The Heart and Mind of Hypnotherapy: Inviting Connection, Inventing Change

Book excerpt: Explains and demonstrates how to create and utilize mind-body connections for unknotting vexing problems. In the popular imagination, hypnosis is misconstrued as something done to people, as if the hypnotist hypnotizes them. And hypnotherapy is similarly misconceived as something done to clients’ problems, as if the therapist could unilaterally counter or cure them. In a refreshing departure from conception-as-usual, Douglas Flemons offers another view, articulating relational ideas about how minds and bodies communicate and learn. In his characteristically casual and concise way, Flemons explains and illustrates how hypnosis, like meditation, is invited, not induced, and how hypnotherapy entails the altering and unraveling of knotted strands of problematic experience, not the controlling and abolishing of labeled afflictions. The therapist gets in sync with clients so they can, together, extemporaneously facilitate changes to undesired thoughts, urges, emotions, sensations, or behaviors. This book takes you to the heart of hypnotherapy, to the respectful, playful practice of utilizing clients’ flow experience to collaboratively discover and create opportunities for embodied learning and therapeutic change.