Will I Be Out of Control?
You've got my page open and your thumb over the button. Then you think about what happened during the stage show you went to last year where you saw a man eating an onion as if it were an apple.
You put the phone down. That was in March.
Nobody asks me this one out loud. It comes out sideways, in the free call, somewhere around minute eleven, usually with a little laugh in front of it. So let me answer it properly, because it's the one thing that stops most people booking a session with me.
Where that picture came from
Almost everything you've seen about hypnosis was somebody putting on a show.
A row of chairs, a man with a microphone, and four hundred people in the audience waiting for something daft to happen. It's good fun and I've no argument with it. But look at who ends up on that stage. They put their hand up. They walked to the front, in front of a crowd, and every one of them knew what the evening was for. Then they did what they'd come to do.
What happens in my room has the same name and very little else in common.
You already know what it feels like
You've driven home and not remembered the last three junctions. You've got to the bottom of a page of a book and taken in none of it, because you were somewhere else entirely.
That's your attention narrowing down while the rest of the world carries on without you. Nobody put you there and you came out of it the moment you needed to. That's the whole state, and you go in and out of it most days.
What I add is a voice, and somewhere useful to point it.
Can I make you do something you don't want to do
No.
You hear every word I say.
You know where you are and what time it is.
If I suggested something you didn't like the sound of, you'd do exactly what you'd do if I said it to you over a coffee, which is decline.
That isn't me being careful with you. It's how the thing works. I can't reach past you and press a button, because there's no button and I'm not past you. Everything that happens, happens inside your own attention, and you're the one holding it.
Can I get stuck in it
No.
If the fire alarm went off, you'd get up and leave the building, and you'd be cross about the parking rather than dazed. If I stopped talking and went for a sandwich, you'd open your eyes and wonder what I was playing at.
You can't get stuck in hypnosis for the same reason you can't get stuck in a daydream.
Will I say something I'd rather not
This is the one people mind about most, and I understand why.
You've got things in your head that belong to you.
You're awake, so you choose what you say, the same way you're choosing what to tell your GP or your friend. I'll ask you questions before we start and you can give me as much or as little as you want. Plenty of the work doesn't need me to know the details at all. I've had people tell me almost nothing about what happened and still get what they came for.
What actually happens, then
You sit in a chair with your feet on the floor. We talk first, for a good while, about what's going on and what you want to be different.
Then I ask you to close your eyes, and I talk. You follow along in your own head. I might ask you to notice your breathing, or to picture walking into a room you've been avoiding, and then to picture it going the way you'd want it to.
Most people say it feels like the ten minutes before you fall asleep, except you're not sleepy. Some find their hands get heavy. Some don't notice anything much at all and are surprised afterwards to find that half an hour has gone by.
The thing that catches people out
They expect to feel gone, and instead they feel very much there.
So they open their eyes at the end and say they don't think it worked, because they heard every word. Then they go home and find that the thing they were dreading on Thursday is somehow doable.
Hearing every word is what's meant to happen. If you'd been unconscious, you'd have missed the whole point of it.
One way to find out
I do a free fifteen minute call and it costs you nothing but the quarter of an hour.
You can ask me this in plain words, out loud, without the little laugh in front of it. I'll tell you what a session is like, you'll get a sense of whether you'd want to sit in a room with me, and then you can decide.
You've been carrying the stage version around since March. Fifteen minutes will sort it out.
