NLP Hypnosis - Stephen Gilligan

Hypnosis - Discussion between Michael Beale and Stephen Gilligan, January 2008.



Stephen Gilligan, Ph.D., is a licensed Psychologist practicing in Encinitas, CA. Stephen was among the group of students that gathered around the founders of NLP during its formation at U.C. Santa Cruz from 1974-1977. Milton Erickson and Gregory Bateson became his teachers and mentors.

(To listen to the interview please click on the MP3 file below. Please allow up tp 2 minuts for download)

http://www.nlp-expert.co.uk/hypnosis/stephen.mp3

Michael : Good morning Stephen. Firstly I'd like to really thank you for taking part in this podcast.

Stephen : My pleasure.

Michael : Could you just start by giving our listeners a brief introduction as to who you are and what you do?

Stephen : Well, I'm a psychologist. I live in San Diego, California. And professionally speaking, for the last thirty two-thirty three years, I've been doing a variety of therapeutic work, coaching work related to hypnotic work. I started out in the late seventies as a student of UC Santa Cruz and I was a student of Bandler and Grinder, I actually met them when they first got together - I was a student of Grinders. And about a year into that they went out and met Milton Erickson and I was just thoroughly taken by what they had brought back, and the next time they went I went with them and met Erickson in 1974 and became a student of his for the next six years until he died in 1980. So a lot of my work has that as a core - Ericksonian hypnotic trance, and a number of other things have become integrated into that over the years, including a lot of stuff from Aikido and Buddhism, and some from other aspects of psychology.

Michael : From your point of view, what is hypnosis, what does the term mean to you?

Stephen :Well I think it's important to distinguish between hypnosis and trance, most people don't, and it leads to a lot of misunderstanding. So in order to define hypnosis I would first have to define trance. One of the most important aspects of Erickson's legacy was emphasising trance, not as artificial, but as naturalistic, and that is it doesn't come from hypnotic suggestion, it comes from consciousness itself - that it's a natural part of peoples learning states and of their consciousness. I think we could say in the most succinct way that trance is the way that occurs any time that identity is disrupted.

And of course identity might be disrupted in a number of ways, you might get traumatised, you might be at the end of an identity cycle or a learning cycle in your life. I was just working with somebody for example, that was going through retirement - that you might call the end of a identity cycle for that person. Your identity might get disrupted because of things that happen in the world, you might get married, divorced, you might have a child, your child leaves home, a parent dies, you get ill, you get a new job, you change your residence. Those would be what we call events at the identity level, and it creates a break in the identity box, if you will, that you've been walking around in.

So because you need to create new identity patterns at those pivotal points, nature has supplied consciousness with this learning state that we call trance - so trance is natural. And like it or not you're going to go into a trance at least periodically in your path.

Now the thing about trance I would say, is that it's incomplete. It needs a human context. And so the social ritual is able to absorb it, to give it a container, connect it with some traditions or some patterns that allow something that is that coming up in trance, be made artistically into something that has human value. So another way of saying that is what your unconscious gives you in trance is not complete, it's only half human. so you need someway to be able to absorb it in order to be able to shift it into something that has full human value. And that's why I say hypnosis is one of those ritual processes if you will. If a way that you can safely create a container, and receive the unconscious and at full throttle be able to open to the more primitive, primordial consciousness. and that has some set of tools that you can gracefully, I hope, effectively guide it, into a thing that has a full human form and full human expression.

So trance is the experience, hypnosis is the social ritual to guide the experience.

Michael : And what drew you to the subject?

Stephen : Well I think I've had a life-long interest in altered states of consciousness. Maybe it comes in part from the Irish-Catholic blend. But also I think that I was just always intrigued - now that I look back to my childhood I was always drawn to these deeper dimensions and these non-rational states, if you will. And then I grew up in San Francisco and came over in the late sixties, where there was a lot of trance in the air so to speak, so when I was nineteen I was already interested in altered states and meditation, and consciousness at a deeper level - and then I met Erickson and he just blew me out of the water, because he was a guy that was modelling and embodying trance and all of it's states far beyond what I had imagined as possible. and that's always a great thing to meet a model that's able to embody that for you.

Michael : And how would you say that it's helped you personally?

Stephen : Well trance is one tradition, I have other traditions like meditation, like yoga, like Aikido, and I think of these as the essential forms that help a person to become a human being - because we're all works in progress - and consciousness is not really, as I said, a human form. So there's not a day that goes by that I don't use it, for example as a way to stabilise consciousness, as a way to align consciousness, as a way to calm consciousness.

And then to have those capacities, and be able to settle in, settle down and be able to let go of the instinctual fight or flight that is often governing primitive consciousness.

There's this piece of Ericksonian work, that is personally so helpful which is, how do you transform problems, or how do you create solutions - and I really utilise a lot of Erickson's idea on that, about how to be able to accept and utilise whatever's there - and to be able to connect with it in a way for it to unfold into a solution - So that's a good skill to have!

Michael : Now you may have already answered it when you were talking about your own personal experience, but what do you see as trance and hypnosis's main uses?

Stephen : I think that it has a number of main uses, so I was just alluding to some of them. I think that we all need some tool to be able to calm and centre ourselves throughout the day - there's a lot of stuff that goes through that gets us agitated, that gets us away from our base. So one use is to be able to centre.

Another use is to be able to understand things, and I don't mean that intellectually, I mean that you'll be able to perceive life on a very good level. And to be able to sit with it in your bones, if you will, and be confident with whatever's going on in any given moment.
And thirdly I think that it gives a set of tools for being able to create experience. I would say that hypnosis is a beautiful model for how consciousness is created, not the only one but a very helpful one.

Michael : Can you just build on that, I'm not quite sure what you mean by creating experience.

Stephen : Well, you might say that one of the things that trance does is it amplifies everything - so all these subtle sub-modalities of consciousness, it amplifies them. So it helps you to be aware of not only how you're creating a certain pattern, but how you could change the way you're creating that pattern - for example - some of the core dimensions in creating a experience of consciousness are you have a relationship to your past, you've got this whole set of experiential learning that are within you.
Most of the time we feel almost like victims of our past. What you're doing in trance is settling down, amplifying and going into that level of sub-modality, and in trance its called age regression, so you get this intimate, deep awareness of how it is you're using your past experiences to create your present, and then you have this opportunity to generate that in a different way.

Other dimension for creating an experience of the world would be time, and time distortion would be that hypnotic phenomenon where you can really get to enter into the really subtle patterns of how time is used to create a world of experience and then you can be able to change that. One's sense of the future, is very influential in how you create your experience, self fulfilling prophecy - that would be another dimension that gets amplified and you're able to focus on it in trance so that you're able to really tune to how to move your creation of the "future" to create your identity.

Those are a few examples.

To read the full article: Stephen Gilligan Interview