Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis by Robin Waterfield Read Free Book Online Page A

influence might be diabolic. But hypnosis does not involve abandoning your will or self-control. In fact, many people talk about hypnosis giving them back control of their lives, if it has helped cure them of an addiction. Modern hypnotherapy is consensual, not authoritarian, and it is not the hypnotist's purpose to rob her patient of his will power, but to channel his will power towards the therapy. In any case, this is a most unrealistic or idealistic objection. Of course it is true that a Christian has surrendered her will to God or Jesus, but that does not mean that she does not surrender her will on plenty of other occasions to others too. If she refuses to surrender her will to a dentist or a doctor, she is going down the route of Christian Science; she should never watch TV, in case she is influenced by an advertisement, or read anything but the Bible and so on and so forth. Christians do not go through their days in a state of complete submission to God; they go through their days just like everyone else, but with a background awareness, occasionally fanned into stronger life, of God's presence. On a daily basis, then, they are just as liable to external influences as the rest of us. No one's life is as monolithic as this objection presumes.
    If some Christians or religious people of any persuasion are worried about hypnotism simply because it may entail the planting of suggestions, they are on very weak ground. All of us, all of the time, are being bombarded by suggestions, and mass meetings such as church services are one of the most potent methods of implanting and reinforcing suggestions. The only element of genuine concern is that (unless the visit to the therapist is prompted by something purely physiological) values are likely to play an implicit part, and a New Age therapist may be assuming a set of values some of which clash with Christian values. In that case, the patient has two alternatives: she can either accept the therapy without taking on board the values (after all, she will be conscious throughout the process), just as she can enjoy a movie without accepting its values; or she can find a Christian hypnotherapist, and there are plenty of them, since far from all Christians are as narrow-minded as those who find hypnotherapy objectionable.
    The fear of being in a suggestible state can be combined with the simple human fear of being in a state about which little or nothing will be remembered afterwards. But spontaneous amnesia in hypnosisis very rare; most commonly a hypnotherapist will give you the choice to remember as much or as little as you want, or can handle, to help the healing process.
    I hope that after reading this book Christians will see that there is nothing to fear in hypnotism, and that its healing properties make it a practice it would be unwise to deny to sufferers.
The Hypnotist
    If flamboyance and authoritarianism are no longer in vogue (except in fiction), what are the basic techniques of modern hypnosis? They vary somewhat from therapist to therapist and practitioner to practitioner, but share the common feature of bearing little resemblance to the fictional and stage methods we've been looking at. This is also the place to mention that hypnotism has been accepted as a valid therapeutic technique by both the British Medical Association (in 1955) and the American Medical Association (in 1958).
    Look them up in the
Yellow Pages
or on the Web; visit a New Age fair; contact one of the umbrella organizations of hypnotherapists. There are a lot of hypnotists around. He may be your doctor or dentist, who finds hypnosis a useful alternative to drugs, or uses it to extend his ‘bedside manner’ to get a patient to relax. He may be a specialist hypnotherapist, with initials after his name signifying that he has been awarded a certificate by (in America) the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, or (in Britain) the London College of Clinical Hypnosis or the British Hypnotherapy