Field Report: "Working" Induction

Summary: I hypnotize a co-worker.


Here is the first of many "Field Reports" that I will be posting to the blog. Each Field Report will contain a report of things that I've actually experienced, in the field, so to speak.

It was a few days before Christmas and my training was over. Some of my friends and co-workers already knew that I had been spending the last few weekends going to my NLP practitioner training and most of them referred to it as hypnosis school. Since it was just before the holidays and the week of Christmas, things around the office were pretty slow. So one day I asked a co-worker if he'd like to be hypnotized.

When asked, I told him that I had already hypnotized many people (which was true, since nearly everyone has, at one point or another, whether they were aware of it or not), but it was actually the first formal induction that I had attempted outside of my training. Before going into the formal induction, I did a short pre-talk. This served the purpose of finding out what he thought of hypnosis and giving me a chance to answer any questions and tell him a little bit more about it, which served to help put him at ease, remove any fear and clear up any preconceived notions that he had about hypnosis.

Then, I hypnotized him using the Elman induction. At first, he was all smiles, giggling now and then. I think part of it was that he didn't believe it would work and another part was that he was probably thinking to himself, "Wow, I'm actually going through with something like this. This is not my kind of thing. Hah."

Seeing that made me even more nervous than I already was. But I was determined to give it an honest effort. I didn't want to sabotage myself with a half ass attempt. And as I continued, he began to relax more and more. By the time I tested for eye catalepsy, he was really relaxed and when I asked him to open and close his eyes for the first time, he took a pretty long time to simply open his eyes. When I noticed that, I knew something was working.

So I went on for few more minutes deepening his relaxation, having him open and close his eyes, doing some arm drops, etc. Then I heard some co-workers walking by and that made me nervous again. I then had the bright idea to bring him back to full consciousness at the count of 3, which I proceeded to count to very quickly, without suggesting that he would be fully alert or refreshed or anything like that.

1, 2, 3 - Snap! Open your eyes. And he did.

I asked him how he felt and he told me he felt really relaxed... too relaxed - groggy, even. And then he indicated to me that he felt like going to sleep and didn't feel like doing anything, which to him, was not a good thing at that particular time and in that particular context. He had a hypnotic hangover.

It was at that point that I realized that I had forgotten to give him adequate time to return to full consciousness and didn't give him any suggestions to be fully alert or feeling wonderful or anything like that. Whoops.

Upon realizing what was happening, I asked him to close his eyes again. He was a little hesitant at first (probably because he was now all groggy and he didn't really want to be.) But eventually, he closed his eyes again and I went back to work. I had him begin to imagine that he was doing a physical activity that required him to be very aware of what was going on, and as he did so, that all of his senses were beginning to heighten. I proceeded in this fashion for a minute or two and then brought him back . (and this time, I remembered to suggest that he felt fully alert and better than he had felt all day.)

When he opened his eyes that time, his head jerked back quickly, he looked around the room, stretched and seem to be back to "normal." I asked him how he felt and he said he felt good. I also asked him what he thought about hypnosis and his experience. I remember him saying "I can see how that can fuck with people's head," but he didn't really say much more than that. I was hoping to get more feedback from him, but by that time, his office-mates were just walking back into the office, and so we all just started chatting it up, talking about sports and news and the like.

A couple weeks after that took place, I spoke briefly with him about that time and he said that when he opened his eyes at the end (after I asked him to imagine he was doing a physical activity), his white shoes seemed really bright (which explained the sudden head jerk after opening his eyes.)