Hi,
Mark sent me a question regarding the last email. He asked:
“In your email “Easiest Hypnotic Deep-Trance Induction Ever” you wrote that one person should use words like “washing machine”, “bookstore employee”, “cruiseship ticket”, and so on. Why these kinds of words? They don’t seem very hypnotic to me.
Short and concise question that get’s right to the point, Mark.
And you are absolutely right: these words are NOT hypnotic. But that’s not the point for that induction. There, it’s about overloading the conscious mind, and it’s more effective to do that by telling people words that instantly create pictures in the hypnotic subject’s mind.
Now, you’d ask me what kind of words are “hypnotic”, I’d list words like:
amazing, astonishing, at last, breakthrough, exciting, fascinating, incredible, phenomenal, quivering, revealing, secretive, stunning, tremendous, tickle, unbelievable… these are “emotionally charged” words. Now, there are MANY more words, and there is no “right” or “wrong” here. We’re dealing with shades of grey, not black and white.
But generally speaking – can you see how using these kinds of words in a sentence INCREASE THE INTENSITY (instensity would be another candidate that I’d add to the list of hypnotic words)?
Let’s see:
I walked down the street and saw a girl.
Now let’s put some hypnotic spices in there:
I walked down the street and saw an stunningly beautiful girl.
These two sentences have a different visceral impact. Now, I said “put some hypnotic spices in there”, and that’s really how you should think of them. Just because they are hypnotic words, that doesn’t mean that “the more the better”. A soup without salt is no fun at all, but if you add too much salt to it, it’s worse than an unsalted soup. Let’s see how much we can overdo this:
At last I walked down the amazing street and saw a phenomenally beautiful girl. She secretively called me over to reveal a shocking and fascinating fact about her amazing family – it was unbelievable.
You see what I mean? This is trying way to hard.
But in case of the exercise – the point really was NOT about chosing hypnotic words. It was about chosing words that instantly translate into pictures in the mind. It’s a lot easier to picture “washing mashine” than it is to picture “amazing”.
When you deal with hypnosis, you have to be aware that a word is not just a word. A word really is magic:
“Words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power.” – Sigmund Freud, 1915.
What do I mean when I say “magic”? I mean that words are not just letters, or sounds that carry a meaning. They also resonate. And each word has a different “emotional frequency”. And you need to be aware of that fact. Look at these words:
rainbow
spring
sunshine
love
nightmare
bone-crushing
humiliation
cancer
Now – I used words from opposing ends of the spectrum to get the point accross in the extremes, but this is also true in much “finer” grades where there is a lot more subtlelity involved.
You can’t possibly know how an individual will resonate to a certain word – but you have to be aware that each person DOES resonate in some way to each word, and when practicing hypnosis, you want to monitor that and be aware if there is a word that has a strong impact on that particular person. For someone with a shoe-fetish the word “lick” might have a very different emotional frequency than for a guy who’s selling ice-cream. You can’t know that. But you can observe how people react, and utilize words that have a strong impact for that particular individual.
I hope I’m not losing you here, I know I’m going deep nitty-gritty here. Let me know what you thought of this one – there’s much more to say about this, but I don’t want to go off on a tangent where you don’t follow me.
And let me know what else is on your mind and what questions you have on hypnosis.
Yours hypnotically,
Robert Walsh
