We view hypnotherapy as a process whereby we help people utilize their own mental associations, memories, and life potentials to achieve their own therapeutic goals. Hypnotic suggestion can facilitate the utilization of abilities and potentials that already exist within a person but that remain unused or underdeveloped because of a lack of training or understanding. The hypnotherapist carefully explores a patient's individuality to ascertain what life learnings, experiences, and mental skills are available to deal with the problem. The therapist then facilitates an approach to trance experience wherein the patient may utilize these uniquely personal internal responses to achieve therapeutic goals.
Our approach may be viewed as a three-stage process:
(1) a period of preparationduring which the therapist explores the patients repertory of life experiences and facilitates constructive frames of reference to orient the patient toward therapeutic change;
(2) an activation and utilization of the patient's own mental skills during a period of therapeutic trance;
(3) a careful recognition, evaluation, and ratification of the therapeutic change that takes place. In this first chapter we will introduce some of the factors contributing to the successful experience of each of these three stages.
The initial phase of hypnotherapeutic work consists of a careful period of observation and preparation. Initially the most important factor in any therapeutic interview is to establish a sound rapport - that is, a positive feeling of understanding and mutual regard between therapist and patient. Through this rapport therapist and patient together create a new therapeutic frame of reference that will serve as the growth medium in which the patient's therapeutic responses will develop. The rapport is the means by which therapist and patient secure each others' attention. Both develop a yes set, or acceptance of each other. The therapist presumably has a well developed ability to observe and relate; the patient is learning to observe and achieve a state of response attentiveness , that state of extreme attentiveness in responding to the nuances of communication presented by the therapist.
In the initial interview the therapist gathers the relevant facts regarding the patient's problems and the repertory of life experiences and learnings that will be utilized for therapeutic purposes. Patients have problems because of learned limitations. They are caught in mental sets, frames of reference, and belief systems that do not permit them to explore and utilize their own abilities to best advantage. Human beings are still in the process of learning to use their potentials. The therapeutic transaction ideally creates a new phenomenal world in which patients can explore their potentials, freed to some extent from their learned limitations. As we shall later see, therapeutic trance is a period during which patients are able to break out of their limited frameworks and belief systems so they can experience other patterns of functioning within themselves. These other patterns are usually response potentials that have been learned from previous life experience but, for one reason or another, remain unavailable to the patient. The therapist can explore patients' personal histories, character, and emotional dynamics, their field of work, interests, hobbies, and so on to assess the range of life experiences and response abilities that may be available for achieving therapeutic goals.
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