Richard Bandler's Guide to Trance-formation by Richard Bandler

Author:Richard Bandler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Eleven

INSIDE AND DOWN

The Patterns of Trance-formations

WHEN I PUBLISHED Trance-formations more than a quarter of a century ago, it almost immediately became the benchmark for books about hypnosis. Even now, long after it is out of print, copies are trading at dozens of times the cover price.

Before then, hypnosis was seen as a rather mysterious and inaccessible subject. Most hypnotherapists adopted an extremely directive approach. It was widely believed that the hypnotist had to dominate his subject’s will and drive him into hypnosis with repetitive, monotonous commands.

Predictably, only a relatively small number of people responded. There was absolutely no suggestion that this might be the hypnotist’s fault. Everyone, it was suggested, was hypnotizable to a greater or lesser degree. It was considered to be an innate trait, rather like the size of your feet or the color of your eyes. If you had difficulties going into trance or were unable to perform complex, deep-trance phenomena, it demonstrated your shortcomings, rather than your hypnotist’s.

Even Milton Erickson believed that subjects had to be “trained” to become good hypnotic subjects. Most of his followers still see him as a kind of instant miracle-maker, but he made no secret of the fact that he sometimes took between one hundred and one thousand hours to prepare his patients for therapy. The idea that hypnosis was something that anyone could experience, or do to another person, was inconceivable at the time.

Trance-formations changed all that. It demonstrated that hypnosis was a natural phenomenon, open to everyone to experience, and that getting people into trance—even really deep trance—was an easily learnable skill, and that hypnosis could be a tool that therapists and teachers in all fields could apply to help their clients and students to learn.

It was the first book ever to demonstrate that hypnosis had a structure, and the structure could be modeled, learned, and taught.

In that book, I outlined several hypnotic patterns, all of which could be immediately applied. These patterns had either been modeled or refined from the work of Milton Erickson or were developed from my own work in the field. The purpose of revealing the “inner structure” of several patterns was to encourage hypnotists to be systematic. It was never intended to suggest that any of these patterns represented “the” way to do hypnosis, nor that the hypnotist was expected to favor one over the other.

However, within a very short time, these patterns were copied and reproduced many, many times. Each new book that came out, each new “creator” of these techniques, presented them as if carved in stone.

What people need to understand is that no one induction is automatically better than another. The most powerful factors that decide whether your subject goes into trance are your rate of speech, tonality, breathing, and your own overall ability to alter your state as an unconscious way of guiding her into an altered state.

The specific patterns and exercises that follow, therefore, are intended both as a guide and a means of developing flexibility. My experience is

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