How to Structure a Hypnotic Story That Appeals to the Unconscious Mind
By Covert Hypnotist | August 24, 2011
Stories are a powerful and essential building block for Conversational Hypnosis. Stories have been around since the dawn of man. All through history life has been documented with some type of story telling. Telling a story, whether it is a hypnotic story or not, is a way of bringing a person out of their own world and into an altered state of mind.
Stories absorb your attention, they bypass critical factor simply because you recognize them as stories and they create unconscious responses in everyone. When you tell a story you will incorporate hypnotic themes, sometimes without even trying, and seed a strategy in the minds of others. You can use stories as a way to embed suggestions, emotional triggers and link these suggestions and triggers to a specific action or outcome.
Stories can help you to suspend reality as well as merge realities together. They can offer a quiet resemblance to your life and the situations and problems you find yourself experiencing. All these aspects of story telling run right along the lines of the skills you will practice and master in hypnosis.
Stories are an important part of what you will be doing as a hypnotist. They are an art form and there is as much a method to good story telling as there is to hypnotic story telling. Remember as you read this information that we are focusing on the telling of stories, this is much different than the writing of stories. What you will do as a hypnotist is tell stories in order to invoke change in the people around you.
There are certain aspects that need to be involved to tell a hypnotic story, there are different actions and ideas that need to take place, at least to some degree. Even the simplest stories are still recognized as stories because they follow a type of formula that you hear and think, okay so that was a story.
You may think it was a bad story or you may think you heard a great story. Either way you are not able to deny that it was a story.
Hopefully you will be creating and telling great stories. In order to get on your way to telling good stories there are parts of a story that you need to be consciously aware of. A simple set of instruction that will help you in creating the most basic principal of what a story is. From there you can build and add to the story as you feel necessary, but it must contain these few instructions in order to fall into the category of a hypnotic story.
The first rule you must include in all your stories is to begin with a routine. This can be a very simple routine or a complicated one; it does not matter as long as there is a routine placed at the beginning of your story. In this article we will build an example story together. So the beginning routine of our story will be, “I was driving my car down the highway.” This is a routine that will start the story we are going to build here.
The second rule for building a hypnotic story is that you must break that routine. Whatever routine you found to begin your story with must be broken. There needs to be an interruption in the action.
“I was driving my car down the highway when I heard an unexpected noise coming from the back seat.” Here we have broken the routine, something other than driving down the highway has happened.
The next rule to this formula for story building is to change someone. There needs to be a character in the story that is changed. This means they need to have some type of emotional effect. Something needs to happen to affect the character you are changing that will produce an impact on that character as a result of an event.
“I was driving my car down the highway when I heard an unexpected noise coming from the back seat.
As I looked in my rear view mirror I saw a small black dog, she was holding her paw in an odd way.
I immediately pulled the car over and got out to see what the situation was. The little dog was bleeding and was in great need of medical attention.
I decided that I would have to postpone my plans to go out and take the little dog to the animal hospital.”
The part of my story where my character decides to take the dog to the hospital is where the change is taking place. There is a clear decision made and an emotion is attached to it.
Now there is a fourth and final rule to hypnotic story telling that you have the option of including or leaving out. If you can find a way to incorporate it into your stories you will be glad you did.
This is called re-incorporation and it really pays off in the end. Re-incorporation is when you add a seemingly meaningless detail to the beginning of the story and then re-incorporate it at the end. This is a way to usually add a riveting effect to your stories.
If you can follow all the rules of story telling you will come up with a story every time that will be recognizable as a story. Your listener will have no question about what you have just said and it will meet the expectations of a story for anyone who hears it.
Now there are many ways to tell stories. If you find one that works better for you and incorporates all that a story need then you should stick with what works for you. But these are the rules that will rest assured give you a good story frame, the rest is up to you
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Topics: Conversational Hypnosis, Embedded suggestions, Emotional Triggers, Hypnotic Language, Story Telling | Leave a comment »
The Power of Stories in Hypnosis
By Covert Hypnotist | July 24, 2011
Stories are a wonderful and powerful tool that you use often now and you will use often in the art of Conversational Hypnosis. Story telling is a broad range of things, especially in hypnosis. The stories you tell as a hypnotist will not be all princesses and castles, nor will they all even be fictional. Stories can be true life like antidotes, jokes, parables, similes, metaphors, facts, or informational stories. All of these will be useful in hypnosis depending on the person and subject matter you are dealing with.
The idea of telling stories has been around as long as humans have. There is sufficient evidence of this from cave drawings to modern day books and the internet. There is not a person on earth who can speak in full sentences that has not at one point or another told a story. They happen everyday, countless times.
You tell the mechanic about the funny noises your car is making. You tell the grocery clerk about how frustrated you were trying to find the eggs. You tell your child about sharing and your spouse about your day. These are all examples of stories that happen daily.
All these stories also have something in common, they are all powerful. Every story speaks directly to the unconscious mind. You feel emotion for a story as simple as not being able to find the eggs at the super market. You may identify with the story tellers frustration or dismay. Emotion is the language of the unconscious and stories evoke emotion.
Stories do several things in hypnosis first they bypass the critical factor. The critical factor recognizes a story and really pays no more attention to it simply because it is a story. There is no resistance to stories.
The other thing that stories do for you is to take your reality away and suspend it as you enter a new reality. This new reality is not really defined and can blend realities together to confuse them. You often find yourself identifying with the characters the speaker is talking about and experiencing their lives and emotions as if they were your own. They allow you to live in the character’s experience.
This is why you feel emotion when we read particular stories. It is because you identify with the characters at some level. This is important as you put into the context of telling stories to improve your hypnosis, you can use a story to conjure a hypnotic effect in another person.
Once you pass up the critical factor you have the ability to create identification with characters and the person you are conversing with. After these two things are accomplished you are in a very powerful position, a listener with no resistance and a story they will want to listen to.
Because story telling is so pivotal in hypnosis, especially Conversational Hypnosis, you should really concentrate on getting experienced and good at it. Practice with those you know, everyone like to hear a good story.
Now lets look at hypnotic stories, how exactly do you tell a hypnotic story? The first thing a story does for you in the area of hypnosis is to seed ideas or set up a frame work of ideas that will lead your listener into experiences. To seed ideas in your stories be sure to embed suggestions within the story. The story itself can really be on any topic as long as you are focused on inserting your suggestions.
You should be aware to use trance themes within your stories as this will have a greater impact on your listener if they are coaxed into a trance. Trance themes that you can start out with are relaxation on vacation, being drawn into a movie or suspenseful ideas. These are hypnotic themes that will help to draw your listener into a hypnotic state.
Isomorphic stories are another helpful skill set to keep in your library. These are stories that portray likeliness to the situation or person you are telling the story to. This goes back and relates to mirroring.
Really be cognizant of mirroring your listener and their situation in the story you are telling about other characters. An isomorphic story will also offer a solution or plan of action to take about the problem or situation within the story, which is in essence your listener’s situation or problem. This type of story will send your listener away analyzing what has happened and eventually find their own meaning stemming from the story you have told.
Finally the last aspect of story telling you will want to practice is that of priming the unconscious mind. This is the art of forming the unconscious mind to be aware of a thing before you actually tell it in the story. This is a technique that is used in many different areas including competitive sports, teaching and sales.
Competitive sportsmen talk about how they will win and this is responded to on some level of the unconscious. The same goes for teaching a teacher can plant the teachings in a form of pre-teach before they actually teach the lesson they want their students to learn. Sales does this through testimonials of products, they convince the customer that they will be happy with the product before they even purchase it.
This concept actually inserts the idea of the motions the person would be going through so they think they have experienced it even before it has actually happened. A sales man shows you want you will need to do for the paper work of buying your car before you actually fill it out.
All the story telling skills and types we have covered are very, very powerful. They will help you in bringing in hypnotic themes and plant processes in the minds of your subjects. They will also assist you in embedding suggestions, accessing states, setting emotional triggers and producing productive positive outcomes.
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Topics: Access State Principal, Conversational Hypnosis, Embedded suggestions, Emotional Triggers, Story Telling | Leave a comment »
How to Use Embedded Suggestions in Hypnosis
By Covert Hypnotist | June 24, 2011
Embedded suggestions are an important aspect that will provide a very great amount of power within your Conversational Hypnosis practices. This is a skill you will use over and over again to create suggestions that are unrecognizable to the conscious mind.
An embedded suggestion is nothing more than a suggestion that is often repeatedly buried in the context of a conversation of miscellaneous words and uttering’s. The statements that contain the suggestion may vary in wording and meaning but the suggestion itself is focused on a particular aspect you and your subject will be working on together.
This practice was first discovered somewhere between the late 1940’s and early 1950’s by the famous master hypnotherapist Dr. Milton Erickson. The idea was presented to him through rumor that the random things that schizophrenics would walk around saying and muttering really had some deeper meaning to them. These undecipherable phrases were ways in which the afflicted were trying to communicate with whoever would listen.
At the time Dr. Erickson became aware of this rumor he happened to be working as a Doctor at the Worcester State Hospital with mentally disturbed inmates, many of which were themselves schizophrenics.
Upon realizing this theory Dr. Erickson decided to conduct a study of his own using the reams of texts recorded verbatim with what the schizophrenic patients were saying. As he poured through the vast amount of different transcripts all of uttering’s that had been recorded word for word from schizophrenics he discovered something.
As Dr. Erickson deciphered the many uttering’s he found that there were actually messages embedded among the majority of non sense words and sounds. The theory Dr. Milton Erickson came up with was that some of the words buried deep with in the non sense were meaningful and made sense once connected.
The doctor spent more time and found and recorded all these words and put them together to create what he thought were real attempts at communication. Usually the finished phrases included explanations of the patient’s conditions and asking for help.
Because this was only a theory it needed to be tested. Dr. Erickson knew of a secretary in the office that suffered from severe migraines, when she got a migraine she would have to immediately go and lie down to deal with the pain.
He prepared a file of the uttering’s from the schizophrenic’s files and inserted his own embedded messages in place of theirs. The next time the secretary needed to lie down because of the pain in her head Dr. Erickson insisted that she take dictation from him.
As he was a doctor she begrudgingly did so without putting up much of a fight. Amazingly, ten minutes into the dictation her head was completely pain free. Her migraine was gone.
She was amazed and Dr. Erickson had proven his theory within this study. Today this principal is known as unconscious priming in the psychological literature that circulates.
So what Dr. Erickson did was to prove that there was a way to get messages across hypnotically when embedded in a list of non sense. This happens because our unconscious minds have an extremely good ‘ear’ for ‘hearing’ or identifying and picking up patterns within life (including your conversations).
There have been many studies since Dr. Erickson’s study; some more complicated, that also prove his theory stands the test of time. Embedding suggestions works for many people at an unconscious level. The mind can pick out the patterns of the words that make sense and use those suggestions and respond to them.
Another example of how the unconscious mind picks up patterns in life is referred to as implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge are those things you just seem to know, no one ever taught them to you directly you just somehow know how to do them. These are simply patterns that the unconscious mind has picked out of life and learned.
These are things that are learned in the background instead of the conscious forefront of learning. Such as shaking or nodding your head, you know what it mean but you were never exactly instructed on how to do it or what it meant.
Embedding suggestions in your Conversational Hypnosis will likely be a fantastic skill. This is a very powerful technique as it lets you speak directly to a person’s unconscious mind and instill the actions needed to get the responses you want.
Embedding suggestions is an art you should practice hard, often and well as it will be one of the defining factors in a novice hypnotist and a master hypnotist.
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Topics: Conversational Hypnosis, Embedded suggestions, Hypnotic Delivery, Hypnotic Language | Leave a comment »
How to Overload the Conscious Mind for Better Hypnosis
By Covert Hypnotist | May 24, 2011
Overloading the conscious mind is a task that is quite easily done. In Conversational Hypnosis you will be doing this in order to confuse the mind so the conscious aspect is overloaded with trying to figure out what you have said. After you have accomplished that your suggestion will bypass the critical factor and move right into your mind without being noticed.
It is a fact that on average the conscious mind can concentrate, and keep straight 5-9 items at one time. Five things are generally pretty easy for a person to remember and nine is beginning to become quite difficult. As you can see this is not a great number when you put it into the amount of items, facts or ideas you can rattle off in a conversation.
This is why when you are having a conversation with a person about their car being in the shop and they start to give you a bunch of different facts about the car they drive, the car their parents drive, the car Uncle Tom drives and the car Aunt Hilda drives you may get confused.
You will so busy trying to keep the different cars, the people who drive them and the facts about them straight that you will miss the point of the conversation in the first place. Your speaker was talking about his car being in the shop.
Overloading the mind with any information will cause the critical factor to either get distracted with unimportant information or shut down all together. This is a plus for you as a hypnotist because then you can attach a suggestion and it will flow right on in.
If a person is able to keep track of the information they will more than likely be focusing on the wrong information which will still distract the critical factor and again allow your suggestion in anyway.
The idea behind overloading people with details is just that. No matter what the subject or how it is being presented, whether it be fact, fiction or just random information, you want to really give them a lot of details to use this powerful concept to its full advantage.
The next language trick or confusion pattern you will use to overload the mind is called the spontaneous change of meaning. This is done by the sudden and unexpected combining of two different statements. When you take two statements that end and begin with the same word you can mush them together to make one sentence that just doesn’t quiet add up.
For example, “I’m going to the store is out of milk.” In this statement the meaning at the beginning and end are fine, they make sense. But somewhere in the middle things get a little confusing, just confusing enough that you have to stop and think about what I have just said.
If you take the statement apart you see that ‘I’m going to the store’ is quite average and normal; as is ‘The store is out of milk.’ This sudden change in how people are used to hearing things causes critical factor to stop for the confusion. When that happens you can simply add your suggestion to the flow of conversation and it will again go in unnoticed.
Another way to incorporate spontaneous change of meaning into your Conversational Hypnosis is to introduce a suggestion in your conversation and then continue speaking as if it never happened. This again causes enough confusion for critical factor that it wants to stop to figure it out.
This is overridden by the fact that you are still talking and there is no time to go back to figure it out. Now the unconscious does pick up the suggestion and stores it away for future use. Again your suggestion gets in to the mind as it bypasses the confused critical factor.
As you include more and more of these spontaneous changes the mind will not only pick up the conversation you are having aloud it will begin to recognize the pattern being created within through the hidden messages.
Yet another way to use this change of meaning is to avoid the ambiguity all together and just combine two statements that end and begin with the same word together. These statements will make more sense and be a little less confusing but still distracting. The key here is to make sure to add these statements casually into conversation otherwise they will be noticed and detected.
Also remember to use these when you need to, not for every other statement. If you use this spontaneous change of meaning too often it can become annoying and overbearing, which is true for most confusion language tactics. Becoming too confusing can be counterproductive in that your listeners will no longer have an interest in listening to you.
Lastly we come to the language confusion concept of shock and surprise. This is a fascinating concept, any time you really shock or surprise someone you will automatically run over the critical factor and make it in. Shock and surprise will create their own type of trance induction.
Just by being shocked and surprised your conscious thinking will immediately overload and shut down leaving only the unconscious open to suggestion and ready to follow instruction, which is perfect for a hypnotist.
There is a caution in shock and surprise method. Some people do not like to be shocked and surprised so be sure you are picking and choosing wise times and the right people to use this technique on.
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Topics: Bypassing Critical Factor, Conversational Hypnosis, Hypnotic Language, Overloading the Conscious Mind | Leave a comment »
