Embedded suggestions (or commands) are an important aspect that will
provide a very great amount of power within your Conversational
Hypnosis practices. This is askill 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
vary 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.
