By: Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht

The first failure I had in my private practice was with my second client. He simply could not being hypnotized. It was frustrating. I knew I’m doing something wrong, but had not clue what was it and what should I do. Needless to say, I didn’t like that client much…

And the hardest I tried to hypnotize him, the greater the resistance he had presented and the more irritated I became.

I had to work a lot with my own memories and logic to find out what was the problem. At first I thought that the myth that there are people who cannot be hypnotized, never, is true. But it seems illogical to me, since we all have the same type of neurology and we all function the same way, though each one is producing different structures of the same neurological messages.

There must be a reason why some people are so stubborn when it comes to simply get into trance at this very moment. I didn’t understand or knew that reason back then, and it seemed to me very important to find that out. I wanted 100% success rate in hypnotizing anyone. Yes, I was that na?ve back then.

Then I came across a research in hypnosis about resisting trances. In that research they claimed that the hardest a client tries to be hypnotized, the more conscious and aware he becomes of the process itself and then it becomes even harder for him to enter a trance at this very moment.

Taking that information into my session room, I came up with a new strategy which later on I found out it was not that original… someone has already thought about it before me, but at least I know I thought about it on my own. Oh well, here it is:

The idea is to lower the client’s efforts instead of their defenses. At most time we try to make it logical to them, so they can go into hypnosis without too much pondering and rationalizing their fear of the unknown. We make it known to them, so they have less to think and more to rest.

The problem I faced with that second client of mine was that I got used to indirect suggestions. Since I’m the type of person who cannot be told what to do or think directly, unless you’re looking to have a vicious debate with me, I thought it was reasonable enough to think that most people are like that. Nobody likes to be told how to think and what to do, right? You’d be surprised, just as I was, that actually many people are exactly like that. They want to be lead. They want to think about it less, and drop the responsibility on the journey to whomever is in charge. It doesn’t mean that they don’t control their lives, it just means that they would prefer someone to give specific directions without too much room for their own creative experimentation.

Those are the type of people, by the way, that if they approach NLP they get almost instantly into the zombie mode. Because most of the ideas in the old NLP are presented as recopies, they tend to save them and treat them as fixed strategies instead of suggested guidelines for personal exploration.

I used to think that exactly those free fallers, those people who let themselves explore and experiment, are those who will present the most resistance in hypnosis. But I was wrong. Those people were actually easier to hypnotized since you didn’t even have to do much. They agreed for it, right? Now all that’s left is to throw in the right suggestion, indirect of course, and let them free fall onto their own path of trance… you just follow along, instead of pulling the strings. As I just said: Easy.