In the pre-hypnotic talk I ask, "Have you ever been hypnotized before?" The answer is usually "No."
Then I ask, "Have you ever made an effort to be hypnotized before today?" Often they say, "Yes, several times, but no one has ever hypnotized me."Then I ask, "was it for entertainment or therapy?"
They reply, "I had a problem that I wanted to deal with."
"What kind of therapist was it that you went to?" (This is very important because you want to find out if it were their neighbor who is a certified public accountant and does hypnotism demonstrations as a hobby; or a psychologist or psychiatrist, whose
hypnotism skills are of ten the same as the next door neighbors; or a trained
hypnotherapist of experience and reputation in the community.)
"He talked to me for a while, then he said to sit in the reclining chair and close my eyes while he repeated, 'You are getting drowsy and sleepy and you are going deeper and deeper into hypnosis.' He did that for quite a while, but I never went to sleep and I heard every word."
"Then what happened?"
"Well when I arrived home my husband asked me, 'How did the hypnotism session go,' and I said, 'Well I am not sure."'
"I don't think so!"
"You should know - were you
hypnotized or not?"
"Well, I don't think I was but the hypnotist said I was."
"I don't care what the hypnotist said, you should know. Did he lock your eyelids closed?"
"Nope!""Well then, you weren't hypnotized. How much did that cost you?"
"Fifty dollars."
"You didn't make another appointment, did you?"
"No!"
One of the measurements of your effectiveness is how many clients return after the first session. The first session is the one where they should be convinced and the rapport developed, so that the therapy is ready to begin.
It is costs you a certain amount of time, energy and money, to bring that client into your office. If you only get paid for a single session, I doubt if you can recover the amount that it cost you to get the client into the office.
Open the yellow pages for any large city and start calling the hypnotists' listings. From thirty to fifty percent of those listed are out of business. This happens because they place their ad five or six months before the directory comes out, and less than a year from ordering the ad they are no longer in business.
Clients fail to return because they were left with the feeling that they were not hypnotized. I met with a group of hypnotists at the Hilton Hotel in Baltimore and one of them said to me, "I really confuse them, when they walk out of my place they do not know if they have been hypnotized. I tell them that is part of the mental confusion process."
I thought to myself, "At least he has found a way to put a positive view on his ineffectiveness." But, it still costs him money every day.
Over the years that I have been in this work and heard these many stories, the question arises, why are the hypnotists losing these clients. What is it that they are failing to do? They are failing to test the subject to bring to the conscious mind the realization of the trance state. They don't test because they are afraid that the client will not respond in the way that the hypnotist believes appropriate and if they fail to respond, what will he do then?
Suppose he tells them that their eyelids are locked closed and they open them. He's afraid that they will say "Hey, Charlie, you did not hypnotize me, you had better give me my money back." That is not the way it works out, but that is the basis for the fear. You can't be successful in any line of endeavor when you operate from a background of fear. You must always operate from a background of feelings of competence. You will experience emotional and psychic burnout because your fear and anxiety will literally consume you.