Hypnosis site

Yay! I've actually found a useful site relating to hypnotherapy: Hypnosis.com. It looks bit a cult-ish to me (although I seem to think that about pretty much everything relating to hypnosis and NLP), but it does seem to have some good content and reasonably active forums.

Shame there doesn't seem to any blogs on the subject though. Maybe I've just been spoiled by all the programming related blogs around the place. The only one I've found that has anything to do with any type of psychotherapy at all is James Hamilton's blog, and one of his recent posts mentions "there is very little quality writing in the field, let alone on the net". Hopefully it'll change because getting all my info from books and courses is likely to be very expensive :)

Floaty light

Doesn't look like I've learned anything from my always-using-arm-levitation thing, cos I'm still using it with pretty much everyone. I haven't had any other people where it wasn't a success though (but that's more luck than skill). Only just the other day, I got one of my friends to be a guinea pig for me - up until the arm levitation she didn't think that she'd entered any kind of hypnotic state. So I still think it's useful to prove to people that they have, but I really do need to avoid using the same technique all the time. I know millions of them, I just keep using the same one. Probably because I've used it the most, so it's the easiest - which kinda misses the point of having guinea pigs to practice on :) The same goes for the induction as well, I pretty much always use progressive relaxation of body parts. It usually works really well (not always though), but I definitely need to brush up on some other induction techniques a bit more.

Yay! Success

Turns out that my friends dental trip went really well. She was much more relaxed than she'd been in the past, and her mother also commented on how much more relaxed she was this time. She was still a little nervous though, so a couple more sessions would help. But, all in all, I'd count that last dental phobia session as a success - which gives me a success rate of 100% :)

Dental phobia

I've been trying to help out one of my mates with her dentist phobia. The first attempt wasn't all that good. I didn't really know what I should be trying, and just ended up using some generic ego-strengthening type stuff that I'd tailored a bit to be more dentist focused. She did say it helped a bit when getting a wisdom tooth taken out - which is a pretty big fear for her, so even a little bit of help there is a really good thing.

Thankfully, my second attempt at some hypnotherapy a couple of days ago seemed to go a lot better. After a progressive relaxation induction, and a couple of deepeners, she was in a fairly deep trance. So I went on to install a post hypnotic suggestion for calmness. Set up so that all she needs to do is a take a deep breath and think of the word calm, then all the anxiety and tension will just fade away (based on stuff lifted from Hartland's, again :)). After that, I got her to experience visiting the dentist to try it out (making a point to focus on the smells and sounds). Once the anxiety was beginning to build up, I got her to do the deep-breath-calm thing to get rid of any anxiety. I went through a few dental situations (e.g. waiting room & dentist chair) like that to reinforce it.

After bringing her back out of trance, she said it felt like it worked really well - and I was pretty impressed with how well it seemed to work as well. I guess I'll find out for sure next week, cos she's going back to the dentist then. Hopefully everything will go great :)

Hypnosis practice

I've been trying to get a fair bit of practice with hypnotherapy while waiting for the diploma course to kick off - so I've been getting lots of my mates to be guinea pigs. It's working pretty well, had good results with some folks, and not much with others :) All useful feedback though.

The one I tried the other day with one of my mates was just a couple of basic deepeners with generic ego-strengthening thrown in. For one of the deepeners, I used an arm levitation technique (based on the one in Hartland's). Personally I quite like that one - as well as giving the 'client' more confidence that he's actually experienced hypnosis (lots of folks say "but I didn't feel hypnotised, just a bit relaxed"), it also gives me a bit more confidence that what I'm doing is having any effect :) But, for this one in particular, he's the kind of person that tends resist being manipulated or controlled. So he wasn't massively comfortable with me trying to lift his arm up like that. Also, the fact that he felt that way managed to bring him out of trance a bit. Oops! Kinda reinforces that when you're doing any kind of hypnotherapy work, you really need to take a full case-history first so you've got a good idea of what will work and what wont. Maybe I'll not be quite so keen to use that deepener on everyone as well :)