Self Hypnosis

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Self Hypnosis
Valerie Austin

Hypnosis is the most natural self-healing gift known to humanity. It is the key to changing old or unwanted behaviour patterns and creating new, positive habits.Whatever you want to do - stop smoking, lose weight, cope with stress, overcome your fear of spiders or just improve your snooker game - self-hypnosis will help you to harness your own inner power and change your life. Valerie Austin is a practising hypnotherapist who leads workshops and courses on self-hypnosis. She shares her years of experience and explains in simple terms the quick and easy-to-learn technique for hypnotising yourself. Your subconscious is actively working on your behalf in more ways than you can possibly imagine. With the scripts you need to hypnotise yourself easily and successfully, this book guides you step by step through the process of relaxing totally and programming your subconscious to help you get what you want out of life.

SELF-HYPNOSIS

The key to success and happiness

Valerie Austin

FOR MY SON

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#ucde787e7-c34d-5540-9e83-f9be7f4e0f7d)

Title Page (#u4b2ebeaa-4d45-5c04-8dcd-162b349b656e)

Acknowledgements (#u01830709-e713-5064-8ed0-a3fe5a024928)

Author’s Note (#ub9818fa0-9b49-5772-b446-7c8b6980c6ea)

Glossary Of Terms (#u5fcc5e46-229c-51f7-a8d0-5e0f711f4f86)

Chapter 1 A Victim Of One’s Mind (#u8575f5e5-9c09-56e3-9b8e-abe22074ed16)

Chapter 2 The Subconscious (#u7c00d2d6-d18a-5864-9b9d-14ecb8a28ff5)

Chapter 3 Self-Hypnosis (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 4 Using Self-Hypnosis To Better Your Life (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 5 Client Case Histories (#litres_trial_promo)

Postscript (#litres_trial_promo)

Useful Addresses (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#ulink_9e429bf8-dd30-5bdf-90a3-d96c34c77548)

To Peter, my love and thanks for years of patience. My agent and friend Roy Stockdill, whose encouragement, loyalty and occasional bullying helped me enormously.

Gil Boyne, who was responsible for introducing me to hypnosis in the first place.

Ormond McGill, an American gentleman in the true sense of the word, who brought dignity to his wonderful skill.

My colleagues and friends, Pat and Vic Leslie, for many years of comradeship.

Frank Lennon of the British National Register of Advanced Hypnotherapists.

Kay Kiernan for being a loyal friend in difficult times.

All my students, each one expanding my experience.

My thousands of patients.

Dr Michael a’Brook, for sending me many of the above and for his wonderful sense of humour.

Dr Acharyya for his faith and support.

Mavis, Azman and Nina, Hj Ayub Abdul Ghani, Malaysia Airlines, the Malaysian Tourist Board, and the lovely people of Langkawi for their help and guidance.

Uri Geller for his positiveness and for mending my watch.

Paul McKenna, a brilliant stage hypnotist.

And finally my fondness and admiration to Mr Adam, wherever you may be now.

AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_783c618c-9f80-5214-bdc8-193b03d91f5a)

You may find that the information in this book will help you, your relatives or your friends to relieve many problems, such as insomnia, smoking or weight control, to name but a few. But if you know someone who is in pain constantly and he or she would like some relief, the correct suggestions in the somnambulism state can give relief for hours. This is not a cure, just a natural relief, and should not be used to delay a visit to the doctor. But for someone with arthritic problems or pain-related illnesses or diseases, any relief will be a blessing.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS (#ulink_f4edec53-f069-5884-a6ba-542ca60cc3e3)

Words you will encounter throughout this book that sometimes cause confusion…

Abreaction: A raw emotion triggered off in hypnosis which then surfaces to the conscious level.

Deepeners: Specially selected words that form instructions for the purpose of guiding the mind into a much deeper feeling of relaxation in trance.

Hypnosis: Not sleep but a heightened state of awareness, similar to a day-dream. A state that a subject can be guided into by relaxation techniques or which can be induced by confusion or shock.

Hypnotherapist: A person who uses therapy while his or her subject is in hypnosis.

Hypnotist: A person who guides another into hypnosis.

Induction: A type of script carefully formed to guide the mind into relaxation.

Suggestion: Words that encourage the subconscious part of the mind into some sort of participation, either physically or mentally.

Trance: Many hypnotherapists do not like this word, but I am using it to establish a state of hypnosis. When a person is in a day-dream he or she is also in trance.

one

A VICTIM OF ONE’S MIND (#ulink_4e293051-0bd3-5936-a8e0-6328bf844298)

It all began with the car accident, the night I almost died—the extraordinary twist of fate that led me to become a hypnotherapist. I would never have believed at the time that there would be a time in the future when I would count the awful calamities and traumas I was to experience as blessings, allowing me to put something back into life in the form of helping people. If I had not had the car crash I would not have had to seek treatment for a serious memory loss and would never have been forced into discovering hypnotherapy as a profession in the first place. The fact that I did, albeit through a bizarre combination of circumstances, is why I am able to share my knowledge with you now. Let me tell you about it…

The car was speeding through the pitch black night, hurtling crazily out of control. I had no way of knowing which direction it was taking. I was very frightened and convinced I was going to die. Moments earlier I had been travelling at high speed on the motorway when suddenly I was forced to swerve violently to avoid a fleeing figure running directly in front of me. It was 1.30 a.m. and there was not even the palest glimmer of moonlight. Why on earth was someone crossing the motorway on foot? Did they intend to kill themselves? How ironic if that were so, as that was precisely what I had been contemplating—a quick end to my life.

As I wrenched the steering wheel to avoid the ghostlike figure, the car skidded and lurched forward into the unknown, deep in the Staffordshire countryside. My headlights no longer picked out the friendly cats’ eyes and I was spinning wildly towards thick undergrowth at the roadside.

I remembered being scared once before when I was a private pilot and wanted to qualify for a licence to fly at night. Unthinkingly I had chosen an extremely busy airport from which to do the two hours’ necessary flying. I was suddenly queueing in line with jumbo jets and getting swirled around in their back-draught. But that experience paled in comparison to my terror now. At least then there had been landing lights, but here, in this horror, there was not even a moon to cast shadows. A jumble of confused thoughts and questions swirled in my mind as I was buffeted from side to side of the car like a limp rag doll. Each jolt sent a dull pain through my body. It was all happening in a few, fleeting moments yet it seemed like an eternity, as if I were watching myself in some ghastly, slow-motion video playback. Not long before I had actually been thinking about killing myself over a broken love affair. Now, in those terrifying moments as the car spun wildly out of control in the darkness, I knew I did not want to die. All I could think of was what would be the result once the car finally came to a halt. Would I be crippled or scarred for life? Would anybody find me so late at night, or would I have to die slowly, badly injured and alone? Had I been selfish? Was this my punishment? Would the nightmare ever end?

Then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. The car shuddered to a halt. Later I learned that it had hit three trees and plunged 30 feet down a ravine. Amazingly, however, I had not hit my head against the windscreen. I can remember sitting there dazed and shaking, yet still being able to think with remarkable clarity. The cassette player was still blasting out disco music, shattering the stillness of the night. Somehow, the windscreen wipers had got switched on during the crash. In my numbed and dazed state I could not remember how to switch them off. I was also alert enough to realize that there might have been a petrol leak and that the car might explode at any moment.

As I slowly and painfully eased myself out of the door, I felt as if I was the star of my very own horror film. The whole thing was so eerie and unreal. I was still trying to work out why my head had not hit the windscreen. I had not been wearing a seatbelt—this was the 1970s and there were still conflicting views about them—and the car had come to a dramatic stop. Later I learned that my head and face were the only parts of my body not to have been injured. It is something I have never been able to figure out to this day. Standing there, staring at my car, the shock of the accident must have distorted my thoughts. To me the car looked undamaged, yet actually it was a write-off. I had no clue as to where I was, I only knew I was somewhere off the M6. I was barefoot. My shoes must have come off in the car. My back felt strange. It was aching, but not too badly. I had heard of people walking after an accident even though they had been seriously injured. I wondered if it were possible to walk with a broken back. I seemed to be at the bottom of a deep hole, surrounded by trees and bushes. Somewhere above me I could hear the whine of the occasional car going by. I began to clamber up the steep embankment, forgetting my shoes in my desperate need to get help. Eventually I found myself on the hard shoulder, more through luck than judgement. I probably looked as if I had been attacked; I was completely dishevelled and distraught. A few cars passed and I prayed that I would not pass out on the hard shoulder and be run over by an unsuspecting driver pulling in for a rest. Then, my knight in shining armour came along at the wheel of a large lorry.

He helped me up into his cab. He said he had seen my headlights down off the roadside. He asked me if I had been drinking—I had not—and offered to take me home, even though I lived a hundred miles away in Blackpool. The pain was now so severe that just before I passed out I asked for an ambulance. I woke up in hospital, to be told by a doctor—to my amazement—that I had no bones broken and that he was discharging me. I was battered and bruised in every part of my body except my head but, apparently, hospital cutbacks meant that there was no bed available for me, even though it was now around 3.30 a.m. The policemen who had been called out to the accident called me Cinderella because they found my shoes in the car. No one knew quite what to do with me, but the nurses felt sorry for me and gave me a bed in a corridor until the morning.

Shock does strange things to the system. The thoughts I had had earlier during that fateful drive—the overwork, the broken romance and other traumas that had led me briefly to contemplate suicide—flitted across my mind but only made me feel glad to be alive. They did not seem so important now. Maybe, I pondered, this accident was an escape of sorts after all. Next morning, still in excruciating pain, I took a train back to Blackpool. The friend who picked me up at the station was shocked by my appearance. I was a sorry sight—hunched over, with bedraggled hair, crumpled clothes and a tear-streaked face. It took me a year to recover, enduring six months of severe pain as my spine slowly healed. I regained my health but my income had gone. Previously I had earned a good living as a top sales representative and had also run my own promotional company. But because I still could not bend sufficiently to ease my way into a car, I was unfit to drive. I had to find other ways to earn a living, so I enrolled in a secretarial course to learn typing, shorthand and advanced French. It was only then that I began to realize that the damage I had suffered in the accident was more sinister than I had imagined and was not confined just to physical problems.

At first I thought I was just being slow at picking things up, though that was unusual for me as I had always been a fast learner. I was already a touch typist but I could not even do that properly without making dozens of mistakes. I found I was not able to understand even the simplest things. Worse still, my friends began to notice that the day after an evening out I would have no memory of the night before—nothing to do with alcohol, either. I could not recall people or places. To my enormous embarrassment I was having to ask lifelong friends who they were. I became what others considered ‘eccentric’, constantly losing things, never ready for a date or appointment on time. I also began to dress oddly. When I confided my symptoms and worries to my doctor he told me my head had been shaken up so much in the accident that it would take some time to ‘settle’. He remarked that I had touched the Pearly Gates and was very lucky still to be alive.

Another 12 months went by and my memory had not improved one jot, so I went back to my doctor. He suggested the problem was probably trauma-based. He suggested I find a doctor who was also a hypnotherapist, but warned me that it would not be easy to find a good one. No one knew the nightmare I was going through because outwardly I looked fine. But I could not perform even the simplest tasks, such as filing. I was a totally disruptive influence to those I worked with. I would start a job and move on to something else, forgetting to finish the first task. I had begun to drive again but I would lose my car keys, go to look for them in my handbag and then forget, when I had found my handbag, what I had wanted it for. I would even forget that I was supposed to be going out at all. I would spend hours looking for things, totally absorbed in the search and unaware of the passage of time. I lost all my money. I could not keep a job because I was unemployable. I tried writing down a list of things to do each day but it was useless—I would simply forget I had made a list!

I suffered two-and-a-half years of this mental fog, during which I got little help or sympathy from anyone except close friends. My father refused even to believe it, thinking I was just being flippant. It was only when my mother suffered a fall and was taken unconscious to hospital that he realized how serious my condition was—because I forgot all about my mother’s accident and went to a party rather than visit her in hospital. My son would be left outside my house on weekend breaks from boarding school while I was off staying with friends, having forgotten I even had a son. My life was a trail of confusion. I will give you an another example of just how bad my impairment was: I took a temporary job as an assistant to a film director. During my brief employment I was given a short memo to be typed and distributed to a dozen people in the film unit, with all their names listed at the top. I spent most of a morning typing and retyping it, trying really hard to get it right. Finally satisfied, I made a dozen copies and distributed them to the relevant people. It was not long before it was brought to my attention that I had left out one thing—the memo itself! I had been so preoccupied with getting the list of names right, I had forgotten about the message!

Very embarrassing.

Indirectly, though, this job was my entrée into the film world. I went to California, initially in search of a cure for my amnesia. I had read a story about a ‘wonder’ drug that was apparently only available in the US. I never found it, but I did find a husband. I fell in love with an American producer and writer and we became engaged. When I returned to Britain, he phoned me every single night just to make sure I still remembered him! This was a bit comical, but actually it also gave me an idea. I was still praying for a cure for my memory loss and badly in need of some money to pay for it, so I sold my story to a newspaper in the hope that someone would see it and be tempted to offer help. The story appeared in papers in both Britain and America—one of them splashed it with the headline: ‘Will Bride Remember Her Husband?’

My ploy worked. A famous American hypnotist called Gil Boyne, a stage hypnotist turned hypnotherapist who has treated many Hollywood stars, happened to be lecturing in the UK and read my story. Boyne tracked me down and said that when I returned to the US he would treat me free if he could use me as a ‘guinea pig’ in front of his students at his training school in Los Angeles.

Boyne was as good as his word. He did precisely what he had promised and cured me of my memory loss before his entire class. To me it seemed the session only lasted a few minutes but later I discovered I was in hypnosis for an hour and a half. One session and I was cured! That was the day before I was due to be married. After a terrible two-and-a-half period of not being able to remember anything, I was now ready to start a new life in the US, with a new husband and a memory that worked!

Ironically, though, my cure did cause a strain in my marriage, almost from the start. The new me was quite a shock for my American husband, who knew me only as a wacky eccentric who was totally dependent on him. He had never met the ‘real’ me, an independent, responsible and quite astute businesswoman.

Gil Boyne recognized the important contacts I had made through my husband, who was a senior editor on one of the top show business newspapers in the US. Boyne was aware of the publicity potential in my cure. He hired me to do promotional work for him and I became his ‘pet amnesia victim’, accompanying him on various television and radio shows. At the time I still had no real serious interest in hypnosis. I was too busy enjoying myself, travelling, building up a good business, interviewing the rich and famous and editing a column in my husband’s newspaper. For two years everything went swimmingly. Then…disaster struck again. On one of my frequent return visits back home to Britain a string of family deaths, accidents and traumas so devastated me that I suffered a relapse into amnesia. Incredibly, the newspaper headline came true and I actually forgot that I had a husband in the US! I never went back to him.

I spent the next four years in another mental fog. My confusion and eccentric behaviour were, if anything, even worse than they had been before. I had a memory retention span of no more than 24 hours at the most, so planning ahead was impossible. I had to live literally for each day alone. One of the things I noticed was how cruel people could be, though mostly unintentionally. I lost count of how many folk joked to me that they would not mind having a memory loss, too!

Throughout the whole sorry saga, I tried work as a journalist, a pop group agent, selling industrial diamonds, selling films and TV pop shows and, holding an Equity card, acting as an extra. Many times I forgot to pick up my salary.

I launched a magazine (it only lasted three issues), while at the same time working in a pub. The customers quickly got used to being charged the wrong money. The magazine failed, mainly due to my inefficiency. I was constantly losing copy and generally causing havoc.

Then I came upon a British hypnotherapist who was an associate of Gil Boyne’s. This man was conducting a training school and was well versed in American hypnotherapy methods. I asked him to help. He did and I regained my memory once more. But this time I took a deeper interest in the whole subject.

I watched the students training and for the first time the thought came into my mind that I might enter the profession myself. My motives initially were selfish. I thought that if I understood more about the whole thing I might at least be able to help myself retain my memory, or be able to call upon professional colleagues who could assist me. The more I learned about hypnotherapy, however, the more I came to see its tremendous value and its potential for helping people.

So that is how I became a hypnotherapist. I trained in Britain and later in the US where, because of my ‘celebrity’ status as Gil Boyne’s star ‘guinea pig’, I was lucky enough to receive some rather special treatment. However, there was a price to pay as well—as they say, there is no such thing as a free lunch! I found to my dismay that video tapes of me being treated in front of Boyne’s class were circulating in the hypnotherapy world for other therapists and their students to see. There were all my most private secrets publicly laid bare on tape and recorded for posterity. Many thousands of clients later, however, I have never regretted embarking on my new life and new career. I went through so many different traumas brought on by my memory loss that I found it easy to sympathize with my clients. I seemed to have had all of their problems myself at one time or another.

With everything I have learned since then, I now know that when I had my memory loss the car accident was only the catalyst. The problems actually stemmed from eight years before, from an even earlier trauma when I had witnessed a terrible crime. New hypnotherapy techniques cut through the more superficial problems of life and go straight to the heart of the real trauma. But it takes a special kind of training to find them and, unfortunately, few therapists are taught these techniques.

A BRIEF LOOK AT HYPNOSIS IN THE PAST TWO CENTURIES

Before we come to the main purpose of this book, it may help your understanding of hypnosis to know just a little of its history and background. Important dates include:

1775: Franz Mesmer developed healing by ‘animal magnetism’, which was later renamed hypnosis.

1784: Count Maxime de Puysegut discovered a form of deep trance he called somnambulism.

1821: First reports of painless surgery in France using magnetism.

1841: A Scottish doctor, James Braid, changed the name from magnetism to hypnosis. He established it as a psychological phenomenon.

1845-53: A surgeon, James Esdaile, performed 2,000 operations—even amputations—with the patients under hypno-anaesthesia and feeling no pain.

1883-1887: Sigmund Freud became interested in hypnosis and began to practise it.

1894: Freud abandoned hypnosis to concentrate on developing psychoanalysis.

1947: Hypnosis was being used by dentists in the US.

1950: Societies and associations for hypnosis started to sprout up.

1958: The American Medical Association approved the therapeutic use of hypnosis by physicians.

In short, it took nearly two centuries for hypnosis to be recognized as a therapy by the medical associations; after another 30 years-plus it still has not been fully accepted by the medical profession or the public in general.

It is true that there have been many casualties of hypnosis. However, these were not the clients but the practitioners, the brilliant men and women throughout history who have succeeded in hypnotherapy but who failed miserably in marketing the controversial phenomenon of hypnosis. Clouded in mystery, the dangers of the trance state have been propagated by the ignorant. Every time hypnosis obtains a foothold as a form of cure, those using it, whether medical professionals or lay people, are exposed to ridicule.

The vulnerability of hypnosis is that it does not have a 100 per cent success rate, therefore it is very easy to claim to disprove it scientifically. In Western society we demand proof for everything. Homoeopathy cannot be ‘proved’. The fact that it works does not seem to interest the sceptics, however, who demand proof according to their rules. Since you cannot prove the existence of the subconscious—let alone what its function is—according to some people’s criteria of proof, hypnotherapy is nothing less than quackery. However, we must bear in mind that science itself is not infallible. At one time it was ‘scientifically proven’ that the bumble bee could not fly—and, indeed, that the earth was flat.

Because of the lack of finance for research, hypnosis is still fighting to gain the recognition it deserves. Only as recently as mid-1992 has there been acceptable scientific proof that hypnosis does work, published in the New Scientist (June 1993). Having undertaken one of the largest surveys ever recorded of stopping smoking methods, spanning several continents, the New Scientist came out with the verdict: ‘Hypnosis is proven to work.’ Indeed, hypnosis was found to be streets ahead of anything else on the market when it came to helping people to stop smoking. Hypnosis is as natural as time itself and a gift to us all, once we know of its existence.

Although hypnosis has been practised, albeit under different names virtually since the beginning of human existence, it came to the attention of Western civilization with Maximilian Hell, a monk who introduced it to Franz Mesmer, the Austrian physician, in the 1700s. Mesmer treated patients with what he regarded as an ‘animal magnetism’ that pervaded the whole universe. His name and methods passed into everyday usage in the words mesmerize and mesmerism. Many years later, James Braid renamed this magnetism hypnosis, after the Greek word for sleep. This was actually a very unfortunate choice which has caused major misunderstandings of hypnotism ever since. For, although the hypnotized are not asleep, they give the impression that they are, which is very misleading.

The history of hypnosis is as chequered as that of some of its practitioners, and trying to outlaw it is as difficult as trying to stop video piracy. Some hypnotists have not exactly been the best advertisements themselves for the profession. When therapists put enough energy into promoting themselves and then revel in the publicity gained from evaluations of their supposedly ‘miraculous’ treatments, the result usually is that they find their egos expanding out of all proportion to their skills. Success can be its own worst enemy! Forgotten is the main rule: that they are only the experts guiding their clients to make the change. It is the clients who actually make the change in themselves, not the therapist.

Real hypnosis has many celebrated professionals. Of the many fascinating workshops I attended in the US, the one that most took my attention for its historical grounding was a session at which the speaker was Morgan Eaglebear, great-great grandson of the legendary Native American chief, Geronimo. Eaglebear is a practising hypnotherapist and healer. He explained how this form of natural healing had been used for generations among Native American tribes. They did not call it hypnosis but it was the same thing. A young tribal member would be chosen to learn the history of the tribe, which was never written down but just passed on by word of mouth. To ensure that the history was sound and the memory of the initiate was not impaired, the chosen one had to go through tests of bravery to prove his fitness. He was then strung up by his skin, while in a trance state. In this trance form, he felt no pain and each elder of the tribe would visit him and relay a part of the history. This went on for many days.

One test to tell if you are in a deep form of hypnosis is to check for anaesthesia. If you feel no pain, then you are in a deep trance. I suppose these Native Americans were unwilling, given that the passing on of tribal knowledge was so important, to take the chance that the chosen initiate was merely feigning a trancelike state. By hanging him up by his skin they could be sure he was definitely in a deep hypnotic trance. The famous film that depicts this particular practice, A Man Called Horse (1969), starred Richard Harris and showed this test of bravery using the most sophisticated cinema effects of the day. Of course, there was no mention of the trance state in the film.

To get back to the workshop, there in front of me was Eaglebear, this marvellously built and very charismatic man who wore his hair long and dressed as a brave, a living embodiment of Native American history. He lifted his shirt to show me the scars proving he had undergone the great test of bravery. I spoke to him after the lecture and he told me that the old Native American tribes used hypnosis on the newborn. Facing the danger of the campsite being attacked in the middle of the night, the tribal members had to ensure that no baby would cry and give the campsite’s location away. Mothers would therefore train their babies to go into a trance, talking soothingly to them and gently brushing the flat of their hands past their babies’ eyes, gently closing them. This was a practice that was passed from generation to generation. Whenever the mother’s hand passed over her child’s eyes in this fashion, the child would become silent. He also explained that the women, when giving birth, did not know it was supposed to be painful and so, not expecting pain, did not experience any. It seemed to me that there was so much that we of the so-called technologically advanced societies could learn from these ancient wisdoms.

WHAT WILL HYPNOSIS DO FOR YOU?

Let us now turn to the real purpose of this book—showing you how you can use hypnosis to improve your own life or to help others to solve their problems. This book is written to present the power that you possess to change your attitudes, which in turn changes your behaviour so that you can achieve exactly what you want. You can choose your own personality and begin to programme it into your mind. Your mind will follow the instructions you give it—as long as these instructions do not go against your interests for survival.

Hypnosis is the gateway to reprogramming an old or unwanted behaviour pattern or creating a new, positive one. It allows you to accept certain thoughts, which in turn change your attitude, so that you can do the things you want to do—or not do the things you do not want to do but cannot seem to stop doing. You may want to stop smoking, lose weight, or treat a phobia—for example fear of success, snakes or spiders. You may want to increase your productivity, improve your love life, bring back the love into your marriage, speed read, fly a plane, be more confident and outgoing or enable yourself, with full concentration, to pass exams or a driving test. Whatever you’d like to achieve hypnosis can help.

WHAT IS HYPNOSIS?