Hypnosis
...self-help, and psychotherapy, hypnosis is still a misunderstood practice and the hypnotic experience an elusive state of mind. But by now enough research has been conducted and enough knowledge accumulated to make it clear that hypnosis's neither a parlor trick nor an occult phenomenon. I always thought hypnotist to be a trick and I still believe that even after reading hypnosis articles and I would never try to get hypnotize, maybe learn how to. The term" hypnosis" invented in the 19th century, is derived from the Greek word for sleep, but the derivation is misleading. People are often physically relaxed, and they may be told to close their eyes to enter a hypnotic state, but they are fully awake and alert. Vivid and unusual phenomena may occur under hypnosis- automatic writing, negative hallucinations (not seeing something that is clearly there), and reliving the distant past as though it were present. During hypnotic, people may talk and act like small children while responding like adults to a command to move forward and backward through time. Their physical reactions may indicate pain while they say they don't feel it. They sometimes have apparent amnesia for the experience or respond to posthypnotic suggestion--instructions given during the hypnotic state to be obeyed afterward on the snap of a finger or other cue. Inducing the state generally takes 10-20 minutes (sometimes only seconds), and there are many ways to do it. Perhaps the best known is to have the person stare at a target like a swinging pocket watch or a dot on a blank sheet of paper. Or the person may be helped to relax and then repeatedly told in a rhythmic voice something like, "Your eyelids are getting heavy." Sometimes it is enough just to repeat, "Relax, focus, float." Visual imagery may be used to...
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