Hypnosis and Couples

HYPNOSIS AND COUPLES

"Hypnosis is a natural everyday experience. Trance is a natural everyday experience."
-Milton Erickson, MD

When couples fall in love they "entrance" each other; they shift each other into a state of consciousness Erickson called "trance". Usually this trance state is positive.

As they get closer and become more vulnerable to their earliest feelings of love and longing, early-memory imprints trigger unfullfilled expectations, and, if these triggers go unrecognized, the couples' mutual states of trance regress and then...

Couples tend to put each other into negative trances that develop into habitual patterns.

We can use hypnotic tools to reverse this proces by helping couples unhook from imprinted patterns. The split-off parts of themselves that are accessed and amplified can then be transformed.

These split-off parts hurt the most and are therefore the hardest to get to.

The trained therapist who is comfortable with his or her own unconscious (part of the training)
can create the many-layered context of trust and safety so that each spouse feels the unconscious acceptance necessary to open up to these vulnerable parts. By accepting and working with them together the couple can transform them.

Where there was anger there can be compassion.

When people develop compassion for themselves they can open their hearts to the humanity in each other.

The art of the therapist is to maintain the unconscious connection with the humanity in each person simultaneously, and to hold that space for them until they can transform their negative
patterns and become who they really are, not who they were programmed to be.

Copyright 2007 by Jane Parsons-Fein