Читать книгу Self Hypnosis - Valerie Austin - Страница 12

To check whether you are a visual person or not (for the purpose of hypnosis) you can do a simple test. Close your eyes and think of a chair—any chair. When you have it in your thoughts, ‘see’ what colour it is, then open your eyes. Ask yourself if you actually ‘saw’ the chair in your imagination or just ‘knew’ what it looked like. There is a difference, if you think about it. If you saw it, then you are considered a visual person.

Freud’s research showed that two-thirds of the population were visual. I decided to make my own study on well over a thousand clients and the results more or less substantiated this figure. This was important to me because I am one of the non-visual people, that small segment of the population who have trouble visualizing. We can imagine what it is like to be visual, but it is impossible for a visual person to understand how someone can imagine without actually seeing. If you have a hypnotherapist who is visual and you are not, there will definitely be communication problems. This distinction has in the past caused a multitude of problems. It has resulted in there being many inexperienced hypnotherapists who have believed their clients awkward and ‘hard to hypnotize’. This is how the myth grew that not everyone can be hypnotized. A proficient hypnotherapist knows that everyone can be hypnotized. Of course degrees of susceptibility vary, but it only takes less susceptible people a little longer to be able to build their belief structure.

The simple ‘visual/non-visual’ test above solves the problem. Try it out on your friends as practice. If someone says he cannot ‘see’ the chair but just knows what it looks like, explain that this is not unusual. A third of the population does not visualize. For these people a hypnotherapist must abandon the words ‘visualize’ or ‘see’ which might otherwise be used, and instead use the word ‘imagine’—in the way you did with the chair. I was told by three hypnotherapists I was difficult to hypnotize. This could not have been further from the truth.