Hope you saw what I wrote above,
I did, and I'm impressed. Being the kind of person that comes back with a response like that is definitely something worth striving for. Well done.
Out of curiosity, how do you explain to yourself your previous failure case to remember "always be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting some sort of battle", and your success in being able to act with that in mind this time around?
Back to the discussion, which I've decided to continue for the sake of those who visit the forum after me, who are hoping hypnosis could help them. I want them to be able to read an "it's-working-for-me-beyond-my-wildest-dreams" story.
Thanks. I appreciate it. I think those stories are important and undershared. When I first got into hypnosis I was kinda baffled that I didn't seem to see people doing all of the amazing things that seemed like ought to be possible. While a good number of those turned out to be infeasible/undesirable for reasons I didn't understand at the time, there was also a big part of the answer that was just "yes, that happens, that's real, and those people just don't go around talking about it all the time"
I love that there are so many schools of thought in hypnosis.
Indeed. Keeps things interesting
SP has found a way to make those states also workable for change work. And I suppose it just makes sense to me, that the deeper the level one works on, the better.
That's certainly an intuitive way to look at it, and there's definitely something to it (or else what is the purpose of "hypnosis" at all?). There can be a bit more to it sometimes though.
"Deeper trance" tends to work well when the right answers are obvious but strongly counter-intuitive. Pain control is probably the most strongly supported use of hypnosis, and it makes sense from this perspective. Feeling okay with strong physical pain is a really hard thing for most people to imagine. It's not simply a matter of "oh, sure, I'll just try not caring!". At the same time, there are plenty of times where it's pretty easy to know that turning the pain off is safe -- like when done with the support of a doctor for surgery or something. In these cases, we want to make a cognitive change that is both *simple* and a qualitatively large jump from normal perception, and we have all the trust that this is the right thing to do. All that is left is going through the motions of shifting attention from where it is and has been to where it needs to be -- and focusing attention to the exclusion of one's normal way of seeing things is what trance *is*.
The reason it's not always that simple is that it's not always so clear what the right answer is, and in the process of it becoming clear often it no longer seems counter-intuitive anymore. For example, when my friend wanted to work on her "irrational" fear of heights, I didn't try to hypnotize her into a deep state and give her another way of looking at it. I just noted that what she was experiencing was an inner conflict, and that she hadn't actually gone through the motions of listening to the fear and deciding whether or not it was rational. She just tried to blow it off before she had really heard herself out, and so it's no wonder she wasn't able to be fully non-afraid. By the time I could get her to say "Yes. I do trust that this rope will hold, and I'm willing to risk being wrong and falling to the concrete below" the fear was no longer something that needed dealing with. From then on, her "irrational fear of heights" has just been a little warning that she'd briefly look at and either decide to heed or dismiss. It's not that the solution was "at a shallow level" -- the same "level" was reached and the actual fear dissipated. It's that it didn't take any large departure from her normal worldview because we were able to bring her worldview along with it real-time.
It just depends on whether the question is closer to "I actually know the right answer here but it's weird and so I still have to get the rest of my brain on board" vs "I don't really know what I want, even if I think I do".
And I think the wacky deep states just totally appeal to me.
. I've had 2 Simpson Protocol (SP) sessions (working in Esdaile) and the outcomes since then, have been incredible.
I'd love to hear more about it, if you're interested in sharing.
(My OP was asking, is there a threshhold below which that isn't true anymore?)
Keeping in mind that extreme depths isn't generally the area I focus on, here's how I model that one:
"Trance" is about the focus of attention, and for a trance to be "deeper" basically means that the sensitivity to things that normally grab attention has been turned down by a larger factor. So to answer your question, if you turn down the attention-grabbing sensitivity uniformly across all things, then you won't be paying attention to what the hypnotist is saying (note: attention and awareness are not the same thing), and therefore it cannot work. I *have* heard of hypnotists making this mistake, and basically inadvertently suggesting that the hypnotee not pay attention to even them.
If, however, you turn down the salience of all things *other* than your message as a hypnotist, then by definition if you succeed it will work -- because they're paying attention to you and nothing else that can block and/or contradict it. It's also worth noting that there is another failure mode here where you inadvertently end up suggesting that they don't even pay attention to the input from parts of their brain required to properly parse your message. This is where you get over-literal interpretations and stuff.
In short, I'd have to see what this particular hypnotist is actually doing, and whether they're screwing it up. As I was saying last time, the easy way to do it is just try it and see.
I'm intrigued.
How do you "peer into the trance"?
It's not altogether different than how you reflect on things normally. If I were to say "can you please pass the milk?", I could then ask "what was that like?" and you could easily reflect on your own experience being asked this, and note how you feel about it and what factors motivate your compliance or non-compliance. That's pretty straight forward, and often that kind of thing can work in a hypnotic trance too.
For example, when I was first learning hypnosis I was playing around with my girlfriend (who wasn't actually interested in being a hypnotists) try to hypnotize me for fun. I decided to play along and really try to make it work, and so when she was giving suggestions, I was trying to focus on the extent to which it was working, and what it'd be like for it to work better. The rest of me was like "well, this obviously isn't working", and I kinda just let that be *there*, without validating/denying/otherwise interacting with it. At the point where she was starting to get cocky because I had "forgotten my name" (which felt kinda like "pretending" at the time), I decided I'd remember my name and burst her little bubble. The thing is -- and this is kinda how hypnosis works -- I had gotten sufficiently into "pretending" that it actually took a few moments to pull myself back and remember my name, even though I always knew I could and that it was under my control. Looking at what my mind was doing in this case wasn't really too different than in things like "pass the milk", except that things like this can illuminate some weird things about how our brains actually work on the lower levels sometimes.
But it'd be significantly weirder if I were to ask you "what was it like being asleep last night?". It can feel like if you don't remember, you didn't really experience it in the first place. That's totally untrue though. "What does it feel like to be asleep" is actually a perfectly well formed question that has an answer. When I first heard an experienced meditator talk about being aware while sleeping, I couldn't imagine what that would even be like. Later though, when I was playing with polyphasic sleeping and learning to nap well, I got it. I liken the experience of falling asleep to having a hundred tabs open on wikipedia and managing to close them faster than you open them, until you don't have any tabs left. It's really weird, because when you're actually asleep you're often (though actually not always!) not thinking enough to even realize "I'm asleep" and you can't really reflect in real time, but when the 20 minute timer goes off you can look back and see exactly what happened -- letting go of one train of thought after another until there was nothing left and then just *sitting* like that, unmoving, for an "unmeasurable" amount of time until the alarm goes off.
What it'd be like peering into this particular type of trance depends a bit on what it's actually like and what you're actually doing, but I'm basically suggesting you add another layer of awareness to the top of it, and watch what your mind is doing at each step of the way. Or if it gets to the point where that would get in the way and you can't keep it up, going into it with the knowledge that this is interesting enough to remember, and that you can expect to look back and see "what was that like?" as soon as you're not too busy with what you're doing, and analyze it then.
) The neglect has caught up with me, and this anxiety isn't something hypnosis can or even should, handle 
