In order to fully understand hypnosis you must first grasp the following psychological phenomena. Hypnosis simply utilizes these normal reactions and the experiential learnings that are common to all of us.

INCREASED MUSCLE TONICITY

One of the first phenomena is that of increased muscle tonicity. A result of this factor is that you can lift the arm and have it stay in a position indefinitely. This can be very beneficial in the practice of medicine. Sometimes you want patients to lie quietly in bed because it aids their recovery.

ALTERED SENSE OF TIME

Time has a different subjective value. An afternoon spent with friends seems very short, whereas 5 minutes of acute pain appear to last forever. Subjective time is a tremendously important thing, and you want your patients to experience pain as briefly as possible. Cancer patients, for example, going through unbearable pain should have that pain cut down in subjective time values, and they should have a period free from pain greatly exaggerated subjectively. You cannot alter the clock, but you can alter the way the patient feels about it.

IDEOMOTOR ACTIVITY

Have you ever tried to feed a baby and opened your own mouth? You opened your mouth when you thought the baby would open its mouth. This was the idea of motor activity, and you attempted to carry it out.

My friend had polio and I know something about it. When you [tag-tec]hypnotize[/tag-tec] patients recovering from polio, you ask them to recall what the movements were like. You can do a great deal of good in the matter of correction of polio handicaps in this way.

IDEOSENSORY BEHAVIOR

Have you ever scratched your face out in thin air well away from the actual skin afer a dental appointment?

You want the patients sufering from a serious head inury to feel numbness in the head. You give them the idea of a particular sensory state because all [tag-tec]hypnotic[/tag-tec] phenomena derive from learnings that you experience in everyday life.

Right now, you are probably experiencing numbness in various parts of your body. You might have forgotten the shoes on your feet, the glasses on your face, the collar on your neck. You recognize them very promptly when you pay attention to them. By inducing sensory changes in the patient you bring about these changes by utilizing the experiential learning of the everyday life.

POSTHYPNOTIC SUGGESTION

It refers to a suggestion given here, now, today, to be carried out at some future time. For example, the anesthesiologist may see patients the night before the operation, induce trance, and suggest to the patients that they will get through the operation very nicely. This way, he can relieve the fear and anxiety, and correct the insomnia that the patients may have.

REGRESSION

Another way to utilize [tag-tec]hypnosis[/tag-tec] is regression. Regression refers to the reestablishment of longforgotten memories. A 50-year-old man can remember what he wore on his third birthday and he can tell you what he ate for breakfast that morning. Sometimes experiences can be verified through old records and things that have been recorded in baby books, the family Bible, and such places.

ABLATION OF MEMORY

Sometimes you wish to hypnotize subjects and help them forget, not recall. You may want your subjects to forget pain, for example. You need to do this when you wish to control the pain experienced by cancer patients, for example. You might wish to teach them how to experience pain and then how to forget it so that they can spend the remaining days of their lives without anticipating pain. You want them to forget it so that each time the pain occurs they can forget that they ever had pain. In this way they can spend the remaining days of their lives in contact with their families.