NLP Hypnosis - Doug O' Brien
Hypnosis - Discussion between Michael Beale and Doug O'Brien, January 2008.
Doug O'Brien is a Master Practitioner and Trainer of NLP, and a Certified Hypnotherapist. He now conducts numerous seminars of his own around the globe.
(Please allow 2 minutes for the MP3 file download if you want to listen to this discussion)
http://www.nlp-expert.co.uk/hypnosis/doug.mp3
Michael : Good morning Doug
Doug : Good morning Michael
Michael : Firstly if I could just thank you for taking part in this podcast. Can you give our listeners a brief introduction to who you are and what you do?
Doug : My name is Doug O'Brien, I'm an NLP trainer, hypnotist, hypnotherapist, and trainer of Ericksonian hypnosis here in New York city. I travel and do seminars elsewhere, but most of my work is done here in New York city.
Michael : What do you understand by 'hypnosis'? How would you define hypnosis if somebody asked you?
Doug : Oh boy, that's a great question. I do a lot of seminars where I have to expose people to hypnosis for the first time. Everybody seems to have this idea of what they think hypnosis is, it's one of those words that makes people go 'Oh! Yeah, hypnosis, yeah.'
But nobody, I think, really, truly understands it because they have a lot of misconceptions based on theatre and stage hypnosis, and movies, where people are under the control of the Sven Gali type person. And it's not just that, I think hypnosis is .... an unfortunate word!
For example when I'm working with a client that wants to quit smoking, I do more traditional trance induction work, where I will relax them and then give them suggestions that they will quit smoking - And that works for most people, it works very well.
There are other situations however where I feel that hypnosis is a natural state, its the type of state you go into naturally on a long run, or when you're driving your car without thinking, but your body is doing it, you're driving the car perfectly safely, but your mind is elsewhere.
This sort of automatic behaviour is a trance. And I think really in a sense that's where the opportunity lies for true realisation of the phenomenon, because as an example, I think most problems are trances - for example if someone raises their voice and you go into this 'oh god I can't handle this' confrontation, then that's a trance, from childhood associations probably, of loud voices or whatever, but its a trance.
As you're going into a trance which isn't very productive, and I think trance sometimes is a de-hypnosis, where you're hoping to get people out of those unproductive trances and get into more automatic, unconscious behaviour that's more productive. It's just as automatic, but its a positive trance if you will.
Michael : What drew you to the subject? and tell us some of your background in it.
Doug : Well, a long time ago, at this point, I was working as a musician in New York city, and I was brought to a Tony Robbins seminar on how to walk across hot burning coals, and I thought it was the silliest things that I'd ever done, but to my surprise I was fascinated by what he was teaching, this NLP, Neuro Linguistic Programming, and I got involved, and I started taking more and more seminars from more and more people, and it seemed like the better you got at NLP you could do this thing called hypnosis, there was this thing called Ericksonian Hypnosis, a lot of NLP apparently came from Milton Erickson, So I said 'Ok, I want to learn that!'
So I start doing whatever I could to do to learn more of the subject, and I've taken seminars from whoever would teach me. sometimes I've snuck my way into seminars that I wasn't supposed to be, because they were kept away from the riff-raff, that's supposed to be taught the people with PhD's or whatever.
I was a musician, I had many degrees etcetera, but none were in the field of psychotherapy, but I did what it took to do all of this stuff and have a great understanding.
Michael : How's it helped you personally?
Doug : It's exceptional. I don't know who or what I'd be if it weren't for NLP and hypnosis. it's been a life changing event. From the behavioural side of things just by stopping smoking or losing weight, I have an ability, I chose to exercise it by the way, I don't think everyone always does and certainly I can't claim to always do it, but I have the ability to effect change on a behavioural level when I want to. And also it's been enlightening and empowering in a lot of ways, just as a quick aside.
Back in the seventies, there was a lot of talking about a lot of things, a lot of live experimentation's with altered states that but they were mostly chemically induced, I was also interested in Eastern philosophy, meditation and that sort of thing. It wasn't very well centred, if you will, and I think what hypnosis offers is an ability to utilize altered states in a useful way.
So it's really helped me utilize my totality as a human being much more than I would have done otherwise. So it's behaviourally important to me but also - I don't want to use the word 'spiritual' but humanly important to me as well.
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Doug O'Brien Interview
Doug O'Brien Interview
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