Comments on: Are Hypnosis And Relaxation Different Flavours Of The Same Thing? https://adam-eason.com/are-hypnosis-and-relaxation-different-flavours-of-the-same-thing/ Hypnosis, Hypnotherapy and Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherpy as taught by Hypnotherapist Adam Eason Wed, 18 Nov 2015 11:31:44 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 By: Martin Williams https://adam-eason.com/are-hypnosis-and-relaxation-different-flavours-of-the-same-thing/#comment-26911 Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:48:01 +0000 http://adam-eason.com/?p=4306#comment-26911 I’m not sure, Eason. I’ve read Edmonston, and his thesis that hypnotic relaxation (which he calls anesis, an attempt to distinguish it from Don Gibbons’s alert hypnosis, or hyperempiria) is essentially identical, certainly in physiological metrics, with ‘just relaxing’, is pretty compelling. His original work is now more than thirty years old, but that doesn’t mean out of date, as you know.

It’s all beginning to sound like this: Relax, using verbal (or any other, such as somatic) suggestions, then introduce suggestions for whatever effect you want to produce.

Edmonston’s stuff is particularly valuable, though, in reintroducing notions entertained even by Braid, viz. that it might be useful to view ‘hypnotic work’ as two separable exercises, with different intentions: (1) as a strategy for creating ‘neutral hypnosis’ – deep,physiological relaxation, with no other object; (2) as an exercise in creating a state of mind (absorption, disocciation, etc.) that facilitates suggestions for habit-change, skill-enhancement, and so on.

Continuing research will throw light on the fantastically thorny subject of hypnosis, of course, but I admire your scholarship and your open-mindedness about the whole thing.

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