Milton Erickson's Embedded Suggestions

Embedded suggestions (or commands) are an important aspect that will provide a very great amount of power within your Conversational Hypnosis practices. This is aan important skill you will use over and over again to create suggestions that are unrecognizable to the conscious mind.

An embedded suggestion is just a suggestion which is often repeatedly buried in the context of a conversation of miscellaneous words and uttering’s. The statements that contain the suggestion may change in wording and meaning but the suggestion itself is focused on a particular aspect you and your subject will be working on together.

It has been recorded that this practice was first discovered somewhere between the late 1940’s and early 1950’s by the famous master hypnotherapist Dr. Milton Erickson. He got the idea through rumor that the random things that schizophrenics would walk around saying and muttering really had some deeper meaning to them. These undecipherable phrases were ways in which the afflicted were trying to communicate with whoever would listen.

At the time Dr. Erickson became aware of this rumor he happened to be working as a
Doctor at the Worcester State Hospital with mentally disturbed inmates, many of which were themselves schizophrenics.

Upon realizing this theory Dr. Erickson decided to conduct a study of his own using the reams of texts recorded verbatim with what the schizophrenic patients were saying. As he poured through the vast amount of different transcripts all of uttering’s that was recorded word for word from schizophrenics he discovered something...

As Dr. Erickson worked out the many uttering’s he found that there were actually messages embedded among the majority of non sense words and sounds. The theory Dr. Milton Erickson came up with was that some of the words buried deep with in the non sense were meaningful and made sense once connected.

After more time the doctor spent a11 those words were found and recorded and put together to create what he thought were real attempts at communication. Usually the finished phrases included explanations of the patient’s conditions and asking for help.

Because this was only a theory it needed to be tested. Dr. Erickson knew of a secretary in the office that suffered from severe migraines, when she got a migraine she would have to immediately go and lie down to deal with the pain.

He prepared a file of the uttering’s from the schizophrenic’s files and inserted his own embedded messages in place of theirs. The next time the secretary needed to lie down because of the pain in her head Dr. Erickson insisted that she take dictation from him.

As he was a doctor she did so without putting up much of a fight. Then an amazing thing happened. After 10 minutes of his dictation her migraine completely disapeared.

She was amazed and Dr. Erickson proved his theory within this study. Today this principal is known as unconscious priming in the psychological literature that circulates.

So what Dr. Erickson did was to prove that there was a way to get messages across hypnotically when embedded in a list of non sense. This happens because our unconscious minds have an extremely good ‘ear’ for ‘hearing’ or identifying and picking up patterns within life (including your conversations).

There have been many studies since Dr. Erickson’s study; some more complicated, that also prove his theory stands the test of time. Embedding suggestions works for many people at an unconscious level. The mind can pick out the patterns of the words that make sense and use those suggestions and respond to them.

Another example of how the unconscious mind picks up patterns in life is referred to as implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge are those things you just seem to know, no one ever taught them to you directly you just somehow know how to do them. These are simply patterns that the unconscious mind has picked out of life and learned.

These are things that are learned in the background instead of the conscious forefront of learning. Such as shaking or nodding your head, you know what it mean but you were never exactly instructed on how to do it or what it meant.

Embedding suggestions in your Conversational Hypnosis will likely be a fantastic skill. This is a very powerful technique as it lets you speak directly to a person’s unconscious mind and instill the actions needed to get the responses you want.

Now you can see that embedding suggestion is an art that should be practiced well as it will be one of the most crucial factors for anybody who started learning hypnosis and is already a master hypnotist.


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Milton Erickson - Trance Hypnosis and Will Power

Yes, it's true that most professionals who practice hypnosis would have you close your eyes. And it's also true that no one ever does anything against his/her will or anything that would be immoral. Now, that's not to say that some people don't do immoral things as I'm sure you've seen others do immoral acts and they never went to a hypnotist. And yes, some will do outrageous things all on their own without the aid of a hypnotist.

So why close the eyes? The most famous hypnotist of all times, Milton Erickson, rarely had his patients close their eyes. He was the master at wakened hypnosis--giving suggestions without having one close their eyes.

You're probably wondering about trance. When you buy because of the masterful suggestions used by advertising and marketing geniuses, or when the ghetto students are motivated by the educator, or when you purchase as a result of the salesman's presentation, where's the trance?

That's the irony. Trance has no feeling. It happens the moment the analytical questioning conscious mind is bypassed to the subconscious mind resulting in a change of behavior.

Suggestions as used by Mesmer and his tub with iron rods centuries ago wouldn't work today as man has become more sophisticated and analytical. Today's man would ask, "What's this stupid tub and iron rods about anyway?" Yet, depending on the hypnotist's charisma, tubs and iron rods could be made to work. But why go to that extreme? The hypnotist would need a huge room just to house the tub when simply an improved suggestive technique will accomplish the very same thing.

The "art of suggestion" is simply to cause a change in behavior in the subject. Example: suppose there were a hundred people casually walking out the front door of a building over the course of several hours and you wanted to have as many of them as possible look upward to the sky as they exited the building. What would you do? What kind of suggestion would you use? Would you stop each person and tell them that they should look up into the sky because...?

Today's sophisticated man would question your motives and ignore you thinking you might be distracting them to take their wallet. The answer is to position yourself so that as they leave the building they will see you glancing upward. Their curiosity will cause them to accept the visual suggestion and look upward. That's hypnosis! That's trance!

Years ago I commuted to NYC from NJ via a commuter bus. Smoking was not allowed in NJ, but was allowed in NY. Soon after we'd enter the Lincoln Tunnel, one of the smokers would realize that smoking was ok and light up. Within seconds, another would light up, and another, and another--visual suggestion. Sometimes, we'd get all the way through the tunnel before the first smoker would light up. I always hoped that they'd all forget until we reached the Port Authority bus station and were off the bus.

So why do hypnotists generally have their subjects close their eyes? In reality, suggestions given with eyes wide open can be far more effective--that is if they are the right suggestions.

Quite frankly, most subjects expect that hypnosis is done with eyes closed. For many years I conducted group and individual sessions for stop smoking and weight management. Both were a single session. The first portion was done with the participants in the wakened state. By the time we got around to the eye closure portion, my job was done. The eye closure was simply a relaxation that was expected by those taking the program.

Most hypnotists couple relaxation with suggestion because with the experience of deep relaxation unexpected feelings of lightness, denseness, numbness, euphoria, and sometimes feelings of separateness of mind from body are experienced. Being unfamiliar with these feelings of deep relaxation, the subject simply assumes that he/she is in trance (since they feel differently than ever before) and therefore that the suggestions will work. In other words, the critical thinking mind has been bypassed because of a conclusion--actually a false conclusion, but it works for both the subject and the hypnotist.

Will power? The only will power required is to take the first step to making change and that usually is to seek help in the form of cd's or a professional.

One particular advantage of programs on cd's is that nearly a hundred hours goes into the writing, editing, production, reediting and final production resulting in the most effective scripts possible as opposed to depending on a creative spur of the moment suggestion in a live session. Once one has used a cd, then if live sessions are desired, far more progress can be made as the cds have already laid the foundation of suggestion--it's usually a matter of fine-tuning.

The important thing to know is that trance itself has no feeling and that hypnotists in general use deep relaxation to deliver suggestion because it's expected of them.
Richard Kuhns B.S.Ch.E., NGH certified operated a stress management clinic for 17 years, educator and seminar leader for various corporations. He is a prominent figure in the field of stress management and personal change. He is behind the creation of nearly 50 best selling stress management hypnosis cds at http://www.DStressDoc.com and http://www.PanicBusters.com.



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