at how your mind and body work together as a team in order to create problems and, most importantly, how to overcome them. We explore the goal-directed nature of your mind and how you can best put your mind to use in order to help you achieve what you want to achieve, while at the same time discussing ways of overcoming any resistance to change.

Part II: Training Your Mind with Self-Hypnosis

Here we open up the self-hypnosis toolkit and take an in-depth look at the techniques you can use. We explore ways for you to take yourself into the trance state, and lovingly linger over the language that hypnotherapy uses so that you get the most out of each practice session. We help you to become conscious of your unconscious as you discover how to harness its power for your own benefit.

Part III: Improving Your Outlook with Self-Hypnosis

If you’re searching for that feel-good factor, this is the section for you. Whether you’re looking to calm yourself or your anger, ease your pain and sleep well, or confidently step out into the world brimming with self-esteem, here you can find strategies to help you accomplish a more fulfilling life.

Part IV: Overcoming Problems with Self-Hypnosis

If your health is important to you then you want to read through this section, as we cover eating and drinking issues as well as smoking here. We show you how to recognise the emotional and behavioural factors that push you towards making unhealthy lifestyle choices and how to gain power over those factors.

Let’s be realistic, self-hypnosis alone doesn’t magic away the unhealthy. Rather, self-hypnosis builds on your inner willpower and becomes a positive driving force, helping you create motivational strategies that eradicate the unhealthy as you stride purposefully into a healthy new lifestyle and a healthy new you!

Part V: The Part of Tens

This is the supplemental resource section of the book. Do you want to put your creativity to good use? If so, we expand on what you can find out in Chapter 5 as you discover 10 creative ways to enter trance. If you’re not sure how to tell whether you’re in trance, peruse the 10 reasons that show you are. To do self-hypnosis or not to do self-hypnosis – if that is the question then we give you 10 reasons why you should be seeking help from a professional source first.

Icons Used in This Book

As you read this book you find many icons that are designed to highlight certain information or give you pointers to ponder on.

This icon indicates an anecdote that we feel usefully illustrates something that we’re saying in the text.

We highlight technical terms and language that you may find unfamiliar and explain them under this icon.

This icon draws your attention to an important point that we want you to bear in mind as you continue reading and practising.

Here you can find something of technical interest that relates to the paragraph you’re reading.

This icon indicates that we’re emphasising information that you may find useful later on.

This icon does what it says on the tin – it highlights something that you really do need to pay attention to.

Where to Go from Here

Julie Andrews may say ‘start at the very beginning, it’s a very good place to start’ and in general we agree with her, except for the fact that this is a For Dummies book. That means that you can start anywhere, at any chapter and still get the most out of your reading. So, turn to the table of contents and jump to the chapter that most appeals to you or to the one that directly addresses the issue you want to work on.

As you read this book, remember that if your mind has had the power to create a problem, it certainly has the power to resolve that problem. We wish you luck as you discover how to take control of your life!

Part I

Identifying Your Needs and Preparing the Way

In this part . . .

The first Part of this book gives you the basics for understanding and practising self-hypnosis. In it, we define what self-hypnosis is, and briefly look at what it isn’t. We then examine how you can get started on overcoming your problems by getting your mind and body working together.

We also take a look at how to help you achieve what you want to achieve, whilst at the same time discussing how you can overcome your own resistance to change and avoid relapses.

Chapter 1

What Is Self-Hypnosis?