Reorienting Hypnosis Education

Abstract

The legacy model of professional clinical hypnosis training presents a restrictive frame increasingly incompatible with our evolving understanding of psychobiology, health, and care. Emerging science recognizes human experience not as disease and diagnosis, but as manifestations of individual, uniquely-endowed, adaptively self-regulating systems. Hypnosis is a particularly well-suited discipline for effecting beneficial change in this paradigm. Training in clinical hypnosis must progress from the current linearly-structured, diagnosis-based, reductionist model toward a more responsive, naturalistic, and client-centered curriculum in order to remain relevant and accessible to clinicians beginning to integrate it into their practices. To that end, this article extends Hope and Sugarman’s (2015) thesis of hypnosis as a skill set for systemic perturbation and reorientation to consider what those skills may be, the principles on which they are based, and how they may be taught. Parsing a clinical vignette reveals how incorporation of novelty and uncertainty results in less restrictive and more naturalistic hypnotic encounters that, in response to client-generated cues, elicit psychophysiological plasticity. This disruptive hypnosis education and training framework extends the utility and benefit of applied clinical hypnosis.

Keywords:

• educational
• standards
• hypnosis
• neuroplasticity
• professional education
• psychobiology
• trance

Notes

^1. In this article, compound words such as neurobiological, psychophysiological, and neurophysiological, which are commonly used to refer to the inclusive integration of many human systems, are used here interchangeably. While it can be argued that there are important and nuanced differences in meaning between these compound terms, those are beyond the scope of this article. All of these can probably be subsumed into the most inclusive and simplest term: mind.

^2. Rossi’s Four-Stage Creative Process is a chronobiologically-based (90–120-minute ultradian period) model for the progression of psychobiological change. Each stage ([1] data collection/sensations, [2] incubation/feeling, [3] illumination/intuition, [4] verification/thinking) in succession maps onto psychobiological rhythms from mind to gene expression and brain plasticity, which project onto changing experiences and behaviors. In this way, the model has utility—both in research and clinical settings—for understanding how people change their minds.

^3. While such protocols have necessarily been the basis for much hypnosis research, it follows from our premise that results of this research have limited ecological validity.

^4. In this context, we are referring to regression as a lifelong capacity for youthful creative adaptability and not manipulating a client to experience a younger age or memory.