Develop Your Unique Voice

Roger Love in Sing Like the Stars has some great advice for learning to find your own voice as a singer. This advice can be easily applied to finding your own voice as a hypnotist. He suggests that you begin by closely studying great singers. Listen to CD’s of your favorite song. Try to imitate what you hear. If you stick to just one singer, the danger is that you will sound just like them. Instead, do the same thing with a variety of singers. Finally you have to forget everything that you learned and find your own voice. The same idea applies the finding your voice as a hypnotist. In the beginning, you will listen to hypnotists that you admire and try to imitate their style. After a period of time; however, it’s time to find your own way of doing hypnosis. You will have at your disposal all that you’ve learned, but you will use what you’ve learned to express the total being that you are.

Within Western music there is only a finite number of notes. The major scale, for example consists of only seven notes. Yet individual musicians and composers can express themselves in a completely unique manner all utilizing the same seven notes. As hypnotic performing artists, are job is take what we have learned, and use what we have learned as elements of a unique personal expression.

The key to developing your own hypnotic voice is to study a variety of hypnotists. Do your best to imitate a particular mentor, but do not stay stuck there. Instead, move on to another mentor, and then another. In this way you will synthesize what you have observed and learned with your own unique individuality.

And that is the point–an in the moment expression of your own individuality, talents and resources in contact with the client’s individuality, talents and resources operating inside the hypnotic context, utilizing but not bound to scientific knowledge and past learning. Something that emerges to meet the present situation with wisdom and enlightened care, so as to move the client from their current stuck perspective–to something new.

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Heinz von Forester is often quoted as saying the following. “If you desire see, learn how to act.” To learn about the world we must first act. Over thinking and planning can prevent us from taking the action that will teach us what we need to know. Patricia Ryan Madson says something similar in a different way. “The essence of improvisation is action–doing it in real time. We act in order to discover what come next. Notice she doesn’t say think about every possibility that might occur. Or have a script that tells you what to do. She says we must act in order to discover what’s next. One thing we can always count on is that clients will respond. As Paul Watzlawick has noted, you cannot not communicate and you cannot not respond. If you suggest to a client that they will close their eyes and they remain wide open, this is a response. It is this response that will tell you what to do next. How can you utilize what the client offers you for therapeutic purposes? How can their response to your interventions show you what to do next.?

Norman O. Brown has stated, “Wisdom is in wit, most excellent fooling; in play, and not in heavy puritanical seriousness. In levity, not gravity. My yoke is easy, my burden is light.  As quoted in Gods and Games P.147.

Rather than commencing a session with a detailed plan in mind, notice what the client and situation offer, and utilize what is offered in concocting the therapeutic stew that you will offer to your client. In her book Improv Wisdom, Patricia Madson discusses the French idea of bricolage. “It’s the art of commandeering the materials at hand — what is most obvious — to solve the problem. This way of doing things turns limitations into assets. You start by carefully noticing what is available. It is a mindset — a deeply ecological approach. Improvising, we’re dealing artfully with what is already there, can be understood not only as a backup approach but also as a way of life.” In the same manner, as hypnotists we need to notice what is present in the therapeutic situation. What is the client’s background? What are their values? What metaphors do they use to describe their dilemma? When you utilize what is offered, and respond to the feedback your client gives you, your sessions will now be tailored for the specific individual that you are working with–and thus more powerful and appropriate. It is the difference between purchasing clothing off the rack, and buying something custom tailored, bespoke clothing, as they say in the UK. Which is going to be the better fit?

The unconscious mind does not need to be bossed around. Rather it longs to be inspired with metaphors, stories, and a vivid imagery. Since most problems that we deal with as hypnotists are imaginary in nature we can solve them through imaginary means. Hypnosis is nothing but an opportunity to let your and your client’s imagination run wild.

I was working one day with my wife who was ill. I induced trance and then used what occurred to me. The image that came to mind was a blanket of comfort. So that’s what I went with. I mentioned being covered with a blanket that brought complete comfort physically, mentally, and emotionally. And I had that comfort began to descend down into her muscles and bones and nerves and deep into her soul so that her entire being was infused with this deep and profound comfort. Prior to the induction I had no idea exactly where I was going to go. I had a general sense of inducing healing and comfort, but it was only once we both sunk deeply into a trance that the image of a blanket of comfort occurred to me.

Learning to access your ability to respond creatively to your clients is largely a matter of learning to access your own ability to respond. It works a lot like a water faucet. The more trust you have the more the faucet opens and the more water flows through the pipes. The less trust you have the more the faucet closes down, and you are left with a mere trickle of water.

The other piece of this is adequate preparation. In listening to the client, with a not-knowing attitude, you are preparing the soil of your own creative resources. Listen to the words that they use, the metaphors, which shape their experience, and the values that they express. All of these factors are ingredients that you can use to create a therapeutic stew.

Letting go

Once, while working with a fellow student in a training session, I asked her what she wanted from the session. She responded with two words, “letting go”.

Following the hypnotic induction, I let my mind drift on examples of “letting go”. I remembered a time when I was moving. This was when compact discs had just come out, and I still had my album collection in a number of crates. I decided that this would be a good time to sort through my music collection, and decide what to keep and what to get rid of. I shared with the hypnotic subject that this process took a long time, because each album cover took me back in time, so that I was no longer sorting through my records, but was also sorting through my memories; taking what was valuable from those memories, and letting the rest go. At the end of the session, there were tears flowing down her face. I asked how that was, and she responded, “perfect”. Would the same result have taken place if I had been reading from a script?

Giving Permission and Learning to Trust Your Creativity

After the former head of the hypnosis program at a professional school of psychology suddenly left, I was called on to continue with the program. Luckily for me, for the first group of students this was their first course in hypnosis, so they lacked any inhibitions to their creative impulse. The second course was interesting, because among the students were people who had trained with the original instructor. To my shock, they had trained by reading scripts. My approach had been just the opposite. I told my students that reading from scripts was not allowed. They were to begin with a basic idea in mind and from that basic idea they were to improvise and to create suggestions in the moment in relationship with what the client offered, utilizing whatever feedback was offered by the client.

It took my new students a little time to adjust. They had been trained not to trust themselves, not to trust their unconscious minds and not to trust the wisdom of the total situation in which therapy can best arise. Eventually, after much initial anxiety, they did get it and were able to learn to be excellent hypnotists.

The notion of trusting your unconscious is often portrayed as the opposite of learning technique. But as anyone knows who is a practicing musician, technique and improvisation are two sides of the same coin. One must be both technically proficient as well as have the ability to trust your unconscious abilities. The same is true in hypnosis: conscious practice builds a working vocabulary which is utilized to communicate to the client, in the same manner that a musician learns chords, rules of harmony, and scales.

During a seminar that I was giving on conversational hypnosis, I was asked a question regarding how I develop stories to tell clients. I responded by asking if they want to know how I do it or how they can learn to do it, because these are really very different questions. How I proceed is that I listen to what the client is offering until I find inspiration to respond. Sometimes an image comes to mind and then I simply go with that. This type of response is what psychologist George Pransky has called Pop up thinking (personal communication). This type of creative thinking is different than linear problem solving where the mind operates on a step-by-step basis. Linear thought works wonderfully when were balancing a checkbook or working on a simple math problem. Here thinking is a step-by-step process.

The Grateful Dead’s live performances epitomized the ecstatic wonder of spontaneous creation.  They did not abandon song structures all together; rather, they treated those structures as jumping off points for wild improvisational excursions. In their slyly oxymoronically titled album, Live/Dead, the band traverses its way through a diverse terrain of musical genres.  No matter the material, the music is alive with a vibrant energy.   This vibrancy of expression is the result of both the joy of spontaneous creation in the moment, as well as the fact that the Dead’s music was relational in nature. They were not simply communicating with their audience, but the audience was also communicating with them in a rock and roll feedback loop.

Bradford Keeney, in “The Creative Therapist: The Art of Awakening A Session, advocates the implementation of the same flexible, relational strategies which one finds in musical improvisation into the domain of psychotherapy, proposing “that creativity — rather than theory, method, technique, or research — is what awakens meaningful and transformative therapy.” He goes on to suggest that “rather than replicating or reproducing a template to be hammered out for every clinical situation, creative therapy custom builds a therapeutic encounter as the patient and occasion calls it forth.” How can we bring that creative spark that is exemplified by Keeney and the Dead into our hypnotic sessions? What if we contextualized hypnosis as a creative performance one, which is improvisational in nature? Such an approach would not be a license to do things arbitrarily, but would rather allow us to respond creatively to the total situation in which we find ourselves as hypnotists.

The notion of hypnosis as a creative performance is bound to come up against much well meaning resistance. Almost from its inception, hypnotism has been denounced as fraudulent. Mesmer’s theories were challenged in Paris by a committee made up of eminent scientists of the day including Benjamin Franklin. To make matters worse, there is the tradition of stage magicians who focus on making volunteers act in a silly manner, and advertisements for how to seduce women with the power of hypnosis. Hypnotists can feel a bit insecure and find themselves wishing for a big dose of credibility that they hope that science can provide. There has been a recent clamor for what is called evidence-based hypnosis. In many of these studies, the idea is to create standardized protocols, administer these protocols in a precise manner, and then measure the results. But what if good therapy is not the result of standardized protocols, but rather emanates from the creative and individualized interaction between client and hypnotist? How are we going to measure that? My fear is that this movement toward standardized protocols may lead us in the wrong direction – to lifeless and rigid practice rather than alive creative performance.

Last week, I watched the movie howl. I saw an advertisement for it, for on demand .  Same time as in theaters it said.  My wife was skeptical, why watch a movie about some depressed  beat poet. I however,  was excited. I’ve always been a big fan of the poem Howl. I knew this was the story of the poet Allen Ginsberg centered around his groundbreaking poem.

For those who for those who don’t know Howl, groundbreaking is probably too mild a word. It was an atomic bomb, in the cultural mindset of the 1950s. The courage of the Beats to express what it was that they expressed at that time in history  is a lesson for all of us in courage.

The  movie utilizes the poem as a way to explore Ginsberg’s life, as well as to show the trial that occurred. Though it’s hard to imagine today, Howl was considered obscene and without any socially redeeming value. The book was banned and the publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Bookstore was charged with a crime for selling the book.

The cool thing about the movie, is that interspersed with various readings of the poem are animations. One that was most powerful for me is the section of the poem where Ginsberg invokes Moloch.  Moloch is a God to whom people would offer sacrifices of their children. In one of the scenes Ginsburg is chanting Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Etc. You see parents with their children and the children have frightened looks; they about to be sacrificed to this evil God . Then suddenly the children are grown up. Now they are soldiers marching off to war where again they will be sacrificed to Moloch.

This movie reminded me how powerful art can be. It communicated the plight of the homosexual Ginsburg in a conservative society, his struggles as well as the struggles of the poets and artists attempting to find meaning and self-expression in 1950s America. It was so much more powerful than any textbook on diversity that one could read. What might we as hypnotists learn from artists?

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