For practitioners
The working side of the site
The rest of this site explains hypnosis to the people who need it. This part is for the people who do it — scripts, technique notes and training, chosen by someone who sees clients rather than someone who sells courses.
Hypnosis scriptsA searchable directory of over a thousand scripts, grouped by presenting problem. Read one before you buy it.Training and Growth ZoneCourses for qualified therapists, and the membership that keeps the library and the CPD coming.
Language patterns 19
The Milton model, one device per page. They are best learned as a set: each is doing the same job — loosening the listener's grip on the literal — by a different route.
- AmbiguityOne sentence, phrase or word with more than one possible meaning — the confusion itself is the tool.
- Cause and effectImplying that one thing causes another, even where it does not.
- Comparative deletionA comparison is made, but what it is being compared with is never stated.
- Complex equivalenceTwo things joined so that if the first is true, the second must be too.
- Conversational postulateA question that could be answered yes or no, and is understood as a request instead.
- Double bindsA question offering two choices, both of which suit your purpose.
- Embedded commandsSuggestions hidden inside other sentences, marked out by tone rather than by words.
- Lost performativeA judgement or evaluation made without attributing it to anyone.
- Mind readingClaiming to know another person’s thoughts or feelings without revealing how.
- Modal operatorsWords implying possibility or necessity — the ones our rules for living are built from.
- NominalisationsWords standing in for nouns that cannot be touched, felt or heard.
- Ordinal numbersFirst, second, next — a presuppositional pattern that assumes the sequence is already under way.
- PresuppositionSomething assumed to be true, so that questioning it means accepting it.
- Universal quantifiersAlways, never, everyone — claiming an authority or knowledge that does not exist.
- Referential indexA statement whose subject is no specific person or thing.
- Selectional restriction violationA sentence that is not logical and does not quite make sense — and works because of it.
- Tag questionsA short question added to a statement; the tone at the end decides what it really asks.
- Unspecified verbsVerbs that leave the how unstated, so the listener supplies it. Common in induction.
- UtilisationAligning with whatever the subject brings, rather than working against it.
Technique 9
What happens in the room: assessment, induction, and the phenomena you will meet.
- Direct hypnosisDave Elman’s approach — instruction rather than suggestion, and quick.
- Eye closureThe change that begins a series of others, developing into a trance state.
- Pacing and leadingStatements about what the subject is actually experiencing, which they know to be true.
- Taking a patient historyIdentifying the presenting problem and the causes underneath it, before any induction.
- Suggestibility testingReading how a subject produces hypnotic phenomena, and what that tells you.
- Time distortionWhere the time that passes and the time that is felt to pass come apart.
- Time distortion in practiceWorking with distorted time in the room, and what it is useful for.
- Time distortion: a case studyA clinical account of the procedure used to relieve a symptomatic complaint.
- BibliographyThe reading behind these pages — sources, papers and books, listed.
From the shelf 1
The one historical text here in full. Braid coined the word in 1843, then spent years regretting it — he thought neurypnology the better name, because what he was describing was not sleep.