The other day I did a hypnotherapy session with a client coming for dental anxiety. During the session, a neighbour started drilling a wall (there’s always some building going on around me here), so I incorporated that sound into the hypnosis. Afterall, here was the perfect arising and I, anyway, work on the principle that we can be aware of a multitude of things and if we have previously only concentrated on our problems, bringing awareness to the multiplicities shifts our consciousness to whatever happens around us and not be fixated anymore on just the perceived issue.
Incorporating the sound of drilling is a neat example of incorporation in therapeutic practice. I could’ve totally ignored the sound and made no reference to it, but it was very loud and present – and quite funny, really, given what we were working on. Something that the client referred to at the end of the session. The sound, and my reference to it as one of many sounds, served usefully as a reinforcing tool, given that I was emphasizing that one’s attention can be on anything, and nothing at all.
The art of incorporation is central to Ericksonian hypnotherapy, as is its counterpart, utilization. What might otherwise be seen as interruptions are actually very useful opportunities.
The principle of incorporation is using the sounds, sensations, perceptions that arise during a session. Sounds of drilling, perceiving the texture of the rug draped over the client’s legs, the softness of the cushion behind their back, how it feels to put one’s feet on the floor, etc, can all be used to deepen a person’s trance.
The principle of utilization is similar, but refers to anything the client does: movements, words, facial expressions, breathing patterns (even breath itself), cognitive and emotional processes. All can be woven into the hypnotic language employed.
I always employ awareness of breath into the hypnoses I do, because it is already a gift. While we live, we breath and we can use our awareness of our own breath whenever anxiety, or whatever, arises. Some hypnotherapists suggest deep breathing, but I find such a suggestion can actually cause a lot of problems. Getting someone to take deep breaths can made a person ultra self conscious, and create thoughts long the lines of, “Am I doing it right” as well as possibly inducing hyperventilation. Awareness of an ordinary breath, on the other hand: breathing out and letting go and feeling more and more relaxed, pause, and breathing in the new is always available to our awareness, and without stress. And, of course, the beauty of it is that breathing is occurring whether we are awake or asleep and we can be aware of it, or not, and whether we are is a matter of choice. Just like anything else in our consciousness, problems included.
I also often refer to the thoughts and memories that are likely, and most probably, arising as I’m doing a hypnosis and I’m likely to say, “Isn’t it interesting that you can have this thought, or that thought, or that… and they keep coming and going like clouds in the sky, taking shape and form, and evaporating.” This technique I employ is quick in inducing a trance state. As the reader may notice, I use utilization and incorporation all the time when doing a hypnosis, and it use it in a rather confusional way. The point of this is that awareness is shifting all the time in ordinary life and when we pay attention to such processes our fixations on problems shifts. It’s hard to hang on to a single iterative thought when we become aware of the multiplicities of sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that arise.
Milton Erickson, the father of the branch of hypnotherapy that I practice, saw the techniques of incorporation and utilization as central to the creative process of hypnosis, and they are. The old idea of swinging a pendulum in front of a person’s eyes and making them focus on just that and ignoring all which is going on around them is unhelpful, in my view. I’m far more interested in bringing awareness to complexity than trying to control the person. It is in the awareness of complexity that we are able to choose what we attend to, which seems to me to be the whole point of therapy. We are free agents when we become aware of such things.
Please email me on dr_mccardell@yahoo.com if you are interested in receiving clinical hypnotherapy. It’s all done online, which works well.
