Learning hypnotherapy, final exam

My final exam for hypnotherapy is over now. It was a pretty long day, starting off with a practical exam to demonstrate taking somebody into trance, some ego strengthening, then bringing them back to full awareness. As well as some 'mock' client issues to show how you would deal with a clients fears or misconceptions about hypnosis, the kind of details you would take for a case history and other things along those lines (basically everything you would cover in the pre-hypnosis interview-ish part).

The practical exam was followed by four written papers, during which I discovered that I don't actually have the ability to write anymore. Thanks to all my time using computers these days, I think this is the first time I've wrote more than a few words on paper for several years. The legibility of my writing seemed to deteriorate rapidly after a paragraphs or so. Hopefully it's all understandable.

I was a lot more confident about these papers before taking them, partly because I had decided to try and pass theses papers without any revision at all. If I do fail any of them, I'll be able to have a second attempt shortly afterwards (I did check this before hand) which I will revise for. I'll be a lot more pleased if I pass first time through.

I found out on the day that I passed the practical examination, and I'll get the results of the written papers in a few weeks. Fingers crossed.

How to have a panic attack

Recently, I've been getting some practice in finding out 'how' people know to feel certain ways, e.g. how they know to be scared of spiders. I've been trying to get the process they go through to have that fear, rather than the reason that they belive they feel scared. This is going from the NLP-type view that the 'why' isn't all that important. It doesn't matter if somebody is scared of spiders because their parents are, because they found one in their food as a child, or whatever else they belive the reason is. The idea is, that if you can get the process they go through from being calm before seeing (or thinking about) a spider, to being afraid, then you can start to change it.

The biggest problem I've had with this, is being able to ask people the right kind of questions to get the type of answer that I'm looking for. People generally aren't aware of their internal thought process, it happens automatically so they don't pay any attention to it. I tried asking a friend of mine, who has a fear of water to the point of taking a panic attack, about the thought process he goes through to get from being calm to having a panic attack. Just thinking about it is enough to make him feel anxious, so it's a fairly strong response. At first, he was mostly saying things like "I just feel my heart speeding up" or "I just feel scared when I get near to it" - but after asking some strange questions I did manage to get him to describe the process he was going through in his mind. He said he imagines himself drowning in the water, seeing it from his own eyes as if he's actually in the water, and seeing the bubbles of air going up past his face to the surface. No wonder he manages to have a panic attack when he thinks about it in that way.

After getting the description of what he does mentally, it seemed like a good fit for a technique I first read about from one of Richard Bandler's books (I can't remember which one). The technique is to get the person to go through the thought process (in this case, it would be imagining the drowning) and as they're doing it, to turn the brightness right up for the pictures or movie in their mind - just like they would if it was on TV, so that it totally whites out. So they can't see anything apart from whiteness. Then go through the same process a few more times (5 being the recommend number), each time turning the brightness all the way up. The idea is that by doing this, you're effectively brain-washing yourself so that you can't play that internal movie in the same way again. When you try it'll just white out again. A blank white movie isn't enough to scare you or cause any anxiety, so no more fear or panic attacks.

The only downside in this case was that after I explained to my friend what I wanted him to do, he said he didn't like the sound of that, and that the whiteness would just be 'nothing' which might be even worse than what he has now. So I don't actually know if this technique would have helped in this case, but from what I've read of other peoples results they've been pretty successful. No doubt I'll get other chances to practice this kind of thing, but I thought it was an interesting response to not wanting to try it. At least he didn't just say "it wont work for me" :-)

"It wont work with me"

Sometimes when people mention that they have a really bad phobia that causes problems in their life (such as being scared of heights, deep water, etc.) and I ask if they've considered hypnotherapy, they say something like "that wont work with me, so there's no point in trying". That response always seems really strange to me, if they've never tried it before how can they know it wont work? It doesn't take long to do it, so the effort required to try it is tiny. Usually I've offered to try and help for free as well, so the cost isn't an issue either.

I wonder if it's just people being scared to try hypnotherapy in general? Although I mostly use NLP techniques for working with phobias now, nobody has ever heard of that so I don't usually mention it (and I still use some hypnotherapy for ego-strengthening with whatever work I'm doing)

One of the people that said it wouldn't work did clarify that it's because she wasn't comfortable with it, so probably wouldn't do what I said. Which makes much more sense - it just bugs me when people say that it's pointless to try because they already know it wont work.