Hypnotherapy, also called clinical hypnosis, is a serious medical treatment that requires licensed practitioners that need to take years of schooling.  Although many people have gotten benefits from self-hypnosis, many more people prefer others to put them in a trance and plant helpful suggestions to help improve their lives.  It certainly takes a degree of discipline to get through an issue of “American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis”, the professional journal of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis.

Not Light Reading

If you know anyone that’s not a hypnotherapist who gets a lot of laughs from the “American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis”, you really might want to sit a bit further away from them.  This is a professional medical journal full of jargon, endnotes, clinical experimental hypnosis and citations from other papers that the reader is expected to know already.  ”American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis” is not written for the layperson.

A typical article title in “American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis” reads like this one from the April, 2007 issue, “Focused Analgesia in Waking and Hypnosis: Effects on Pain, Memory and Somatosensory Event-Related Potentials”.  Yes, I’ll think I’ll wait for the movie, too. But if you can’t wait, this particular article can be read online.

BNet

Oddly enough, even though there is an official website for the “American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis”, you can’t read any articles for free at that site.  You have to be a member of the website in order to do that.  But some articles (such as the fifteen word title above) can be found on BNet, which publishes selected articles from trade and business journals for free.

There are also article summaries from “American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis” in case you can’t quite bring it into yourself to slog through the entire article.  It is still preferable to paying for a subscription (which you can do through Amazon.com).  A year’s subscription costs over $80 (US) for a whopping four issues.  In this day an age of high transportation and printing costs, the only way the journal has survived is by only coming out quarterly.

So, if you ever need to go to a hypnotherapist for whatever reason and wonder where all of your money is going towards, know that a chunk of it is most likely going towards a subscription to “American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis”.  Of course, your hypnotherapist could write it off as a business expense.

Perhaps you have a persistent problem such as overeating, smoking or hyperhydrosis (uncontrollable sweating). Hopefully, you have first gone to your doctor to get treatment.  Perhaps your doctor has suggested to you to use clinical hypnosis, often called hypnotherapy.  Don’t just laugh in your doctor’s face and dismiss the idea, thinking he is being paid by the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis.  Clinical hypnosis is nothing like the professional stage hypnotism acts done strictly for laughs.

You Will Not Become Brainwashed

We’ve all grown up with the notion of an evil hypnotist like Svengali who could control someone’s mind with just a stare and a commanding voice.  The hypnotized subject in these scenarios is completely helpless to the whims of the Svengali-figure.  This is very akin to our fear of demonic possession, where we are completely helpless to someone else controlling our bodies.

That does not happen in clinical hypnosis.  No hypnotherapist, no matter how good, can make you do anything that you don’t want to do.  You always retain the power of choice.  All clinical hypnosis does is plant helpful suggestions or reminders to come to the forefront of your mind when certain situations occur.  It’s up to you to pay attention to these suggestions or ignore them.

You Will Not Go Into A Trance Unpredictably

Clinical hypnosis does put the subject into a hypnotic trance, which is very much like the stage you are in right before falling asleep.  This is when the subconscious is most open to suggestion and most likely to remember the suggestions. You don’t even have to go into a sleep state after or during the session.  You usually contain a complete memory of what happens during the session.

Some people fear that anything can put you suddenly into a hypnotic trance.  It could be a certain word or a song or a vibrational frequency.  There have been some really frightening urban legends about people who underwent clinical hypnosis, then were driving on the freeway when all of a sudden they unexpectedly went into a trance and crashed. This is all nonsense.  It won’t happen.

Going into a hypnotic trance takes at least five minutes and a conscious decision on your part to relax your body.  You can’t just go into a hypnotic trance at the snap of someone’s fingers.  Just as it’s a conscious decision on your part to listen to a hypnotic suggestion, it’s also a choice as to whether you want to go into a hypnotic trance.