Cal: Hello, everybody, Cal Banyan here; Cal Banyan's Hypnosis Etc., where we talk about, you guessed it – Hypnosis, Etc.
Mostly we talk about how to do hypnosis, how to do hypnotherapy, and what's going on in the news world of hypnosis.
Today, I'm going to talk about a couple of things. We're going to talk about the Solid Gold Weekend, which has just happened. I'm going to talk about – a little something about age regression, and I'm going to answer a question of how do you respond to a client who after the session says she doesn't think she was deep enough in hypnosis.
All right, a little bit about me, I'm the CEO and Founder of the Banyan Hypnosis Center, developer of 5-PATH® Hypnotherapy, and the wonderful mind-body-spirit approach to hypnosis called 7th Path Self-Hypnosis®.  I've trained hypnotists from all over the world, and continue to write for the "Journal of Hypnotism," and I've written a couple of books.  So I'm considered to be the hypnosis authority in this area well, actually, internationally.
All right, enough about me, that's so weird introducing yourself. I usually – regular viewers of this show know that I usually have Celeste or Brenda or Meredith, somebody introducing me. By the way, I'm working on a couple of special guests. I am going to mention them in the next video, the next podcast, the next episode, so please keep checking back.
By the way, if you are not yet one of our VIP members, please, you can either send a blank email to Videos@CalBanyan.com or you can click the VIP Membership graphic on this website, CalBanyan.com.
All right, let's get into this. Oh my goodness, I'm so excited to be doing this, having you all to myself today because usually, as I said before, I have a co-hostess working with me and today, I'm just all by myself, it's just me and you.
So, one of the things – I'm coming off the hypno-high of getting done with the National Guild of Hypnotists Solid Gold Weekend in Las Vegas. You've heard me talking about it. It is the premier western hypnosis event. Nothing bigger, nothing better, in my opinion, than the Solid Gold Weekend, and it is only – the only thing better than it is the National Guild of Hypnotists convention on the East Coast, which we're getting ready to go do right now. I'm going to be doing a two-day workshop on Certification of Age Regression Hypnosis.
All right, speaking of age regression, I was on a group on the Internet the other day and we were talking about – actually someone asked the question about inductions. And after talking about inductions and we talk about other things in hypnosis, we got talking about how deep you need to go and why, and one individual who said that he doesn't really have people go into deep hypnosis, he doesn't really need to, and in fact, he doesn't even test for hypnosis. And I'm wondering, if you don't test for hypnosis, how do you know if the person is in hypnosis at all? But that aside, he made a statement – he or she, we'll try to be as anonymous as possible here – that he didn't do age regression hypnosis because he doesn't like to look for people to blame. He'd rather focus on the now and the future.
Well, my friends, we don't do hypnotic age regression in order to find people to blame. The fact is that we have these experiences which include how we perceive the event, the meaning that we gave that event, and the emotions and feelings that were generated in that event. And as most of these events cause the problems that we have today, any well-trained age regression hypnotist would be able to tell you that most of the time the first event called the ISE occurs before the age of five.
And you know what? When you're a little curtain-climbing crumb snatching lawn monster about five years old or four years old or three years old, you're not very sophisticated, and you're blaming people all over the place. So it's not that the hypnotist is looking for someone to blame or the adult client in the chair is looking for someone to blame.
What has happened is the child inside that had that experience has already assigned blame. And when we do the hypnosis, one of the main things that we want to do is go back and revisit the event with the hindsight of the adult client.
Like I've said in so many podcasts, how many times have we said, boy, I wish I knew then what I know now. Â Why? Because we'd be able to think about it differently and we'd be able to feel about it differently. Â And, when we change how we feel, we change how we behave. We change our mood, we change our behavior, we change our perspective about the now and in the future.
So when we do age regression hypnosis, it's really kind of a reality check on the perceptions of the past, the perceptions of the child. So we go back with the adult perspective of both the client coaching and the client as they are an adult coming to see you in their office, going back, re-examining those events, and where the child generally misperceives things, exaggerates things. You know, when you're only about two-and-a-half, three feet tall, everything is bigger; everything that's scary is scarier.
So what we're going to do is we're going to go back and we're going to give the adult perspective to that child. It changes how they think and how they feel. And with hindsight, how many times have we looked back and said, boy, if I knew then what I know now, I'd be glad that I wasn't getting that job, or I would be glad that I wasn't staying in that relationship, or I'd be glad – whatever the thing was that was so painful, so disappointing at the time we went through it, we could look back now and see how in some way, maybe a small way, maybe in a huge way, that disappointment or that failure or that scary thing that we went through as a child or a teenager or whatever worked out in some way to be beneficial to us.
So, in addition to going back and re-examining the events in the age regression – we're not looking for people to blame. The child has already assigned blame. But it's done from a childish perspective. Now we can go back with the wisdom of the adult, and perhaps the child will stop blaming or see things from a higher or more mature perspective.
In fact, we can simply say, you now have the knowledge and the wisdom of the adult as you go through this event – which would be one quickie kind of way to do it – run them through the event, seeing everything differently from a more accurate perspective. And it changes what they think and how they feel. And when we change how a person feels inside, we change how they behave now.
In my book, ‘The Secret Language of Feelings’, and we just finished a whole series on that, I talk about particularly, the feel bad – distract cycle and the too-much behaviors. If you've got an old feeling in the past like a fear, and it is not based in reality – for example, the little child is left alone and he thinks, oh my goodness, I'm going to die, and becomes very frightened, we can take the adult back to that time, show the child that he's not going to die, and that fear is taken away. That fear that still lived in the adult, this kind of vestigial fear, useless fear, fear that cannot be satisfied by anything that they could eat or drink or smoke or, you know, anything, and those are the too-much behaviors. When we take away the fear inside or whatever the painful emotion is, then the drive to do, for example, the too-much behavior goes away as well.
So let's not talk about age regression being a way to look to assign blame. What we're trying to do is do a reality check and have that child within that's still afraid or is too angry or is too sad, to get them to a state of reality. And in that case, we'll reduce the fear. And of course, there's more work that can be done, too, as we talk about in Phase 3, 4, and 5 of the 5-PATH® System.
Okay, so there's that. The other thing I want to talk about before I run out of time today is I saw another question on another group, and the question went something like this – and I paraphrase, “How do you respond to a client who after the session says she does not think that she was deep enough into hypnosis�
Okay, this never happens to me anymore. Now, in the very early days of my profession, it did, and then I figured out that – you know, I live my life surrounded by the wisdom of those who came before me. I did not come up with the idea of convincers, but I finally figured out that if I used convincers the proper way, then my clients will know that they were hypnotized and they’re going to do better. They’re going to do better in the session and they're going to do better after the session is over with.
Now, when I say convincers done right, if you don't know if your client is hypnotized or you don't know what level of hypnosis your client is in, and then you try to convince them in hypnosis, you're being reckless because they might fail the convincer and become very unconvinced.
So what we need to do is, we must covertly test for a deep level of hypnosis, and then we use light tests like eye lock, which corresponds to hypnoidal, and arm catalepsy, for example, which corresponds to light hypnosis. If we have previously tested for the deep level of hypnosis covertly – and it's very important that you do it covertly, which means secretly; the client doesn't know they’re being tested. We need to do this because if they fail, they won't know they fail. And one of the best ways to do this is the losing the numbers part of the Elman-Banyan induction. And you can just type Elman-Banyan induction into Google or whatever search engine, and you'll get something about it.
You can also go to Hypnosis.org, and right there I've got a video that will show you how to do the Elman-Banyan induction. And plus, if you get that video, I'm going to give you a whole bunch of other free stuff, too. So if you're new to Cal Banyan, one of the best things you can do is go to Hypnosis.org right now and then get that video, and I'll send you a whole bunch of stuff, including a video on how to do the Elman-Banyan induction.
All right, so how do you respond to a client after the session who says she does not think that she was deep enough in hypnosis? Well, first of all, avoid it. Let's not have that happen. Let's do convincers. Convince the client that they’re hypnotized while they are in hypnosis when they’re most suggestible and avoid the situation.
But, let's say that you haven't been doing that, you're not ready to do that, but hopefully you will very soon. I think all professional hypnotists should use convincers.
I want you to think when something does – all of your clients should be convinced they’re in hypnosis. And one of the Banyanisms is when something doesn't work like it should have worked, it means that something before it wasn't done either effectively or properly or completely. So if the client isn't convinced that she was hypnotized or she was deep enough, one of the problems is you didn't do a good enough convincer.
The other thing is, she had some fear or, in this case, misconception about hypnosis, and this should have been covered in the pre-talk. There’s a gazillion misconceptions about hypnosis; you can't have a pre-talk that covers everything. In our office, we use a Truth about Hypnosis pre-talk video that covers probably 90% to 98% of the stuff that people have as misconceptions or fears about hypnosis.
What we do is think about what wasn't done. And so what is going on here is if you truly hypnotized this client and if you truly tested to make sure that they're in hypnosis, and they come out of hypnosis wondering if they were hypnotized, it means that they had some conception of what hypnosis would be like and the actual event didn't match it.
And so I would ask something like, what makes you think that? If they say, I don't know if I was really hypnotized deep enough, I'd say, what makes you think that? Or what makes you say that? And then we're going to find out what the misperception was, and we can then alleviate that through explanation.
And one of the things is they expected to feel a certain way. Well, I didn't feel hypnotized, or I could still hear what was going on around me, or I was still conscious. That stuff should have been covered in your pre-talk, but if not, you've got to cover it now. The pre-talk isn't done until it's done. Sometimes you'll be in the second or third session and something will pop up and you need to educate that client so that they can then continue in the process.
So you tell them that it's normal to be aware of what's going on. Hypnosis doesn't feel like anything. I know that sounds funny. Some of you who have been trained in other places, you have this mental expectation of what hypnosis would feel like. Well, the definition that I like most of what hypnosis is – and you can compare this to whatever definition you use, and that is, hypnosis is a heightened state of suggestibility. It is some level of suggestibility, either a little bit beyond or far beyond normal suggestibility; suggestible such that the suggestions given by the hypnotist affect the perceptions of the individual, the beliefs of the individual, the habits of the individual, even the emotions of the individual.
Now, a heightened state of suggestibility in and of itself doesn't feel like anything. Now, in a lot of inductions, we will say, relax, as I count down from five, relax, or assume that feeling of relaxation through your body, or relax your eyelids so much that they don't work or whatever; and then ten times the relaxation, two times the relaxation, and all that kind of stuff. And then the hypnosis feels like relaxation.
But, we can also do like, arm catalepsy, where their arm is stuck up from their body, feeling stiff and rigid like a bar of steel. Now, hypnosis feels like stiff and rigid like a bar of steel.
Now, here's another insider tip, and that is, one of the other reasons why my clients never ask me this or tell me that they don't think they were deep enough, is because I get into hypnotic age regression as soon as I can.
Now, one of the best convincers is hallucination. Now, when you do age regression, a real age regression, they’re going to either see things or taste things or smell things or pre-vivify to relive some aspect of those events in the past. It might just be emotions. But usually, it's a little bit of all of it, if not a lot of all of it. And that is such a convincer to relive a moment or an experience or an event from a time when you were 15 years old, 5 years old, 3, 2, 1 year old. And so here's another tip: get into doing the age regression hypnosis as soon as possible.
Another thing that I like to do is even after you explain this stuff, clients will sometimes wonder. And I like to – I borrow this script from Don Mottin, and it's called ‘Red, Red, Red’. And what it really is, is it's a suggestion that after they emerge from hypnosis, on the way home – for a couple of days longer, if they like – the color red is going to be more noticeable than ever before. It's just going to stick out. It will seem sharper, clearer. It could be a tail light, a stop light, the color of a car, clothing. It could be as small as a lady's nail polish, or as large as a billboard. And every time they see the color red, it will reinforce everything we did in the session today.
I'll go through that a couple of times, and then what happens is even after they leave the office, they continue to become convinced that they were hypnotized – post-hypnotic convincers.
So, thank you, Don Mottin, for that.
All right, so, I'm ready to wind it up. I've got one more “all-Cal†episode that's coming up, and then I'm going to have a co-host back. It will either be Erika Flint or it will be Scot Giles, Reverend Dr. Scot Giles, a huge star in the world of hypnotism, or Brenda may come back. I've got her on a special project to put together some special material for our next time that we're together.
So that's it. Oh, by the way, I've got a class coming up, the Week of Power, for all you folks who are already certified and you want to get 5-PATH®, 7-Path™, build your skills, maybe even your confidence level. That's May 4th through May 10th, 2014. And then we've got the full-blown 10-day course. This is for both people who are new in the profession and those who were previously certified, and this is the NGH Approved Banyan Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy Certification Super Course with 5-PATH® and 7-Path™, and that's July 14th through the 25th.
And guess what? If you're watching this video, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, 20 years into the future, as long as I've got classes, they will be posted on CalBanyan.com and Hypnosis.org.
And that's it. All right, that's it. Another 20 minutes or so flew right by. I want to see you at the NGH Convention. Keep in touch, leave comments below. I love comments. Send a suggestion for future podcasts, or just comments. We love them. Positive, negative, send them to me.
That's it, Cal Banyan signing off.
Copyright 2014 Calvin D. Banyan . All rights reserved.