4.0: Hypnosis and Ordinary Trances

The hypnotic state clients experience in my office as a result of a formal trance induction is just one of the many different trances they experience throughout their day. There is nothing unusual about hypnosis, everything we experience is trance. You can evoke one kind of trance by listening to one of the induction audio files in this kit [see Appendix A: Trance Formation Audio Files], but you don’t need a formal induction to change your state. Consider the following thought experiment:

Thought Experiment: The Emergency ─ Imagine that you just got a message that someone in your family had been seriously hurt in an automobile accident and you must get to the emergency room right away. Your biological state would change immediately and you would run or drive there as fast as you could, heart pounding, thoughts racing, experiencing great distress. When you got there and discovered the report was untrue, you would experience relief, a very different trance. Objectively, the report was never true, yet it had a great impact on your state of mind and body. State-dependent phenomena ─ including motivation, perceptual bias and response probability distribution ─ are determined by the subjective reality that existed only in your mind, not by what was objectively true.

In the example above the information that evoked the stressful state was objectively false, and so the trance was not valid. But some kinds of information are neither objectively true nor false, so the trances they evoke are neither valid nor invalid. Pathogenic structures emerge when the individual considers such information to be important [e.g., “others find me unattractive,” “I don’t have what it takes to succeed.”]

Barry, the 31 year-old engineer who views himself as socially awkward is at a party with co-workers, when his supervisor makes a joke at his expense. Barry would love to respond with a clever comeback, but he expects to be inarticulate. Will there be a witty exchange or an awkward silence?

The appraisal: “I’m a loser,” or the expectation: “I will perform well” exist only in Barry’s mind not in the objective world, but his subjective reality has a great influence on how he performs in the real world. Appreciating Barry’s tendency to freeze up in such situations, one coworker expects an embarrassing pause and another expects him to say something stupid. But these expectations exist only in their minds. Objective reality is determined by how Barry actually performs.

When he is in the right state of mind Barry can be very funny and quick witted. Whether or not he can use this talent in this stressful situation depends to a large extent on his subjective reality at the time. His retort is more likely to be clever if he is in a confident trance than if he is in his “I’m a nerd” trance. He wants to bring on the clever version of himself and enjoy a social victory for a change, but he expects to be weak and intimidated as usual.

So there is a conflict between Barry’s intentions ─ to be cool and clever ─ and his expectations of humiliation. Will his expectations or his intentions determine his subjective reality at the critical moment? Which will be the effective stimulus when Barry is faced with his crisis?

Expectations have the advantage ─ both Barry and his friends believe them to be objectively true. From our dispassionate perspective we can see they are merely creative fictions which are neither true nor false. As a dispassionate observer I can see that Barry himself is the source of an artificial limitation that diminishes his fun, increases his misery, and prevents him from establishing an intimate partnership. My task as his therapist is to help him create a subjective reality that is at least as valid as the one he currently holds, but that evokes more self-serving trances.

At first Barry resisted change because being someone different than he really is would be inauthentic. My first task is to challenge his tacit premise that there is a real Barry. In fact I have met many versions, including the clever Barry and the intimidated Barry. Intentional Trance Formation refers to the method of transforming a less resourceful version into one that is more resourceful. The ambitious objective of this section is to enable you to intentionally influence your subjective reality and hence you capability to cope with real-time challenges.