Creating numbness through hypnosis can be an invaluable method which may be used instead of anaesthesia. For the therapist to actually create numbness in a limb, say an arm, he or she would have to suggest an unconscious response to numbness by saying the following sort of things.
“It’s Winter. Supposing you’re a young child and you’ve gone out to play in all the snow. What’s it like making snowballs to throw at your friends and perhaps making a snowman.
“Pretty soon, those hands begin to feel somehow different.. just dangling on the end of your arms, as if they’re just objects which have no relation to you..
“and tying a shoelace with those numb, ice-cold hands becomes so drawn out and awkward.. even when you try to turn a key in a lock..
“and finding a hand that’s becoming more and more numb”.
So the therapsit has presented a time when numbness was natural. It’s a universal pattern. Although the therapist has used the word ‘you,’ it’s the general ‘you,’ the Royal ‘you,’ if you like! And this makes it rather ambiguous.
At this point, the conscious mind’s in some confusion and rather tied up. The patient isn’t sure whether the therapist is simply describing a pattern, or suggesting that indeed their hands may go numb.
Another example of creating a universal pattern for numbness would be describing to the patient how sometimes you can wake up in the morning and find your arm completely numb. The reason is because you’ve slept on it all night.
This universal pattern could be introduced to the patient by the therapist saying something like;
“Many people have had the experience of waking in the night..
“to find they’ve been sleeping on one arm. I’m sure you’ve heard of this..
“and that arm is numb..
“and they feel as though the arm doesn’t even belong to them anymore..
“as if all the blood has completely drained from that arm just temporarily..
“with the feeling that it belongs to someone else..
“so that they may have to lift it with the other arm.”
You can always find a hypnotic phenomenon to prime the mind for a hypnotic response. For example, your arm seems to go up ‘all by itself’ when someone goes to shake hands with you. This would be used if the therapist wants to effect arm levitation.
Further to the above, the following principles should be considered.
. Always remember that people have conscious and unconscious minds.
. Make sure you know to which part of the person you’re talking.
. The unconscious mind deals in patterns, while the conscious mind is for direct communication.
. The subconscious must be primed using universal patterns in order to respond hypnotically.
. So that the conscious mind is excluded from the process, dissociative language must be used, (e.g. ‘That arm’).
