Monday, May 17, 2010

Where did I learn hypnosis?

This is one of the most common questions I get when I meet people. I get it so often I'm going to answer it and then make a permalink to the post!

Most of my early learning was reading books in high school and trial and error. I did more progressive relaxations than I care to remember. (I almost never use them these days, but I did learn how to do a good one.) I recorded self-hypnosis inductions, I hypnotized my friends, I figured out a couple of times that it helps to ASK them first, if you want to keep them as friends...

When I got to college, I devoured every book in the library. On my trip back to my old alma mater this spring, I stopped by the library with Copper and we went and found the best book I read, the one that gave me the tools and techniques I now use. Please note there are tons and tons of fantastic books out there, but this is the one that rang the most bells for me and made me able to move past progressives and into more useful inductions.

That book is William E. Edmonston Jr.'s The Induction of Hypnosis. It is out of print, but in case people want to try and find it online the indicia information is as follows:


Wiley Series on Personality Processes
Copyright 1986 by John Wiley and Sons, Inc
ISBN 0-471-83112-3


This is not a hypnosis 101 light read, but neither is it as dense as many books on NLP. It is a book intended for academia and it shows. It was also the best book I could have picked up, since it is focused on just that: inductions. It is a history book, but it deals more with how people get into the state than many books. Since it deals with trance across time, it shows that people are capable of hypnotizing themselves with methods that have nothing to do with relaxing each and every body part in turn. And, of course, it has a chapter on Milton Erickson.

1 comment:

  1. Sadness. Google Books has scanned it but the publisher doesn't allow preview even though it's out of print :(

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