Hypno case studies

Hypnotherapy Case Studies

By:

Steve G. Jones, M.Ed. Clinical Hypnotherapist www.SteveGJones.com

Transcribed by: Katherine T. Sinclair

Copyright © 2007

All rights reserved. No material in this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the author.

For Rick. My mentor in writing case studies.

Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Case Studies References Resources Books by Steve G. Jones, M.Ed.

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Foreword In the 1950s, the American Medical Association took notice of hypnosis after a patient underwent a thyroidectomy (removal of the thyroid) while in a hypnotic trance induced by a hypnotherapist (Blakeslee, 2005). No other painkiller or anesthesia was used. Since then, hypnotherapists have made powerful strides toward changing public perception about hypnosis. Doctors continue to use hypnosis to calm their patients, and to ease pain during procedures (Bierman, 1995). They regularly tell patients how easy recovery will be. Additionally, doctors tell patients that a procedure is common and meets with a high degree of success. Because these phrases are delivered by an authority figure, they act in exactly the same way as hypnotic suggestions, and become reality for the patient. More obvious hypnotic suggestions are also sometimes given to patients by doctors trained in hypnosis, and for over a century, dentists have used hypnosis to ease discomfort during dental procedures. In addition to using hypnotic techniques themselves, doctors and dentists regularly refer patients to hypnotherapists for help with weight loss, smoking cessation, and overcoming fears about dental and surgical procedures. Before the 1950s, the medical profession scoffed at hypnotherapy, but today it is being readily embraced as a complement to long-standing medical procedures. According to the southern Medical Journal (2004), as many as 40% of Americans use some form of complementary and alternative medicine such as hypnotherapy. At no other time has the world of hypnotherapy been as wide open with exciting possibilities as it is now. Because more and more people are exploring 9


and accepting the benefits of hypnotherapy, a much greater need for qualified hypnotherapists to open practices now exists. For the latest information about the hypnotherapy world, visit www.americanallianceofhypnotists.org the website of the American Alliance of Hypnotists, of which I am the founder and director. The organization started in America as a network of hypnotherapists, but it is now open to practitioners worldwide. Among other things, this site lists hypnotherapists and classes available in your local area. Become a member. It’s free.

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Chapter 1: Introduction

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Hypnotherapy is not a Zen-like trance in which the client, also referred to as the patient, is in some sort of metaphysical state. From time to time, clients will experience this state; however, the goal of hypnosis is to get the client into a very light trance, also known as “Alpha.” When in Alpha or deeper, a client’s brain waves are altered (Blakeslee, 2005) and they are more suggestible than when they are in Beta. They are therefore more able to receive messages that influence positive change. Anything deeper than Alpha (Delta or Theta) is helpful but not necessary. Stages of Consciousness Hypnotherapy practices deal with four stages of consciousness: Beta, Alpha, Theta, and Delta. Normal waking consciousness is called Beta. In Beta, a person’s brain is fully functional and in an alert state. It is paying attention to, and processing stimuli from the outside world. In Alpha, the person is slowed down slightly and is therefore more focused and able to dedicate her train of thought to one thing. Equate Alpha to the state you are in when watching TV, or when you have been driving for a lengthy period. When driving, your attention is focused on the elements of driving. Outside stimuli play a lesser role. At first, you may be aware of things around you such as cars and pedestrians. After prolonged driving, your attention shifts to what is happening directly in front of you. This is Alpha. Alpha is a “not-really-here, not-really-out-of-it” phase. In Alpha, outside stimuli no longer distract the client, who

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is then able to receive habit-altering messages from the hypnotherapist. It is important to note that similar to driving in a trance, patients in hypnosis still can react as things happen. A common misconception is that clients under hypnosis cannot react, and that therefore the hypnotherapist has ultimate control over the patient. In Alpha, the patient is always in the driver’s seat, and is fully capable of reacting and making decisions. Some hypnosis patients go deeper than Alpha into Theta or Delta, and most patients will transition between Beta, Alpha, Theta, and Delta during the session. Some patients will never attain Theta or Delta, regardless of what the hypnotherapist does.

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However, almost everyone will fall into Alpha on the first session. Techniques for guiding patients to Theta or Delta are more complex, and are beyond the scope of this course. Those techniques are taught in my advanced class. You should know, however, that there are tests for ascertaining how deeply a person has fallen. Some methods of hypnotherapy are more effective in Theta and Delta. (Incidentally, the person whose thyroid was removed while under hypnosis was in Delta.) Because patients generally toggle among stages of consciousness in any given hypnotherapy session, most will have the experience of only remembering some of the things the hypnotherapist has said. Patients often believe that they remember everything but, actually remember very little. What Is Hypnotherapy? Hypnotherapy is a combination of hypnosis and therapy, and this is one of the many attributes separating it from stage hypnosis. Traditionally, a hypnotherapist will spend about half of his or her time talking to the client while the client is in Beta (normal waking consciousness). The remainder of the time, the client will be in hypnosis (Alpha or lower). Hypnotherapy works by combining hypnosis with precise, outcome-oriented therapy and targeting the subconscious mind. Hypnotherapy is quite different from traditional therapy. Instead of spending years with a therapist, clients who undergo hypnotherapy will have an efficient, fast, reliable means of altering negative behavior. Hypnotherapy produces the most immediate results for changing beliefs and/or behaviors.

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It is important to note that hypnotherapy is not for everyone. Some patients want to spend years in traditional therapy; getting to know themselves and examining the roots of their behavior. Some patients will even respond better to long-term, non-hypnotic therapy. Hypnosis is just one of the thousands of ways a person can achieve her goals; however, if your patient wants immediate results, hypnotherapy is the most effective tool. The beauty of hypnosis is that a person’s body does not know the difference between imagining something and having it happen. As far as the body is concerned, the physiological responses are the same, regardless of whether the client is imagining something or actually experiencing it. The client therefore has the advantage of intellectually knowing that a situation is happening only in the imagination, and physically responding as though it has happened. The client gets the benefit of tackling her fears, losing weight, or becoming motivated without ever having left the hypnotherapist’s chair. The client is still reclined in the chair, yet as far as her body knows, she has conquered her cravings, lost weight, learned how to speak to romantic interests, and so on. This means that when it comes time for the client to eat healthy foods, go on a date, or stop procrastinating, her body will feel as though she has already done this. Therefore, she will have the confidence and ability to move forward.

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Ethics To help move hypnotherapy into the mainstream, hypnotherapists should adhere to the following guidelines: 1. Do no harm. This course provides powerful tools for tapping into the subconscious mind. In doing so, you must first make a commitment to making only positive changes in your patients’ lives. If you have a client whose idea of a “positive change” differs from yours, you have a responsibility to refuse to perform therapy on that client. For example: If a weight-loss client wants to lose 15 pounds in one week, you should explain to her that this is unhealthy. Then offer a more reasonable plan and refuse to treat her if she insists on attempting to lose 15 pounds in one week. 2. If hypnotherapy is not working on a given patient, stop treatment and refer the patient elsewhere. If you continue to treat a client who is not getting the results she wants, you will have wasted your client’s time and money — and damaged not only your reputation, but also that of hypnotherapy in general. Not all patients will respond to hypnotherapy, and not all patients will respond to your method of hypnotherapy. Accept this, and move on if goals are not being met. Let’s say that you have a client who is a mortgage broker and wants to make more money. You should initially have her agree to three to six sessions. At the end of those sessions, you must assess how the treatment is progressing and if it is of any benefit to the client. I always assign 17


homework to patients to get a measure of how invested they are in their own change, and to keep them moving toward their goal. For this client, I would have her make a certain number of calls per week. If she has not made the calls after the third session, we are obviously wasting each other’s time, and I would terminate the hypnotherapy. 3. Set reasonable, solid, productive, attainable goals. Aim high, but give your clients time to respond. Never promise clients that they will, for instance, lose 50 pounds in three weeks. Instead, do your research and set a reasonable goal. Do not set your clients up for failure. For instance, as with the mortgage client discussed above, I would break up her homework into small steps. In week one, she should make 10 calls. In week two, she should make 20 calls, and so on. Expect that your client will get off to a slow start. Perhaps she will not do the homework at all the first week. Keep in mind that many people expect you to wave a magic wand over them that forces them to accomplish their goals. These people are waiting for a zombie-like trance to take over their mind and body and cause them to act uncontrollably. By week three, reality should set in. The patient either understands that she has to work toward her goal, or I must explain to her that she is wasting her money. Believe it or not, some clients would be happy to undergo hypnosis for years because it makes them feel and appear like they are “trying.” Never allow this. When hypnosis works, it works quickly. Long-term, wonderful effects may reveal themselves later, but most of the changes begin to happen within a few weeks. Take things slowly when you have a client who wants to lose 100 pounds, for example, but make sure that she is at least doing her homework and making small steps forward. 18


4. Follow all state and federal laws. For instance, legislation in early 2003 required hypnotherapists in California to disclose certain information to their clients. It is YOUR responsibility to know the law in your area concerning hypnotherapy. Consult an attorney if you have to. Do the right thing in your practice. Unlike many medical professionals, hypnotherapists are given a lot of leeway, and in many states, are not strictly regulated. In any situation, you have a built-in compass for right and wrong. Use it. Treat people with care and respect. 5. Check with your client’s physician before performing hypnosis to determine whether or not the client has a medical condition related to his or her hypnotherapy goals. Perhaps your client wants to lose weight but has a history of bulimia that she “forgot” to mention. Make sure that you have permission (a signed form or letter authorizing the treatment) from the client’s physician before moving forward when you are treating any medical condition with hypnosis. 6. Likewise, if another healthcare professional refers a client to you for treatment of a specific problem, treat only that problem. You have not been handed a blank check. Respect the process of the MD, the hypnotherapist, or the psychotherapist. Do your job, report your findings to the appropriate healthcare professional, and end the treatment.

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Hypnotherapy Overview A general hypnotherapy session begins with a pretalk. This is where you explain hypnosis to the client and reassure her about the power of her mind. Next comes the induction, which is the initial attempt to drop the client into a light trance. After the induction, the hypnotherapist will conduct a deepening that drops the client into an even deeper trance, as the name suggests. The hypnotherapist will then use a script, which is the therapy portion of the session. The script includes a suggestion for change. Upon finishing the script, the hypnotherapist will segue into amnesia, which suggests that the client’s mind will forget the session. Finally, the hypnotherapist will use trance termination to bring the client out of hypnosis. In this course, each of these steps will be covered in detail. However, each client is different, and so the therapy session might be changed depending on the client’s needs. Hypnotherapists should be flexible and able to think on their feet. Do your research so that you can take an alternate path if you are on a course that does not seem to be working. When conducting a hypnotherapy session, learn to speak monotonously and slowly. Throughout the session, you will want to lengthen your words. Your tone should be dull and boring. (See Chapter 3, Inductions, for more details.) You will also want to use positive words. For instance, when I work with people on procrastination, I do not call it 20


“procrastination.” I call it “motivation,” because this is the positive way of looking at the situation. Learn to spin things positively. Instead of saying that a person is “afraid to fly,” say that she wants “freedom to fly.” Experiment with phrasing things positively. Some professionals believe that hypnotherapists should not use the word “no” or “not,” because they believe that the subconscious mind drops these words. In other words, instead of hearing, “You will not eat carbohydrates,” they believe the client will hear, “You will eat carbohydrates.” I often use the words “no” and “not” with positive results. However, to be on the safe side, you may choose to avoid using negative words. Instead, say, “You will be done eating foods with carbohydrates,” or “You will crave foods that are low in carbohydrates.”

Recording Your Sessions Because it takes approximately 21 days to form new habits, you should be prepared to record your hypnotherapy sessions so that your clients can listen to their sessions each night, thus reinforcing their change. Only record the hypnosis portion of the session. The hypnosis session begins when you begin the induction. Be prepared to begin the recording (CD, mp3, etc.) immediately when hypnosis begins, and stop at the conclusion of the session. I sell hypnosis recordings from my website, and sometimes people buy four or more recordings at once: weight loss, unlimited motivation, unlimited confidence, and better golf! These clients may intend to listen to all 21


four recordings at once. Do not let your clients do this. Tackle one problem at a time, and give your client three weeks to change a single habit. Allow the client to ease into the change. If you try to force change, or if you tell the client to listen to the recording 21 times in one day, both you and your client will get frustrated. Remember: Set reasonable goals. Do not try to force change; doing so could be counterproductive. Controlling the Environment You will want to establish an office space that allows you to control the environment. Cut your clients off from the outside world and demand their complete attention. You must have them relaxed and have them in an oasis from the outside world. In controlling the environment, first make sure that the client has gone to the restroom. Dropping your client into Alpha and sustaining hypnosis is difficult if she is squirming with discomfort. So ask her before you start, “Do you need to use the restroom before we begin?” Likewise, make sure that the client’s cell phone or pager is turned off. Make sure that she is in an environment where no one and nothing is going to disturb her. There should be no barking dogs or sounds of traffic. Control the environment. Make sure that the client is not too cold or too warm. Give the patient the option of being reclined. A comfortable, reclining chair is perfect for this. Get one. I prefer to have my clients reclined in a nearly horizontal position with an eye covering, like the ones that are sold for sleeping or airplane trips, over their eyes to

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block out any light. The client listens to my voice through headphones. I want to completely control the environment, and for this reason, I generally avoid going to a person’s house to conduct a hypnotherapy session. The client is not going to see anything because his eyes are going to be covered. He is not going to hear anything except my voice and the sound of gentle ocean waves that I play in the background. The client is perhaps going to be covered with one or two blankets, depending on the temperature. Again, your job as a hypnotherapist is to prevent anything that could interrupt the session. I learned this lesson the hard way in 1986. I had a patient, a doctor, who wanted to be hypnotized. She was on call during our first session, and she kept getting up during the hypnosis session to respond to her pager. She was not respecting the session. I immediately formed a strict policy against this disruptive activity. If your patient is on call, tell her to come back another day. Do not allow yourself or your client to be disturbed. Some clients like to multitask, but hypnosis is not the place for multitasking. Think of it like surgery — it would not be acceptable if someone knocked on the door during surgery, or if the doctor stopped operating so that the patient could take a cell phone call. Show your clients how you want them to respect the hypnosis session. The bottom line is this: control the environment! It’s YOUR responsibility.

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Clients to Refer Out Occasionally, you will receive a call from someone who is not an appropriate client for a hypnotherapist. You will know when you are in “over your head.” It is always a good idea to refer out (send to a more appropriate healthcare provider) anyone who informs you that she is, for example, schizophrenic or psychotic. These are serious mental health conditions that you are NOT trained to handle. Also, refer out anyone who wants to uncover past memories of abuse. You are NOT trained to deal with the emotional fallout of such scenarios. As hypnotherapists, we work with changing behavior in otherwise high-functioning clients. This means they are stable individuals who simply need help with losing weight, gaining motivation, being more confident, stopping smoking, and so on. We enable behavioral changes that stem from changes in their belief systems. We do not “turn insane clients sane” or psychotic clients “normal.” I cannot list all of the types of cases that you should refer out, but use your judgment. Never take a client just for the money. If you feel you are not qualified to handle the case, you are RIGHT. Refer them out. Helpful Tip Go to a hypnotherapist for a general session on motivation, and pay attention to how they do things. You can get some great ideas from other hypnotherapists. You can also see what it is like to be a client. And you can decide what NOT to do in your practice. This visit will pay for itself over and over again.

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Chapter 2 Case Studies

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CASE: Confidence PATIENT INFORMATION AND PRESENTING PROBLEM Dave is a 44 year old Caucasian male, married. He is a computer analyst. Dave came to me for a career change, overcoming selfimposed limitations, and general self-improvement, also to improve his focus and motivation. TREATMENT I saw Dave for a series of 3 sessions. In the first session, Dave indicated that he needs to be the driver of the vehicle in his life and make a new business venture in his life. He stated that he needs to be more organized and structured. In the past he gravitated toward “neutral territory” and stated that his “internal thermostat” had not been turned up. He was referring to his lack of motivation. He feels that he needs to introduce a certain level of discomfort in his current job as an analyst so that he can get out of the job and move on. He states that he “throttles back” when he should be going into “after burners.” He feels that he should give 110% most of the time And that he has not done so. He stated that his father was “a bit lazy” and smoked marijuana. His mother was manic depressive and as a child he was constantly moving. He also stated in the first session that he wants courage and he wants to overcome fear and he wants to be consistent and wants to follow through. Week One: In our first of three sessions which were done one week apart I worked with Dave with increasing his confidence. I used The Pyramid script with him from the Handbook of Hypnotic Suggestions and Metaphors by D. Corydon Hammond. I performed a relaxation induction using a beach scenario. I used the stairs as a deepening. Since Dave is starting a new business 26


which relied heavily on calling prospects, I assigned the homework of calling five prospects within one week. He already has a list of friends who he could call to see if they want to be a part of the business which is a multi level marketing business. I also assigned the homework of organizing his office and specifically the task of clearing his floor since he mentioned that he had numerous files on the floor. I made the copy of the hypnosis session in CD form and told him to listen to it every night for a week until he returned. As part of my standard procedure, I did this. Week one treatment also consisted of letting go of fear, the question what would he do if he left his job, letting go of guilt, changing routines, applying the knowledge he has, and discontinuing saying the phrases “I can’t” and “It’s hard” since he often used those phrases when I was talking with him in our session before the hypnosis. Week Two: Dave did call five people and he did get most of his floor cleaned off. He is feeling more confident having had the session and listening to the recording for the week, but he still feels trapped by his job. We did an NLP session in which I had Dave give me a list of what he wanted out of life. What he said was, he wants a Mercedes Benz with a white powder color with a moon roof, E300 Diesel with white tan interior, a four door seDave and he wanted to get his wife a new town and country vehicle. He also said he wanted to ski in Colorado and travel to the Orient. I did a NLP technique with Dave designed to link current positive and productive behaviors with a clear vision of what those results will produce in the future. I did this with a swish pattern in which I had Dave imagine a picture frame in front of him two feet high, two feet wide and two feet in front of him and then I had him imagine another picture frame next to that, also two feet high and two feet wide. The picture frame on the left would show his current positive productive activities which would eventually lead to his goal attainment and the picture on the right showed his goal attainment ten years from now. So the way I do the swish pattern is I then have him move 27


the picture on the right, the “future him” out, ten feet behind the picture of the present day him. I had him imagine that there were rubber bands attached on the left hand side of the future him to the left side of the present day him. And on the right side of the picture of the future him connecting to the right side of the picture of the present day him. I then informed him as is part of my procedure when doing a swish pattern, that if I were to let go of the picture of the future him, it would come flying forward and break through the picture of the current day him and fill his visual field for a split second and then go back out to ten feet leaving him with only the vision of the current day, him doing current day activities in a movie format. So each of these montages of movies would be seen one at a time, alternating back and forth. I then told him to imagine doing this exercise ten times in a row at his own pace, seeing the current day him doing those productive activities and then the future him comes flying forward, breaking through the current day picture of him, filling his visual field for a split second and then going back out to ten feet. After this, he was to tell me that he was done with that exercise and then I would have him imagine the future him being out at fifty feet and we would go through the same exercise except this time he would do ten repetitions as quickly as he could and on the tenth repetition he would sit with just the vision of the future him and other people who’s lives, those goals have positively affected and he would sit with that for about a minute. He would look at his future self ten years from now at age 54, eye to eye, and his future self would say to him “thank you.” Meaning thank you for creating this future for believing in yourself. Dave did that exercise and then opened his eyes at the end since the entire exercise is done with closed eyes. Dave had to decide which of his current activities were contributing toward the creation of his future goal and tell them to me beforehand so that I could use them in the session. Dave was able to identify numerous activities which were contributing to this. Dave told me that the activities which are contributing to his goal attainment ten years from now, which he is doing now, are cold calling, trusting himself, making a plan to leave his job, accepting himself, becoming knowledge about the multi level 28


marketing company he is part of, helping people, becoming comfortable with meeting and talking with people, calling prospects, being confident, and those were the things which Dave listed as current beliefs and behaviors which are contributing and moving toward his final goals. Dave was also able to give me a list of his final goals and those were used in the other picture frame of the future and they were becoming a go-to guy for the family, being a national sales director in the multi level marketing company he has joined, having an income of $750,000/year, being full time in his venture, traveling frequently, having a dream house which is 10-12k square feet, having an extra house in the mountains, going on a vacation every few months for a week or two, being part of charity outreaches, developing scholarships for young couples sending their kids to private schools, and in general feeling good about himself. Week Three: Dave returned the following week with a wonderful attitude about his future. He had discussed the week two session with his wife and she was very happy to hear his long term goals since he had not previously revealed them to her. We did a hypnotherapy session just designed to tie everything together. At this point Dave has a set of goals and has become more organized and has developed powerful reasons for moving forward with his goals. RESULTS In following up with Dave six months later, he had left his job and had left the multi-level marketing company too and joined a different multi-level marketing company in which he was doing quite well making an undisclosed amount of money which more than took care of his needs and his family’s needs. He was planning vacations and seemed to be generally in good spirits. His wife had written me a thank you letter and Dave seemed to be on a course for success.

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REFLECTIONS Dave serves as a typical example of a modern day person who is in a job related rut. Dave was unable to derive meaning from his job because he was unable to contribute to society and his family in the way that he wanted to. In discussions with Dave during the initial consultation and in the follow up six months later, it became clear to me that Dave wanted to be a financially powerful man and his reasons for wanted this were he wanted to be able to help others and provide for his family. Additionally he sought meaning in the work that he did and as a computer analyst he did not feel he was able to contribute to the world in a level that he wanted to. However, in multi level marketing Dave now has multiple opportunities to speak publicly to groups and to mentor people who want to improve their situation in life financially. Dave is a true success story and a good example of how someone with determination to make a positive change can be helped with hypnotherapy.

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CASE: Weight Loss PATIENT INFORMATION AND PRESENTING PROBLEM Kassie is a 44 year old Caucasian female. She was a phone client which means that I treated her by hypnotherapy sessions over the phone. She is married, has three children and is overweight by thirty pounds. She feels that she has lost momentum in the past few years and feels very negative about herself and her future. I worked with Kassie for five sessions on the phone, one week apart each. She wants to be a hypnotherapists. She wants to move with or without her husband. She hasn’t spoken to her mother in three years because her mother is negative and also speaks negatively to the kids. TREATMENT Week One: I did a hypnotherapy session with Kassie addressing her negative self-talk, her low confidence and her lack of lack of energy. In week one I did a meditation induction with her in which I had her imagine herself in a meditation room sitting on a comfortable cushion in the lotus position. And by using this as the induction it also serves as a template for her so that she could then begin meditating on her own. She states that she has meditated before she was married and that this offered her a great deal of focus and stress relief and relaxation and she says that using that information from the induction that she will continue to meditate regularly. Week Two: Kassie made an attempt to meditate during the week between the sessions so today I assigned as her homework for the following week that she will set up a definite time and place to mediate just five minutes a day. I want her to ease into the meditation process but also to have a definite plan to do so. So a brief meditation 31


time accompanied by a specific place to do the meditation was the best option for this patient. Today in the hypnosis session we worked on confidence and addressed the issue of weight loss which in her case consisted of changing her diet. We also addressed increased exercise, motivation and having energy in general to do what she needs to do. Week Three: We worked on concentration and focus while meditating since she is meditating regularly now. And confidence to get her game patented. Kassie has an idea for a game which she feels that once patented would be a wonderful seller. So I worked with her to get the confidence to make that happen. We also worked on other areas of weight loss. The homework I assigned to her to talk to husband since she stated that her husband is negative toward her. She agreed to do the homework of talking directly to him about this asking him to change the way he talks to her. Her homework was also to write down the next few steps in getting the game patented. Week Four: We worked on confidence again, programming her to expect to win. We worked on future pacing, having her seeing and living in the future, that is the way she wanted to be. She stated that her patent is coming along. She did not talk to her husband and now states that she wants to leave her husband. She is meditating regularly. Week Five: Summary session in which I reiterated in a hypnosis session everything that we had covered up to that time.

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RESULTS In following up with Kassie six months later, I have learned that she has not followed through with her patent and she is still living in an uncomfortable situation with her husband. She is still not communicating with her mother. She has lost weight. She has lost 20 of the 30 pounds that she wanted to lose. REFLECTIONS I feel that in retrospect that Kassie was working too many things at one time. I also did not realize until half way through working with her that her husband was a strong negative figure in her life and still is. Additionally she revealed halfway through our sessions that she had to do our sessions at a time when he was not around because she was strongly opposed to her going through any form of therapy. She paid for the last few sessions with a check rather than credit card because she felt that that would be less easy for her husband to track. In working with Kassie it also became apparent to me that she was in a very small town and she had been isolated from all of her friends by her husband who was trying to control as much of her life as possible. In all fairness I had never spoken with her husband and my only knowledge of him is through what she reported. I think that this is perhaps a typical situation in which a female has married at an early age and begun having children right away and not pursued her individual interests and that this clearly contributed to her lack of self esteem. The solution, although it will seem apparent to the reader, is not that simple for Kassie, the idea of having a conversation and potentially leaving him if he does not agree to be “a better person” is much easier said than done especially by a female in a small town whose only adult experience has been within that relationship.

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CASE: Business Motivation PATIENT INFORMATION AND PRESENTING PROBLEM Mark is a 43 year old African American male and the graduate of an ivy league school. Mike is interested in becoming a better salesman. However, he feels that sales are “sleezy.” He is reluctant to make calls. He has been working at his job as a broker for three months. Before that he was mostly in management. He was an accountant. He also has a fear of public speaking and networking. He is afraid that if he “pokes his head up, someone will shoot it off.” In other words, he is afraid that if he achieves too much there will be negative repercussions. Mike has an MBA from an ivy league school. He volunteers with kids and he mentors small business owners. TREATMENT I worked with Mark for four sessions. Week One: I did a beach induction, stairway deepening, and a confidence script. I also referred him to a public speaking coach. Note to reader: I often try to augment the therapy of the client by having them contact other healthcare providers or service providers who can help them achieve their goal. I also outlined with Mike in this first session how we would work together and basically I would be ramping him up for success to help him feel better and better about himself. Week Two: Mark is feeling “on top of the world.” Today we took things up a notch with a hypnotherapy session on motivation.

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Week Three: Mark came back feeling even better. Today we used a swish pattern in which I had him imagine all of the inappropriate ideas and actions he is involved in now and replace them with appropriate helpful acgtions. The inappropriate actions and ideas which mike has are: he is focused on surviving rather than thriving, he is not involved in the community to the extent he would like to be, he has a corporate job which does not fit his personality, he is in what he calls the cubicle life, he is under someones leadership who he doesn’t respect, he is unmotivated to work, he feels that he is “just another drone,” he feels that he is towing the company line and speaking verbage he doesn’t believe in, feel that he is having to conform and yield to mediocrity. The positive and helpful thoughts which he had which I used to replace these are: he would like to write a book and become a recognized author in helping the minority community succeed financially i.e. the African Americans, he wants to enjoy life, he wants to contribute to society, he wants to be more vocal about helping people and the need to help others, he wants a four dour M5 BMW, he wants to live in a five bedroom house on one acre of land, he wants to have a timeshare gulf stream jet so that he can use it to do presentations, he wants to have a yacht to host events for the chamber of commerce, he would like to have a vacation home in Mexico, and he would like to travel as an author talking about his book. The procedure I did was the swish pattern which I believe can be used for two different purposes: 1.) as I expressed elsewhere in this book it can be used to link how current behaviors relate to future positive outcomes and 2.) it can also be used as was the case with Mark today to replace current behaviors and ideas and actions which are more helpful. So I had Mark imagine a picture frame in front of him which is two feet high and two feet wide and seeing everything from the list of non-beneficial actions and ideas and then I had him see another picture frame two feet high and two feet wide, also two feet out in front of him next to that one with all of the appropriate actions and ideas. Then I had him move the picture frame showing the positive actions and ideas 36


out to ten feet so that he could only see the non helpful actions and ideas and then I had him imagine that there were rubber bands attached from the left side of the positive action picture to the left side of the negative action picture and the right side of the positive action picture connecting to the right side of the negative action picture. Then I had him look at the negative actions that he is doing now and just see them in front of him and imagine the positive actions flying forward breaking through the picture of the negative actions filling his visual field for a split second and then going back out to ten feet. I had him to do this ten time in a row at his own pace and then ten times in a row as quickly as he could. Week Four: We worked on being calm during public speaking because he feels that his livelihood is threatened by lack of calmness speaking publicly and he may not get money if he is unable to speak publicly due to the nature of the future he is designing for himself. During the session I had him recall three times when he felt good about himself when he was talking publicly. He was able to identify three different times. One time was when he was doing a class presentation. Another time was when he was giving a speech for a professional group. The third time was when he was speaking overseas to a group of investors. Although I could have installed a resource anchor using these three events which would have also been very beneficial, what I did was a hypnotherapy session where I had him clearly remember each of these three experiences and realize that the person in those three experiences is still him and he is still very powerful. The induction I used was unique for him. I had him imagine that he was driving the car of his creams, the four door M5 down the pacific coast highway. The deepening was watching the sunset over the Pacific Ocean and the script was the aforementioned confidence building material.

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RESULTS Before we were even done with the third week, Mark had quit his job and had begun devoting time to his own financial business. In following up with Mark at six months he had completed two books on financial planning and was giving public speeches regularly regularly without any challenges. challenges. Following up with Mark at one year, although he did not have the yacht yet or the timeshare airplane, he did have the car he wanted and was very happy and still focused on getting the yacht and the timeshare airplane and achieving the rest of his goals. REFLECTIONS This is a clear example of a highly intelligent and highly motivated individual who was ready to make a change and just really needed someone to believe in him and tell him he could do it and that it would be okay. He had everything required to actually make it happen. My job as the facilitator of the change was very easy and straightforward and this stays in my mind as one of the more powerful success stories stories that I have encountered in my twenty tw enty years as a hypnotherapist.

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CASE: Anxiety and Insomnia PATIENT INFORMATION AND PRESENTING PROBLEM Todd is a 29 year old white male. His occupation is e-commerce and it keeps him up at night and has some trouble sleeping and is reporting insomnia and anxiety as his chief complaints. TREATMENT I worked with Todd for one session due to money concerns. We did a hypnotherapy session focusing on relaxation. I used a beach induction and a stair deepening deepening and a relaxation script. I also told him in the script that he would put the day behind him at the end of the day. He would fall asleep anytime, anywhere even during the day, under any circumstances that he wanted to fall asleep. I told him that when he thinks about the next day he will be relaxed. RESULTS I followed up with Todd T odd at six months and he was still having insomnia. REFLECTIONS I prefer to work with clients for a series of three sessions on insomnia. First session building confidence, second session addressing insomnia directly, and the third session is what I call cleanup, meaning I work with anything that has been overlooked overlooked or needs to be revisited. Some clients, as was the case with Todd, somewhat undermine this procedure by wanting to save money. I explain to them that the efficacy of the treatments is less when they don’t follow through with the three session protocol. However, Todd understood that and he wanted wanted to have the treatments anyway.

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CASE: Confidence for Dating and Acting PATIENT INFORMATION AND PRESENTING PROBLEM Dave is a 45 year old white male. He wants to have confidence with women and confidence in acting. Dave is a beginning actor in Hollywood. He also wants to work on memorization of his lines. Since he is still a beginning actor he has a day job so he wants to deal with stress relief in his job and personal life, also concentration, becoming less dependent on relationships, making more money, overcoming procrastination. Dan was previously married and has a daughter through that marriage. He will continue to pay alimony until that daughter is 18 years old which will be six more years. He is a former semi-pro football player. He is just now ending a relationship. He was a Jehovah’s Witness and he left them ten years ago. He states that he always tried pleasing his mom, but he could never measure up. TREATMENT I worked with Dan for six sessions. Week One: I did diagnostic hypnosis. I used a technique which I teach in my book Advanced Hypnotherapy for Professionals. The reason did the diagnostic hypnotherapy with Dan was to discover the reason for his lack of confidence since he was unaware of it consciously. Dan was able to discover under hypnosis that his lack of confidence was due to one major incident with his mother when he was a child in which she disciplined him for speaking his mind and that happened when he was five. Ever since that point he has been a shy person and lacking in confidence. We did a hypnotherapy session following that. Since Dan is somewhat of a spiritual person, I used a meditation induction in which Dave imagined himself meditating in a private room alone and for the deepening I had him imagine himself walking down some stairs in the meditation room as I 41


count down from ten to one. This is a common induction and deepending I use with more spiritual minded clients and the script was a basic confidence script. Dan left the session in awe of hypnosis. This session was very powerful and mind opening for him. Week Two: We worked on acting motivation, discovering certain attitudes which he had been holding on to which were nonproductive for him and helping him let go of those. I did a beach induction with a stairway deepening and an acting motivation script. Note to reader: many of my scripts are available in Hynotherapy Scripts Volume I and Volume II. Available on my website: http://www.stevegjones.com/books.htm. Week Three: We worked on his confidence with women. I did not have a script for this, I used a relaxation and chakra meditation induction and a stairway deepening and I did not have a confidence with women script at the time, I currently do. At the time this was something I had not dealt with before since it was early in my career and I modified a basic confidence script. Week Four: We did NLP. We did a Dickens pattern where the client sees themselves in the future seeing two alternatives, one is a successful person the other is unsuccessful and they are able to easily determine that they want to be the successful version of themselves. I had him look ten years in the future at age 55. The successful version of him had the following attributes: he is starring in movie, he is successful doing voice overs for movies, he has a five bedroom house by the beach in los Angeles and a house in manhattan, he has a Mercedes 500SL convertible, he has several girlfriends, he is helping his daughter, he has lots of “toys” meaning jet skis and an airplaine, he travels everywhere. 42


The unsuccessful version of himself was him working in the same job he has now, he is with the same women that he just recently broke up with he went back with her, and he does not own a house. Using the Dickens pattern makes it easy for the client to determine which future they want. I also installed a confidence anchor for him today. Whereby he could touch his right index finger and say the phrase “Oh yeah baby.” Note to reader: the client decides which phrase they will say and what action they will do. The therapist does not. That way it is more personal to them. All I had to do was have Dan recall three times in his life when he felt confident. As he recalled each of those times in detail and got him to a peak state, he would then anchor that incident by touching his forehead and saying the phrase, “Oh yeah baby.” It is also important to note that the anchor should be very specific. For example, he used his right index finger and touched it to his forehead. Week Five: We worked on him feeling good about himself with a meditation induction, stairs deepening, and a script of general well-being. Week Six: We did another Dickens pattern where we again looked at two alternative futures because he was deciding whether or not to get back together with the woman he had just broken up with. We looked at the alternatives of staying with her. Looking at the two alternative futures, one staying with the lady and one not staying with her. He say himself ten years from that point. Looking at the alternatives, the first one was if he stayed with her, he saw himself as having a bad attitude, being jealous, being abrupt in his conversation, being with a woman who is closed off emotionally and doesn’t want to share anything, being a person who is not committed because he is not that into her, having missed opportunities that he could have taken advantage of both professionally and relationship wise had he not been married. Looking at the alternative of not staying with her, he saw 43


himself acting, being on his own, coming and going as he pleases, “partying” by himself without feeling guilty, acting and auditioning without feeling guilty, having a house, having found the right person, having freedom, and having financial independence. These are the ways that Dave described each of the two possible futures, one staying with the lady and the other not staying with her. He was able to decide from that, that he did not want to stay with her. Note to reader: I want to point out that he probably did not need to go with the hypnotherapy session after coming up with that list while wide awake because the list is so clear that he obviously did not want to have a future with that lady. We did not do a hypnotherapy session, I just had him come up with that list. RESULTS When I call Dan six months later he had left the lady and was auditioning regularly and feeling very good about himself. One year later Dan had become a regular on a television show and quit his day job, he said he was, “Living the dream.” REFLECTIONS Dan, like most people, had a clear vision of what he wanted for his future but he was plagued by guilt and a lack of confidence, this stifled his growth as an individual and kept him from making the moves which he wanted to make. He was in essence coming to me to ask permission to make these moves and I reassured him both through talking with him and through hypnotherapy sessions and through the work with NLP that these moves were fine and he was in charge of his life. And his decisions, although they would affect others, needed to be motivated by his true inner desires which were very clear to myself and to him. After our brief time together, Dan was able to move forward. We did work together for six sessions. I did my standard protocol of three sessions which I normally do for Dan’s type of situation which would be building confidence and

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then becoming motivated and then Dan wanted to work together for an additional three to address the other issues he was facing.

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CASE: Pain Control PATIENT INFORMATION AND PRESENTING PROBLEM Kip is a 47 year old white male who is currently in a drug rehab center for oxycontin abuse. This was not mandated by a judge. This was self imposed, he admitted himself to the treatment center. The treatment center is very expensive; it is $50,000 a month. Initially Kip had an injury and was prescribed oxycontin for the pain four years ago. He still has the pain and now has a pump which directs the oxycontin directly into the blood stream. He is at the drug treatment facility to get off the pain medication. I was called in by the psychologist who is the head of therapy at the center to get Kip off of his medications and teach him how to control pain with his mind instead, using hypnotherapy. It is important to point out that Kip is a very wealthy individual and is accustomed to having the highest level of service that money can buy. And he expects results from himself and others. This would prove to be beneficial as we continue working together since Kip proved to be very diligent in doing his assignments between treatments. Kip has had nine back surgeries. He has also been on medication constantly since 2000 and he wants to get off of the medication. TREATMENT Week One: Today I assessed Kip’s suggestibility by using the lemon test. I had Kip imagine himself looking at a lemon tree. I described the lemon tree in detail and had him imagine picking a lemon, cutting it open and biting into the lemon. Kip produced saliva during the test which indicates suggestibility. I then tested Kip on his hypnotic aptitude for dissociation, putting himself under hypnosis and having him imagine his center of consciousness across the room. Kip was able to imagine this and felt dissociated from the pain in his body at the same time. I then tested his hypnotic aptitude for altering the tactile sensations of 47


his body. I had him imagining replacing feelings of pain with cold sensations in those parts of his back where he was feeling the pain and he was able to do this. I then taught him how to numb her arm just by thinking about it becoming numb. I then taught him how to change the feelings of pain to feelings of cold just by relaxing and imagining them changing to cold, slowly. I then taught him how to dissociate from the pain by imagining his consciousness being across the room simply by having him imagine himself leaving his body and him being across the room. Kip displayed enormous aptitude for self hypnosis. He was immediately able to perform all fo these techniques. His homework was then to practice all three of these techniques. Week Two: I explained the circuit breaker model of pain control to him in which he can imagine himself going into a room in his mind where there is a circuit breaker box and each circuit breaker corresponds to a different part of his body. So he would practice turning off the circuit breaker corresponding to his left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg, etc. Kip was able to master this easily and he had done his homework. I then worked with him in a hypnotherapy session to engrain this technique and his belief in his ability to do this technique and the other techniques I had already taught him. His homework is to practice all four fo the techniques: dissociation, changing the pain to cold, numbing himself, and using the circuit breaker box. I drew a circuit breaker box which had seven circuit breakers. The top circuit breaker corresponded to his head, the next one corresponded to his front torso, the third one corresponded to his back, the fourth one corresponded to his left arm, fifth one right arm, sixth one left leg, and seventh one right leg. I used with him the same technique that I use in certifying my hypnotherapy students for my specialization class on pain control found here: http://www.stevegjones.com/advancedhypnosiscertificationclass es.htm#optC.

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Week Three: We reviewed all four of the techniques and I did a hypnotherapy session with him just making him more powerful in using these techniques. Week Four: We reviewed all four of the techniques again and eliminated the cold technique since it doesn’t work too well for him. Kip at this point is displaying an even greater aptitude for using these techniques and becoming proficient at using them when alone and quiet. As I explained to him, he needs to use them in any situation. I had him demonstrate to me how he could use one of the techniques of his choice in his mind to control the pain and I had him open his eyes and talk to me while he was still controlling the pain. Thereby adding a level of difficulty to his pain control and allowing him to segue into using this technique in his everyday life while he is doing things he would normally do rather than simply being able to use this technique under ideal conditions, i.e: when he is alone and quiet. Kip was able to maintain his pain control while talking with me so we did a hypnotherapy session just solidifying his ability to do this. Week Five: Kip has done his homework and has been talking to people while controlling the pain. I wanted to focus on just one technique which he could become an expert at and use consistently and he and I discussed it and he decided that he would imagine a soft blanket covering the painful area. We solidified this technique today using hypnosis making it now his one and only technique to use. Week Six: Kip has become an expert at using the blanket technique of pain control while talking with others so I decided to raise the level of 49


difficulty for him to make this technique more appropriate for use in his everyday life. I brought a tennis with me to the session. I had Kip do his pain control technique while talking with me, imagine the blanket and control the pain. He was able to do so. I told him I would be tossing a tennis ball to him and that I would like him to toss it back to me and at the same time talk with me. So first we engaged in conversation then during the conversation he relieved his pain using the blanket technique and then I began tossing the ball and had him tossing it back to me while we continued talking and he continued to control the pain. Kip was able to do this perfectly. On a scale of 0-10 Kip reported that he was able to keep his pain down at a zero the entire time. RESULTS Kip then ended his stay at the drug rehab center having received help from me and an entire team of experts in their individual fields. He asked me to make hypnosis CD recording which he could use to control the pain, to keep his skills up in controlling the pain and remind his subconscious mind of his power. I prepared this recording for Kip, gave it to him and he listened to it for the next three weeks. In following up with Kip six months later, he still has the pain since it is of an organic nature with actual tissue damage. However when the pain does surface he is able to immediately control it using the blanket technique and keep the pain subdued throughout the day. He wakes up with pain but immediately controls it. Sometimes at night he wakes up with pain but he will immediately control it and is able to get back to sleep. Kip is leading a normal life and is doing his normal activities uninterrupted. In following up with Kip one year out, his status was the same. REFLECTIONS I find that working with pain control clients I have their complete attention and cooperation. Working with clients to control pain is unlike working with weight loss clients or people 50


who want to quit smoking or people who want ot be more motivated. Think of these people of being in a fire or in a burning house, they want to get out of the burning house. People who want to lose weight, stop smoking and be more motivated are generally are not in an immediate rush to do so. They view it more as a process. People who are especially in extreme pain want that pain to go away right now and they are willing to do anything it takes to make that happen. They are almost always extremely diligent about their homework and they do produce results. The lemon test which I did with Kip at the beginning of our work together, is a type of test I do with every pain control client to assess their aptitude for self pain control and their potential success with treatment. I don’t always use a lemon test. There are other lemon tests that I use, but it is important to do a suggestibility test. If a patient does not pass the suggestibility test I tell them we can continue with the hypnotherapy sessions, however I know in my mind it may take a few more sessions than usual. When working with a highly suggestible person the work is very easy and they are able to gain relief from pain control very quickly. Less suggestible people i.e: people who do not produce saliva during the lemon test will require, generally speaking, more sessions and may not be able to achieve their goals. If they “fail” the suggestibility test I do not share this with them because I think it if very important to not discourage a client from achieving their results. I simply write a note in their records that they may require more treatments than someone who is highly suggestible. To share this information of “failure” with a client would be to potentially undermine the treatment or delay their recovery.

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CASE: Confidence and Insomnia PATIENT INFORMATION AND PRESENTING PROBLEM Natalie is a 26 year old white female. She has come to see me for ego strengthening and insomnia. Natalie is a female body building champion. She recently was married and her husband who brought her to the session and stayed with her throughout the entire session is not accepted by her parents. Her husband is a nutritionist and a body builder as well and works with her on her weight training and nutrition. As a child she was mentally abused and has flashbacks about that. She left her family six months ago. She told her parents she was going to work on a Master’s degree but she left her country of origin and moved to the United States to marry her current husband. She cried while telling this story. Her parents are Italian. She was taught that she should have a rich Italian catholic husband and her current husband is none of the above. She states that her parents argue a lot and she used to think that this is normal. She thinks that her father did not want a daughter. Her parents do not show affection. Her dad is illiterate and “blows up” a lot meaning his temper flares. She had an abortion after becoming pregnant from a marijuana dealer in her country of origin. Her mom was okay with this because at least she stayed at home. She has been a professional body builder for six years. Her mom emailed her current husband as if she was Natalie and then pretending to be her, was able to obtain some personal information about their relationship and discovered they were married. Additionally Natalie has constipation problems. She has tried numerous remedies, but the constipation remains and appears to be stress related. She was sexually abused by her father until she was 17 and the social services of her country at that point forced him to stop. As a child she was not allowed to walk on certain carpets or touch certain things. Her father would check the linoleum floor daily to see if there were any dents. She was not allowed to track things onto the carpet or move things which the father had placed in a certain position. She currently has problems making 53


decisions on her own. She is relieved she can be herself around her husband. When she was a teenager her dad would watch her with boyfriends to make sure nothing happened. She feels that she had done something wrong when she misplaces items currently, such as misplacing nail clippers. Her parents are very controlling. She currently uses marijuana to sleep at night stating that it helps to calm her down. Her husband is in favor of her maintaining a relationship with her family but without the negativity. Her parents are only supportive if they are in control. She feels that she cannot operate a motor vehicle on her own, go to the gym on her own, or even walk down the street on her own. In the twelfth grade she had IBS and ulcers. She is constantly nervous now. She is unable to become naturally lubricated during intercourse. When she and her husband have intercourse they have to schedule it. She also has to receive an enema daily. She will spontaneously raise her voice and become violent. Recently she kicked and broke a dresser in their bedroom. She grinds her teeth. She eats six packs of gum at a time. She is a very driven person and will drive herself hard physically even if it risks her health. She trains constantly for body building. Her husband regulates how much she drinks per day, what and when she eats and the duration of her exercise. Otherwise she would “go overboard.” Her husband drinks excessively and when he drinks he tends to become loud and she speaks loudly in public. She has an anxiety of people “thinking he’s an ass” when it comes to knowledge about fitness. TREATMENT I worked with Natalie for one session. During this session her husband was present for every step of the process and consistently verbally offered information about Natalie’s condition and what he perceived as being an appropriate course of action in hypnotherapy. It was my understanding that they would come to a series of hypnotherapy sessions with me and I began what I thought would be the first of those sessions with a hypnotherapy session using a confidence script. When I’m working with clients I generally use a confidence script in the 54


first session. This serves as an underpinning for all future progress, giving the client a firm belief in themselves and allowing them to accept positive change into their lives. RESULTS Natalie did not return for any subsequent hypnotherapy sessions. She contacted me approximately one month after the session to tell her that her husband had been arrested for being drunk in public and becoming obnoxious at a nightclub while they were together. He had propositioned one of the ladies who worked at the nightclub and had gotten into a fight with one of the bouncers. She stated that she was feeling better about herself and thanked me for the session. In following up with Natalie one year later by email, she told me that her husbands regular drunken outbursts and that she had moved back to her country of origin and was continuing with her training. REFLECTIONS It was apparent to me from the first session that Natalie had recreated some of the negativity of her childhood having chosen her husband as her replacement for her father. The presence of her husband at the hypnotherapy session made a productive and honest session nearly impossible. It was apparent to me, almost immediately that her husband was the current catalyst for the continuation of many of her childhood problems but that she was not prepared to let go of that father figure. The depth and extent of Natalie’s challenges would have required numerous hypnotherapy sessions. It is my feeling that her husband brought her to hypnotherapy to “fix her” and that this was simply part of the on going controlling process that she had become a part of.

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CASE: Smoking Cessation PATIENT INFORMATION AND PRESENTING PROBLEM Tim a 60 year old white male who has been smoking for forty years. He has recently gotten himself down to 3-5 cigarettes a day from 2.5 packs a day. Ten days ago he cut back to eight cigarettes a day and now he is at 3-5 cigarettes per day. He formerly smoked for any reason whatsoever. His medical doctor referred him to me due to some pre-cancerous growths in his throat. Tim is highly motivated to stop smoking after seeing photos of his throat from his doctor and being warned that he needs to stop or have a vocal chord scraping performed soon. TREATMENT Week One: Today we did a hypnotherapy session on confidence and decided on a stop smoking, this is the date he will stop smoking and I worked this date into his hypnotherapy session programming him to stop on that date which is two weeks from today. Note to reader: This is my standard procedure when working with a smoker. We pick a stop date and we both agree on it. Then I program them to stop on that date in the session and I give them a CD version of the session so they can listen to it every night until that date. Also as part of the first session in the intake, I have the client fill out the stop smoking questionnaire. All of this information is available on my online stop smoking certification class found here: http://www.stevegjones.com/advancedhypnosiscertificationclass es.htm#optA. In the stop smoking questionnaire I find out various triggers which have caused the client to start smoking again in the past when they have stopped and triggers throughout their day like eating a meal, getting up in the morning, driving in a car which they have associated with smoking on a day to day basis. I also determine which they do

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not like to eat so that I can use this information to create a negative association between that food and smoking.

Week Two: Tim returned for his session feeling good. A couple of days ago he had a puff of a cigarette but that was it. He is having touble with cravings during his morning coffee, when he has an alcoholic drink at night, and at the dog race track where he likes to spend some time. I made note of these two to work into the final session. Note to reader: I do not require the clients to stop smoking until the third session. Sometimes they attempt to stop before the third session and that’s fine, but I explain to them clearly that they are not expected to stop nor are they held accountable for stopping until the third and final session. Tim simply wanted to try early and I think that is commendable. In the second session according to my protocol from my smoking cessation class I showed Tim a series of graphic pictures detailing the effects of long-term smoking on different body parts. This picture can be especially impactful for a male since it shows what can happen physically to the penis as a result of long term smoking. In addition to this it shows such various body parts as the mouth, skin, scalp, fingers and toes having incurred damage as a result of smoking. I instructed him to continue to listen to the recording from last week every night for another week just like I instructed him for last week. Week Three: Tim reported another area of cravings that I will include in todays session and that is during social situations. In the third session I hypnotized Tim and used the protocol which I teach at http://www.stevegjones.com/advancedhypnosiscertificationclass es.htm#optA which uses ten different techniques both NLP and hypnotic to help the client stop smoking. Among them is the aversion therapy where I pair the food which he does not like with the act of smoking. I also go through his day addressing each smoking trigger which he had told to me and some others 58


which I suspected such as stress when dealing with certain people in his life and I removed those triggers. RESULTS In following up with Tim in six months he had not smoked anymore and again at one year Tim was still smoke free. I wrote a letter to his medical doctor after the last session stating what I had done. Note to reader: It’s also important to note that I wrote a letter to his MD when I initially took him in as a client. This is considered to be an expected formality among healthcare providers that when a client is referred to you from a medical doctor you will thank him or her for the referral and then you will later update the doctor on what you did. Also as I explain in my hypnotherapy certification course: http://www.stevegjones.com/learn.htm, it is important to only treat the client for what the doctor has sent them to you for and not to consider this client an ongoing patient of yours. This practice of having someone referred to you and considering them to be your patient on goingly is considered by many doctors as unprofessional and somewhat abusive of the trust they have put into you that doctor as sent that client ot you for one specific purpose. If you continue to work with that client it should be each time as a result of the request of that doctor or with the permission of the doctor. REFLECTIONS I never doubted Tim’s determination to quit smoking I also never doubted that he would stop smoking. Tim presented me with tremendous leverage to help him stop smoking. He already had bad news from his doctor and he was already determined to quit smoking. He had actually told me in the initial intake that he was going to quit with or without me. He just wanted me to help him. I fully believed this, that Tim would have quit whether anyone had helped him or not. He was efficiently scared about what would happen to him. Many time when working with smoking patients, if they are not scared that smoking is going to 59


hurt them then they are usually not prepared to quit. Smokers, just like gamblers or anyone else who displays compulsive behaviors feel that there is more time before they hit rock bottim and so they will continue smoking or gambling or drinking excessively until something really bad happens. For a gambler it could be losing a house. For a drinker it could be killing someone in a drunk driving accident. For a smoker it could be a diagnosis by a doctor of a precancerous growth. These events, although extremely unfortunate, generally mark the turning point for the patient. The point at which there is sufficient leverage to help the patient stop that compulsive behavior. It is also important when working with smokers that you do not offer any discounts because this makes the financial impact less severe if they do not quit smoking as a result of your therapy and you lose leverage. Additionally, I never accept payment from a third party from a third party because this loses leverage also. If they are to continue smoking after you treat them, that action has to be impactful for them. It has to hurt them in their wallet or pocketbook. This gives you the leverage that you need to help them. If someone else is paying for their session and they don’t stop smoking, they haven’t lost anything. They are not feeling the pain of having lost money. These points about leverage are very important points because when dealing with a smoker or anyone else with compulsive behaviors. You need to have as much leverage as you can financially, medically, etc. to help them reach their goal of stopping.

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CASE: Smoking Cessation PATIENT INFORMATION AND PRESENTING PROBLEM Dwight is a 30 year old Caucasian male. His presenting problem is smoking. He first smoked at age 23. He has been taking 8-10 Vicadin pills per day. He started taking them after a dental procedure about five years ago and now he continues to take them. He has lost fifteen pounds in those five years. He currently appears gaunt. He later wants to get off Vicadin. Dwight is a manager of a car dealership. He wants to stay in front of the desk more because when he leaves the desk to smoke it takes away from being seen as a good manager. He is hiding it from his parents. He would like to focus more on his job and get involved in church which he doesn’t attend anymore. He also wants to get back to the gym and start exercising. He has a strong belief in Jesus and believes that prayer will help him overcome anything. TREATMENT I worked with Dwight for two sessions. We had planned on working together for three sessions, but he only showed up for two. Week One: We set a stop smoking date. I did a beach induction, sunset deepening, and confidence script and also implanted the stop smoking date in his subconscious mind which was to be the date of his third session. Week Two: I showed him the pictures of smoking damage and told him the implications of smoking physiologically.

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Week Three: Dwight didn’t call or didn’t show to his third session and he wrote me an email saying that he was sorry for not making the appointment. He had to be admitted to the emergency room; he had a blockage in his intestines. He is back at work but not sure how long he will be at work. He said he just wanted me to know what happened and why he missed his second appointment. He expressed that he hates when his customers don’t call him to tell him that they are not coming and he did not want to be that person. He also stated in a phone message that he had stopped smoking. RESULTS As stated, Dwight did stop smoking. Following up at six months and twelve months he also was not smoking but was still using Vicadin. I informed him that if he wanted to work on that, we could certainly his Vicadin use. REFLECTIONS Dwight was obviously ready to stop smoking. I think the first and second sessions helped him make this a reality. The fact that he did not come to the third session seems to be unimportant. I feel that the results are the most important thing to consider in any hypnotherapy session. Dwight clearly produced is desired results.

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CASE: Business Motivation PATIENT INFORMATION AND PRESENTING PROBLEM Lawrence is a 38-year-old Caucasian male. He is a homosexual. Lawrence wanted to work on business improvement TREATMENT Custom Recordings I worked with Lawrence initially making custom hypnotherapy recordings for him. So he found my website online, www.stevegjones.com and he paid for several custom recordings approximately one every two months and he bought three total. They were dealing with things such as increasing his business and becoming more focused in his business and having a better relationship with his boyfriend. In Person Session Lawrence scheduled an in person session with me when I was going to be in his city doing a seminar and had some available time to see clients. Lawrence came to me and we worked on feeling good about himself physically, mentally and business wise improving his business, being mentally and physically strong, being comfortable using QuickBooks in his business, being a better manager of things at his business, being able to leave the business mentally when he leaves it physically each night and not being burdened by it after business hours, and telling his boyfriend that he no longer wanted to work with him, being more confident, and getting more joy out of his relationship with his boyfriend, having more of a social life, taking more time to himself for relaxation, stress relief in the form of getting his business in order, redefining his relationship with his boyfriend as a non business relationship seemed to be the two primary issues on his mind.

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Custom Recordings After working with Lawrence in person, he asked me to make two more custom recordings and these were dealing with a situation that had arisen in which Lawrence felt victimized by the local police department who had arrested him for reckless driving. At this point his business going under financially and he seemed to become emotionally unstable. He also revealed while I was working on these custom recordings that he was schizophrenic whereas he had not revealed that to me in the past. He also revealed that he had previously been under the care of a medical doctor but that he had discontinued seeing that doctor and had discontinued taking his medications. RESULTS Lawrence’s life during the course of the treatment he was receiving from me took a 180-degree turn. Lawrence went from being a minorly stressed yet successful business owner to being on the brink of bankruptcy and mental breakdown. Lawrence did not achieve any of the results he was looking for and at this time is destitute. REFLECTIONS This is important case for hypnotherapists as generally nonlicensed professionals we are under an obligation to follow the treatment outlined by a licensed professional who the client is seeing. In cases of mental illness, we also have an obligation to contact the licensed professional who treated the client last if that client gives that permission for that contact. The reason for this is that the licensed professional is more knowledgeable on how to treat a mental illness. And in those mental illness cases in which the licensed professional cannot be reached it is my strong opinion that a hypnotherapists without any other credentials should refuse treatment of the client and refer them to a licenses mental health practitioner. In Lawrence’s case, I had no idea he was schizophrenic, I had no idea he was schizophrenic until very 64


late in the treatment. At the time that he revealed schizophrenia it was already apparent that he was quite mentally unwell. Lawrence did not reveal the name of his doctor so I did not have any way to follow up with that doctor but I did recommend to him that he seek the help of a medical doctor or licensed therapist in his city. I gave him the names and number of two that I found in the online local director in his city. In dealing with Lawrence mostly through emails when preparing the custom recordings, he revealed that he has cyclically been clinically depressed and it is my understanding that the clinical depression which he displayed during the latter part of the treatment that he underwent with me was “normal” for him. It is my belief that he should have sought the help of a licensed mental health professional rather than the help of an unlicensed and less educated hypnotherapists. However, he made his decision.

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CASE: Business Motivation and Weight Loss PATIENT INFORMATION AND PRESENTING PROBLEM Rob is a 35 year old Latin-American male. He is a business owner. Rob would like to be more motivated in his business. He also wants to lose some weight and he would like to have a relationship with a female. He has anger toward his wife. Rather than leave her as he has left other women in the past, he wants to try one last thing, hypnotherapy to curb his anger. He said he was “not getting enough sex from her” and that was upsetting her and in the last week it has improved but he is still not satisfied. He will try hypnosis to see if his anger goes down and if it does he will continue with hypnosis. He has children and that is part of the reason he remains with his wife. TREATMENT I worked with Rob in a series of four sessions. Week One: In the first session, as is my common procedure, I work with him on confidence and I mention that if we continue working together I will work on helping him gain more confidence. I also mention that if we continue working together we might have to address his anger directly because he did disclose to me that he has some anger. Week Two: I did a hypnotherapy session on business motivation since Rob expressed to me this week that he wants to be more motivated in his company and resolve what he calls little things. He wants to talk more to customers. He wants to check with his workers frequently. He wants to organize his office. He wants to stay in the office longer each day. He wants to schedule his days more

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efficiently. In general, he wants to run his company more efficiently and be more organized. Week Three: This week we worked on weight loss. Ideally weight loss would be treated as a series of six sessions devoted strictly to weight loss, but Rob says that time and money are an issue so we just devoted one week of our work together to weight loss. He has identified the ineffective foods he is eating as pizza, fries, burritos, McDonalds breakfast food, sodas, and bread. The foods that he would like to replace those foods with are tuna, chicken, avocados, variety of fruits including nectarines, peaches, bananas, and grapes. Week Four: We worked on confidence. Rob wants to be confident in dating and looking for Ms. Right. He has apparently not been loyal to his wife. Rob revealed that he is actively dating other women. So we worked on dating confidence. Note to reader: I think that it is important here to note whether or not the hypnotherapists condone cheating or not, I feel that they have an obligation to provide a service for the client to achieve their goals as long as it’s within the limits of the law, that’s my person view. I have no problem with hypnotherapists who would refuse to give dating confidence to a married man, however keep in mind that Rob has stated that he does want to leave his wife and he has revealed this week that he is and has been actively dating. Rob has a fear of asking women out. I assigned some homework where he will approach ten women and say the following phrase, “You are very beautiful. Would you like to go out sometime?” It’s a simple phrase which Rob can easily memorize and simply test on ten women. I told him the level of success which he can expect would be somewhere in the neighborhood of a thirty percent positive response rate and a seventy percent rejection rate and anything better than that would be very good, but to expect about thirty percent. It is always interesting to me how 68


many men are interested in using hypnosis to have dating confidence and also learning hypnotic techniques they can use with their dating prospects. I have worked a lot with people on this sort of thing and I decided to put it into a book called Hypnotic Techniques for Dating Success available at my website, www.stevegjones.com. It is highly effective for women as well. Today we did NLP for confidence, installing a resource anchor which Rob could fire off when needed for dating confidence or anything else that he is going to work on. He had to come up with three situations in his life which were powerful for him which he could use to get himself into the peak state of confidence so that the next time he is in a situation where he needs confidence all he will have to do is fire off the anchor. We decided to use the action of him patting his left upper chest with his right hand and the phrase would be saying, “You got it.” Having a kinesthetic and a verbal anchoring cue seems to be more helpful than just having one or the other. So the procedure today was done by having him imagine each of the three scenarios and feeling the confidence associated with each scenario at each state and anchoring that state with patting his left upper chest with his right hand twice and saying “You got it” at the same time. With his eyes closed he first imagined himself in the first scenario he told me about which was seven years ago when he was a salesman, he had proposed to his ex wife and he had also just bought a new house and he was making a lot of money. All of these situations made him feel very confident so I had him imagine himself back in that period of his life. By the way it is always good to have these anchoring memories limited as much as possible in time. Such as an event that occurs in the space of a few minutes is better than a period of life that could expand a few months. However Rob wasn’t able to come up with three moments in his life which made him feel wonderful about himself so we used as a first anchoring memory, a period of his life rather than a brief snapshot of his life. An example of a brief snapshot would be opening a letter of acceptance to a college, blowing out candles on a birthday cake, or saying I do at a wedding. These moments are what psychologists call flashbulb memories because they are so 69


powerful, the memory is imprinted more clearly than the average memory. The second thing I had him remember was the time in his life when he was making a lot of money and living by the beach and he was quite popular socially. The third time I had him remember when he was playing baseball with a community team and the game was tied and he scored the winning run. I had him close his eyes remember each situation, and fill it in with detail, the sights and sounds and smells and feelings both physically and emotionally more intense and then anchor the events one after the other. I would have him anchor one and have him recreate the next and anchor it and then recreate the third and have him anchor that.

RESULTS In following up with Rob six months later, he had in fact lost the amount of weight he no longer wanted or needed. He had left his wife and was dating a woman he considered to be attractive. He had completely changed his business to make it more stream lined and organized and efficient. In general he stated that he felt much more confident. In following up with Rob a year later, Rob had maintained his weight loss, was engaged to the woman he had been dating at the six month mark, and his business was doing even better. REFLECTIONS Although I did not think that Rob would be able to obtain maximum benefit from the individual hypnotherapy sessions due to the diversity of the topics, Rob completely surprised me in achieving highly in every category. I was honestly very surprised by his success because he seemed to be extremely lacking in self confidence and it was reflecting strongly in lack of dating success and poor management of his company. And his apparent inability to be honest with his wife about the situation of their marriage. I am glad to see that I was wrong and very encouraged by the results even though the procedure was done in the less than ideal manner. The ideal manner would have been between 70


three and six sessions on each topic. That is the protocol I like to use when the topics as diverse as the ones presented by Rob. However, Rob had tremendous success and ultimately that is all that matters.

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CASE: Gambling Addiction PATIENT INFORMATION AND PRESENTING PROBLEM Cedric is a 45 year old Asian American. He is addicted to gambling. He formerly had a gambling problem. He stopped seven years ago and started two months ago. In those two months he has lost $8,000 gambling. Since the 1980’s when he started gambling he has lost $35,000. He enjoys it due to the adrenaline rush. However, his wife has had enough. She told him he cannot go to Las Vegas and this frustrates him. He has been going to Gambler’s Anonymous for fifteen months. Cedric is a Christian. He says he has lost faith in himself due to being a gambler. He has also been a preacher in the past and feels that right now he cannot preach due to the embarrassment of being a gambler and people in the church knowing that he is a gambler. TREATMENT I worked with Cedric for nine weeks, nine different sessions. Week One: In the first session we worked on confidence and he left feeling much better about himself. Week Two: In the second session we worked on motivation to relax and be confident. We did a swish pattern designed to have him replace ineffective actions with appropriate helpful actions. Week Three: In the third session, Cedric has relapsed. He is gambling, he won $500. I told him he needs to stop gambling because he knows that a compulsive gambler ultimately loses, which is one of the 73


premises of GA (Gamblers Anonymous) which he is a part of. Note to reader: Any time a client is working within the framework of any of the anonymous programs: Gamblers Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, etc. It is important to recognize this as part of the belief system of the client and to work within that belief system. Therefore I made my hypnotherapy advice to him consistent with Gambler’s Anonymous beliefs. Today we did a hypnotherapy session with NLP in the hypnosis. I had him recall a time when he felt powerful, under hypnosis. I had him make a fist with his right hand and told him this is his power hand and he can use this whenever he needs it in the future when he feels the urge to gamble he can simply make the fist and it will remind him of that time when he felt powerful. Week Four: Cedric says he wants to continue gambling. He says he may quit for six months and then start again. He says that this is fifty percent due to fear and fifty percent due to wanting his money back. He wants to be honest about this with his wife who by the way escorts him to every session but does not sit in on the sessions with him. He also says he does not want to “break his wife’s heart anymore.” Cedric states that money is an issue for him right now. In talking with his wife before the session I discovered that they are having serious financial problems. His wife is actually taking care of payments for the sessions. I told her that starting today the sessions will be at half price because I want Cedric to continue with the sessions. Cedric says that he wants to discontinue the hypnotherapy and if he decides he wants to quit gambling in the future he will resume. Week Five: One week later Cedric was back in the office ready to quit gambling again. Today he wants to work on his stamina to be a strong person and to no longer look back, to just look forward.

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He also wants to trust himself so we worked on these issues hypnotically today. Week Six: Cedric states that he gambled recently and lost $40. He said, about gambling “I don’t need it in my life anymore. I don’t want to waste my money anymore on unreasonable things.” He said that his brother told him, “You are better than that.” His son is coming up. He states that he wishes he had more money for his son to buy him something nice. Concerning gambling he says, “I dumped it.” Today we worked on solidifying his resolutions concerning being done with gambling. Week Seven: Cedric states that he gambled again recently. He lost $250 at a local casino. He states that he wants to quit gambling for the rest of his life and he is ready to make a strong stand against it. Note to reader: this is a typical pattern for a person dealing with a compulsive behavior. The client will often wrestle with it and go back to it and stop it and go back to it and stop it and so forth. Cedric is gambling less now than he had been before coming to see me and his rate of money loss has decreased considerably, in other words he is not losing as much money as he was before beginning the hypnotherapy session. It is my belief as I state in my book Basic Hypnotherapy for Professionals in the ethics section that if therapy is not working, it should be discontinued. However, it is clearly having an effect on Cedric’s behaviors and he and his wife are optimistic, as am I, about his progress. Cedric came in today with a number of affirmations about stopping gambling which I incorporated into the hypnotherapy session. He also would like to become focused on a project which is setting up a fish tank. Note to reader: I find that the cultivation of projects, artistic, business, etc. Is a wonderful therapeutic tool for obsessive types such as Cedric. A considerable amount of the extra energy they have can be channeled toward the project or hobby rather than the 75


compulsion. As the project or hobby progresses, the patient begins to feel better about themselves. Cedric’s homework is to set up a fish tank.

Week Eight: Cedric states that he has not gambled since the last session although he did have the urge yesterday. We did an NLP session, a swish pattern in this session I had him imagine a picture frame in front of him two feet wide, two feet high seeing himself engaging in those activities, mainly gambling. In a picture frame next to it, two feet high and two feet wide I had him see the logical end result of that activity, ten years from now. I had imagine himself having fallen apart, having hurt people and basically living life as a nightmare which is what he stated his life would be like if he continued gambling. I then had him imagine the picture frame on the right of his future moving out to ten feet in front of him and I had him imagine rubber bands connecting the picture of the present him and the future him on the right side and another rubber band on the left side. I told him that if I were to let go of the future him, it would come flying forward breaking through the picture of the current day him filling his visual field for a split second and then going back out to ten feet. I had him do this exercise ten time in a row at his own pace and then ten times as quickly as he could. The idea here is that he is creating an association in his mind between the ineffective behavior of gambling and the ultimate undesired result ten years from now which is a life he is not proud of. I then did the same procedure but I had him associate his effective behaviors with a powerful and happy future by doing the same procedure yet this time the present picture showed him fighting the urge of gambling, saving more money for travel, for his house, for his son to get married. The future picture showed him ten years from now which would be age 55 traveling, having plenty of money, having a happy family, being trustworthy, living a worthwhile life, having a greater connection with his family, having lively communication with those people in his

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life, feeling that things are great, loving his life, enjoying his life, celebrating his life, and feeling that life in general is beautiful. Week Nine: Cedric has been gambling and he has lost $5,200 in the last week. He has also started smoking. His wife found out and he had been hiding it from her. Smoking has been going on for about a month. He revealed today that his mom was a gambler and his relatives were gamblers all of this as a child and as a child he played cards at home. His gambling game of choice is pigow. Which is popular in his culture and is a card game. He stated that he hates going home when he loses at gambling. Note to reader: when working with someone who has a compulsive tendency, it is typical for their subconscious mind to attempt to sabotage the treatment. I have found that this usually happens about half way through the treatment. I feel that there is a thermostat in the subconscious mind and it likes to be at a certain level. When you alter that level it can react violently and attempt to pull things back to where they were. In the case of Cedric with his compulsive behavior his subconscious mind seems to have a reason to hold onto this behavior and caused him to sabotage his success by causing him to gamble excessively to the point of losing a lot of money so that he can go back to being in a situation where he feels comfortable. There is generally a payoff for these types of behavior. Perhaps in Cedric’s case it is more attention or being able to avoid creating a powerful life. In today’s hypnotherapy session, Cedric has decided to go back to the church and begin preaching again and today we did a session reaffirming his affirmations that he has been saying to himself such as, “You think very clearly. Your focus is on God. You rely on God. You will turn your life around. You will restore your intimate life with God. Before you do anything you ask God.” After the induction and deepening I had Cedric imagine himself walking into a church and confessing his “sins” to God and feeling the love of the people in the church. His homework then was to do this, to walk into the church and confess his sins and feel the love of the people. 77


RESULTS In following up with Cedric I spoke with his wife six months after his last session and she said that he is now a “man of God,” he is no longer gambling and he is very active in the church as a preacher. In following up one year from the last session with Cedric, he still had not gambled at all and continued to preach. REFLECTIONS Cedric displayed a typical pattern of a person battle with a compulsion. I was surprised that the after the last session he no longer gambled for a year considering that he had lost $5,200 the week before the last session. Many times with clients, a belief in a “superhero” ie, someone greater than them whom they can rely on for strength is very helpful. Putting religious beliefs aside, the reader should realize that everyone’s concept of God is unique even among certain groups such as Christians, Muslims, Jews. God is unique for the individual so everyone who believes in God carries a unique representation of Him or Her in their minds. I like to refer to the collective idea of a God under the broader category of a superhero. If a client believes that there is some entity with superhuman strengths which can help them in time of need, that thought independent of the actual existence or non existence of “God” is going to help them. The thought is what allows them to make the change in my opinion. And as we look at “God” in the larger category of being a superhero we can also include in that category deceased relatives who can give some extra help to the individual, “angels” who can assist the individual, etc. My point here is that whether “God” exists or not or whether a Muslim God or a Judeo Christian God, or any other god actually exists is not the issue here. The issue here is how strongly that individual believes that their superhero can actually assist them. In Cedric’s case, the belief in the superhero proved to be strong enough. Of course his wife’s insistence on him no longer gambling played a major role as well. But his 78


reintegration into the church unit was in my opinion was the primary facilitator of the longevity of his recovery. If Cedric did not have that church unit to go to regularly, the commitments to himself may not have lasted very long. So we see that community support, family support and superhero support all played a role in Cedric’s change and should be considered to be very useful in working with clients and helping them reach their goals.

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CASE: Finding Missing Items PATIENT INFORMATION AND PRESENTING PROBLEM Erin is a 42 year old white female. Erin works as a high end prostitute and she has misplaced $10,000 in cash and wants to find it. She states that she has no memory of where she put the money. She stated that she was beaten as a child and she has panic attacks now in which she blanks out. She states that when something good happens to her she wants to “mess it up.” She previously suffered from anorexia and the last time she was in therapy was ten years ago. TREATMENT Erin wanted to work together for one session to get the maximum benefit out of that one session since for her money is obviously an issue for her right now. Erin told me during the initial intake that she entertained an Asian man over the weekend and he was a client of hers and he spent the weekend with her and for this service he paid $10,000 cash. She said she clearly remembers putting the money in her closet in a specific place which she also remembers and when she went back to look for the money, it was not there. During further discussions with her she said that after the session she had a male friend come over who she says is the only person in the world she can trust. She told him about the money. She stated that when he left she looked for the money and could not find it and thought she had misplaced it since “he would never do something like that,” meaning he would never take the money. Under hypnosis she remembered using the restroom while her friend was visiting after the Asian client had left. She remembers coming out of the bathroom and seeing him walking away from the closet. After the hypnotherapy session, she had a clear memory of walking away from the closet, as had been revealed under hypnotherapy. Yet she maintained that she must be remembering incorrectly 81


and she must have put the money somewhere else and just can’t remember where it is. She thanked me for my time and left the office. RESULTS The results in this case are unclear because I do not know what happened to the money or anything else. In trying to follow up with her six months later her phone had been disconnected. REFLECTIONS I believe that what happened is that her friend stole the money and that it is difficult for her to accept this fact. She is a woman who has resorted to prostitution to make a living and as with most people who turn to that she has extremely low self-esteem. This friend of hers was her “last friend in the world.” For her to acknowledge that he would do something like that would be for her to acknowledge that she actually has no friends in the entire world. This would be devastating to her psyche so in order to keep herself intact, her subconscious mind finds it necessary to deny what seems to be the very obvious reality of her friend stealing money from her.

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CASE: Confidence for Acting PATIENT INFORMATION AND PRESENTING PROBLEM Michael is a thirty-year-old actor in LA referred to me by his psychologist. In addition to being an actor, Michael is an engineering student. He is a Latin-American male. Michael has been doing voice over work for Disney and recently was booked in a feature length movie. This came as a surprise to Michael because he was doing voice over work and going to school as an engineering student so he was a bit shocked at his recent success and he has since then has been part of another feature length Hollywood movie and feels that his success has simply been luck. Michael just wanted to have one session because although he has made two movies recently, the money has not yet shown up for him due to the way that screen actors guild members are paid. Michael’s chief challenge at this point is that he wants to be in a third movie but feels like he has only been riding his luck and will not be successful getting the part in the third movie. TREATMENT Normally with a client of this nature I would work with them for three sessions and then assess the progress and then work with them for three more sessions. Since financial concerns were on Michael’s mind, I did what I could for him in one session combining hypnotherapy and neuro-linguistic programming. I had Michael tell me three things which made him feel that he was a worthy person and those three things were: 1) that he was recently in a movie 2) in high school found out that an attractive girl liked him 3) receiving the job for doing voice-overs for Disney. It is important to note that although one may feel that a client can generate “better” reasons for feeling confident, the client’s judgment is all that matters. If graduating from kindergarten is important in the eyes of the client and that is one 83


of the things that they mention as being a major accomplishment in their lives that made them feel good about themselves. The therapist has an obligation to not question this decision on the part of the client. The technique that I am about to describe which I used with Michael it is unimportant what I or anyone else besides Michael think about the importance of his selections. The only important factor is that Michael feels that those things are important. So once michael had the three things in mind which made him feel powerful in his past, I simply had him in the NLP anchoring portion of the session I had him close his eyes and put himself back in each of those three situations, one after the other. I would tell him to increase the volume of the memory, intensify the visual aspect of the memory, increase any odors associated with the memory so that he could have all of these senses associated with the memory heightened. Also anything he felt in his clothing or in the temperature of the air that was increased as well. I then told him when he was feeling the good feelings of confidence of having put himself back in that situation at a peak state, he was to fire off the anchor which we had determined ahead of time and the anchor was saying the phrase “I’m the best” and squinting his eyes. I like to have as part of the anchoring process a kinesthetic accessing cue and a verbal accessing cue so I regularly make these part of the process and I let the client choose the action and the words which will they will then anchor each memory with. The idea is that they can then fire off the anchors when they need them when they are going into a situation in which they need to have those feelings again. In Michael’s case the feeling he was anchoring was confidence. So before going into an audition in the future he could simply fire off that anchor by squinting his eyes and saying softly to himself “I am the best.” RESULTS In following up with Michael one year later it was not necessary to follow up with him because I saw him in three feature length Hollywood movies in that year after his final session. Michael clearly achieved the goal he was after. 84


REFLECTIONS It is my opinion that Michael actually did not need hypnotherapy because clearly what he was already doing was already doing. Having worked with many actors when I had an office in Beverly Hills, California I noticed that there level of success had absolutely nothing to do with their self worth and self confidence. I have never noticed any correlation between how popular and well known an actor is and how they feel about themselves. It is prevalent among actors at all levels of success to feel an extreme lack of confidence in their acting abilities. Although, every actor I’ve worked with feels that they are the only one who is harboring the “secret” that they can’t actually act and that they are not worthy of the roles that they are receiving. This secret fear is very common among actors. In my opinion the proof is in the pudding and the fact that they are getting acting jobs clearly indicates that they are confident enough to get the jobs and be successful. The mounting evidence of continuing to book more and more movies unfortunately does not act of evidence of worthiness in an actors mind. They continue to see themselves as worthless and untalented in many cases. And they feel that luck and connections and their ability to disguise their lack of talent are the only things which are getting them acting work.

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CASE: Confidence and Skin Picking PATIENT INFORMATION AND PRESENTING PROBLEM Tara is a 19-year-old Caucasian female. She is a student. Tara came to me to improve herself and improve her self-confidence and control her skin picking habit. She claims that she has “disorderly eating habits” (bingeing). She is often on 100mg of Zoloft per day. Tara states that she has had an eating disorder since age twelve, but that she is okay now even though she eats emotionally. Her skin-picking problem affects her at night. She washes herself and sees imperfections and starts picking at her face. She does it more when she is upset or has had a bad day. She has been doing this for about a year. A year ago when she started she would do the picking for about two minutes once a week and now she does it one to two hours five times a week. A possible trigger is that a year ago she was working with a theater company and had a lot of stress. Before that she was happy and calm. Now she is anxious and stressed out and depressed. The goal that we determined was her possibly being on Broadway since she is a stage actress. Another possible goal is medical school, but she has a couple of weeks to decide on what goal she wants to achieve. TREATMENT I outlined with Tara that we would do a three-session protocol and that today we would work on confidence, next session we would work on increasing that confidence and the third session we would work on motivation toward a goal. I find that ramping a clients self esteem up and then focusing them on a goal that they will accomplish in the future is very effective in helping them overcome certain situations. Week One:

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Today’s session was on confidence. I used the beach induction, the stairway deepening and a confidence script. I also implanted in her mind that she would reset her mind emotionally to a year ago when she felt light and carefree before the picking started. RESULTS Tara did not come to any subsequent sessions, nor did she answer any phone calls. REFLECTIONS I don’t know what happened with Tara. I have no information. There are two reasons why I included this case study in the book is 1). I wanted to show the protocol with working with someone with a self-esteem related issue and 2). I wanted to show that not all clients continue on with their treatment and in many cases there is no reason given. When training hypnotherapists I always tell them to separate themselves from the results. This case serves as a good example of how we must, as hypnotherapists, practice this separation. If I were to be emotionally or egotistically involved with the results then I would have suffered when she didn’t call back. However, I have a clear understanding that the results have very little to do with me and mostly have to do with the client. A therapist of any type should always keep this separation involved so you are able to transcend the work you are doing. You simply do your job to the best of your ability in the way you have been trained and the results take care of themselves. This is perhaps a good of a place as any to mention that I tell clients in the first session that I cannot guarantee any results and that my philosophy is that the responsibility for the results lies clearly on the shoulders of the client and every client I have ever worked with agrees with this. For example if someone is smoking, I cannot physically show up to their home and pull the cigarette out of their mouth and make them stop smoking. I will do my job of hypnotizing them, but not smoking is their responsibility, just as coming to subsequent sessions is their responsibility. 88


References Bierman, S. (1995). Medical hypnosis. Advances: The Journal of Mind-Body Health, 11(1), 65. Blakeslee, S. (2005). 3, 2, 1:This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis. New York Times, 155 (53406), F1-F4. Bloom, A. (2007). A trance to behave better. Times Educational Supplement . Bolocofsky, David N.; Spinler, Dwayne; CoulthardMorris, Linda (1985). Effectiveness of hypnosis as an adjunct to behavioral weight management. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 41 (1), 35-41. Choi, C. (2004). Gut Feeling. Scientific American, 290 (1), 30-30. Cochrane, Gordon; Friesen, J. (1986). Hypnotherapy in weight loss treatment. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 54, 489-492. Complementary and Alternative Medicine. (2004). Southern Medical Journal Diamond, S., Davis, O., Schaechter, J., & Howe, R. (2006). Hypnosis for rehabilitation after stroke: six case studies. Contemporary Hypnosis, 23(4), 173-180. Holt, J., Warren, L., & Wallace, R. (2006). What behavioral interventions are safe and effective for treating obesity?. Journal of Family Practice, 55 (6), 536-538.

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Kirsch, Irving (1996). Hypnotic enhancement of cognitive-behavioral weight loss treatments—Another meta-reanalysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64 (3), 517-519. Rouse, D. (2007). creating a healthier life. Better Nutrition, 69(4), 46-47.

Weil, A. (2007). ask Dr. Weil. Prevention, 59(1), 88-89.

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Resources Steve G. Jones, M.Ed., Clinical Hypnotherapist (The official website of Steve G. Jones) http://www.stevegjones.com American Alliance of Hypnotists (Membership is free in this worldwide online directory) http://www.hypnotistsalliance.com Classes on Hypnotherapy (Become a certified clinical hypnotherapist online in eight weeks) http://americanallianceofhypnotists.org/classes.htm Hypnotherapy pre-recorded sessions (Over 250 specific topics such as weight loss on CD and mp3) http://www.stevegjones.com/products.htm

Hypnotherapy Scripts (Mostly written by MD’s and Ph.D.’s) Hammond, D. Corydon. Handbook of Hypnotic Suggestions and Metaphors. 1990. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. (A Norton Professional Book from the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis.)

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Books by Steve G. Jones, M.Ed. M .Ed. Available at http:// http://www.stev www.stevegjones.com/books.htm egjones.com/books.htm and select bookstores worldwide.

-Basic Hypnotherapy for Professionals -Advanced Hypnotherapy for Professionals -Hypnotherapy Inductions and Deepenings Volume I -Hypnotherapy Inductions and Deepenings Volume II -Hypnotherapy Scripts Volume I -Hypnotherapy Scripts Volume II -Hypnotic Techniques for Dating Success -Business guide for Hypnotherapists (Office set-up, set-up, websites, forms, advertising online, search engine optimization, creating and selling hypnotherapy hypnotherapy CD’s and mp3’s) -Hypnotic Sales Mastery Techniques -Hypnosis for Laymen -Past Life Regression Hypnotherapy -Hypnotherapy Case Studies

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Hypno case studies

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