EPISODE FIVE

Please note this is a verbatim transcription from the original audio and therefore there may be some minor grammatical errors.

Dougie Jackson
Hi there. My name is Dougie Jackson. And this is tickety boo, the podcast that aims to be very candid about the anxieties and traumas, we all experience the podcast that says it’s okay not to feel okay.

Andy Griffiths
You focus on that point on your hand. Just take a nice deep breath all the way in.

Dougie Jackson
And then all the way out. And again, just take another nice deep breath all the way in.

And all the way out, and as you breathe out just allow those eyes to close down. That’s right.

And that is therapist Andy Griffiths guiding me through my very first hypnotherapy session. What happens? What does it feel like you find out later on in this episode.

First up, though,

before I look into the eyes, not around the eyes, but into the eyes. What exactly is hypnosis?

Andy Griffiths
we’ve all got very different ideas of what it is and what it should be. For most of us. Our first awareness of hypnosis was probably through the likes of Paul McKenna, and latterly Derren Brown, or being on holiday and seeing you know, the stage show type stuff sleeping people clucking like chickens. Hypnosis is a state that we all naturally go in and out of.

Dougie Jackson
OK, you are going to have to expand on that one for me, my friend. Explain.

You hypnotise yourself. I’m just a guide. And actually, you go into hypnosis to three times a day. Hypnosis is a very narrowed focus of attention, when we kind of just go a little bit more still bring our attention right down and narrow it. That is when we go into hypnosis, and you’ve experienced hypnosis. You just don’t know it.

Forgive me. I’m having a bit of difficulty grasping the concept. Can you please give me an example of when I would put myself under hypnosis.

I’m sure you’ve had the experience of doing a car journey but not really remembering it, you know, you’re in the car. And if the traffic lights went red, you would have pressed the brake pedal and brought the car to a stop. But you don’t feel like you’ve had that much involvement in the journey. The experience of getting engrossed in a movie or a book and time just seems to disappear or engrossed in a hobby like music. They’re all different forms of hypnosis.

Right, I now understand what you’re saying. I get that. I’ve experienced that on many occasions. I just never pegged it as being hypnosis. Would it be like that? If you hypnotised me right now, can you hypnotise me right now?

Andy Griffiths
What I do know from running hundreds of clients sessions with hypnosis is everyone has a slightly different experience. And it’s their own personal experience. Everyone can be hypnotised. Some people can go super fast. So if you’ve ever seen a stage show, you’ll notice that he’ll maybe start with twenty or thirty people on the stage and he’ll weed that down to maybe ten, the twenty that gets sent back to the seats go, I can’t be hypnotised. They can. He’s just he doesn’t have an hour to hypnotise you. He’s got to entertain the audience. He’s looking for the very susceptible people. In a clinical environment where I work with clients. That’s not an issue. I’m not entertaining people we’ve got all the time. So that person may need 20 minutes to go into hypnosis. Some people can go into it super fast. And we have what we call low, medium, highs. Some people are sort of not very susceptible to it. But actually after two or three hypnosis sessions and move right up the rank and become very susceptible to it, we can train our minds to become more open to it. So hypnosis is definitely something for everybody. And it’s a natural state and it’s not something that a hypnotist does to you. The hypnotist is just a guide.

Unknown Speaker
Okay, guide me, Andy Griffiths.

Dougie Jackson
Put your feet flat on the floor and adjust yourself in the chair. So you’re comfortable. And what I would like you to do is to plonk your hands down in the lap. So unlink your hands and just rest them down in your lap. Take a look down at your left hand and just pick a point on the hand. It could be a knuckle, it could be a line but I want you to do is just focus on any point on your hand and just keep focusing on that point on your hand. And as you focus on that point on your hand, just take a nice deep breath all the way in and then all the way out. And again, just take another nice deep breath all the way in. And all the way and as you breathe out just allow with those eyes to close those.

There’s loads of different ways that we can use hypnosis to help people. Our unconscious mind or some people refer to as the subconscious mind. It does 95% of what we do. So blinking, breathing, you know, all of these things we do, when we sit down, we don’t have to remember how to use a knife or fork it the unconscious minds got it programmed in there. So our unconscious mind, what it tends to do is it tries a behavior. And then if it works, it tends to hang on to it, even if it’s not particularly great for us. So when we go into this altered state, or when we go into hypnosis, the part of the mind that’s responsible for running these behaviors, becomes much more open, more open to suggestion to ideas, looking at new behaviors. And like most people, our minds don’t like being told what to do. They like options. So I say my job as a hypnotherapist is to shine the torch on the dark areas, going the answers maybe over here, offering better alternatives and the current behaviour and allowing the unconscious mind to pick that up. So instead of smoking, what could you be doing? Could you be going for a walk? Could it be eating healthily? Could you be breathing better? Most of the behaviours that we’ve picked up were programmed into us, we weren’t born with them. So if we’ve learned them or they’ve been programmed in, we can reprogram, you can adopt it, unlearn it, change it. It never ceases to fascinate me the levels of what can be done with hypnosis. You know, I’ve helped people that have had strokes, gain momentum, we’ve got rid of pain and phantom limbs, to the bizarre of somebody who forgot where they put a very precious piece of jewellery. As you breathe, your eyes are clear your heads clear your nose is clear. Four as you breathe, you just gently start drifting upwards now, Five Eyes gently opening back in the room calm and relaxed.

So what was going on there? For me? There was nothing going on there. There was absolutely nothing going on that I could hear your voice. Yeah, there was nothing flying over inside my head. And I felt a little muscle spasms, which is obviously me unwinding so I could feel them in both arms. And I could feel them in my legs and my neck. From that. I assume I was relaxing as I was oh yeah,

Andy Griffiths
you’re away. I got you out of your own head for a bit. You know, I was just knocking on the door there. I wasn’t really in doing much.

Dougie Jackson
But you know, I was aware of everything. Yeah,

you hear hypnotherapist use the word sleep. Hypnosis can be very relaxing and lead to sleep, but it is not sleep. You hear my voice you hear sounds in the room. It’s about hearing. As a hypnotherapist the only tool I have are words. So I need you to hear them.

Well. You just helped me have probably the most relaxing five minutes of the week, though.

Yeah, thing is five minutes of hypnosis can be like having two hours power nap in the chair. And it’s weird the kind of things you can sort out when you’re in that state.

And if you’d like to find out more about what you can sort out by hypnotherapy, just head over to www.ticketyboopodcast.co.uk for all the information. If you have any questions, suggestions, stories or helpful information. Or if you have a media request, please contact us by email on [email protected]