Most of us are familiar with the image of hypnosis portrayed by stage act hypnosis. The guy who is hypnotized into thinking he cannot lift his leg off the ground, or is made to meow like a cat or bark like a dog. So how can something that appears to be bluntly embarrassing to the subject be used to help someone in therapy? The answer lies not so much in what the subject is asked to do during hypnosis but in the trance like mental state that a person enters during hypnosis. That hypnotic trance uncovers the unconscious mind, which is exactly what psychotherapists are after during many of the stages involved in therapy.

One of the keystone principles of modern psychology is the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind. The conscious mind is the everyday stuff we think of when we say "mind". It is the everyday feeling, thinking, judging right and wrong, analyzing, looking, listening and decision-making. The unconscious mind is what we don't see. It is the automatic programming behind the scenes that makes the conscious mind possible. Only a small amount of information can be in the conscious mind at one time, the rest is unconscious mind.

A good analogy is to compare your mind to a computer. What you see on the computer screen is like the conscious mind. You basically only see it one screen of information at a time. You can go through a lot of screens of information very quickly but it is still only a small amount at a time. The programming inside the computer is like the unconscious mind. It is the programming inside that makes everything you see on the computer screen possible. Most of us never see the programming unless by accident or if something goes wrong and the operating system spits out some computer jargon. Generally, when common everyday computer users see the computer programming in this fashion it is a bad sign and the computer needs to be fixed. Here is where the analogy starts to break down. In the modern world if computer programming goes wrong we usually just reload the program and reboot the computer. You can't do that with people's minds. But sometimes when a computer goes wrong a programmer has to get at the programming and change the program to get the computer functioning properly again.

In the same fashion, sometimes people get off track in their lives and can't seem to get unstuck. Sometimes a therapist has to get at the unconscious mind of those people to see what went wrong in the programming that manifested the conscious day to day problems. Hypnotherapy not only provides access to the unconscious mind but also provides a tool for helping to fix the problem. The same power that allows a stage hypnotist to get people to do strange things can be used to help reprogram a person's unconscious mind to correct the problem feelings or behavior. To be sure, the human mind is not nearly as easy to fix as a broken computer but hypnotherapy provides the therapist with a powerful tool to help.

 

Michael Russell Your Independent guide to Hypnosis Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_Russell