Hypnosis Training

 Below are the new selected dates for the Consulting Hypnosis Course:

The next professional NGH Hypnosis Certification Course will be held at my office conference room at 939 Rt. 146 in Clifton Park.  The times and dates are as follows:

2025 Class Schedule

8:00am—6:00pm

Saturday & Sunday, Jan. 11, 12, 25, 26

Saturday & Sunday Feb. 8, 9, 22, 23

Saturday & Sunday, March 8, 9

Make up day:

Saturday, March 29

For this years class, 2025, call 518-577-8367 or email me at jmh@jameshislop.com

Movie Study Guide for Hypnosis Training

   Selected for our learning and enjoyment are the following movies; Scent of a Woman,  Prince of Tides, The Sacrament, and Meet Joe Black.   Movies invite the viewer into a trance of unreality that becomes real in the imagination, like any good, well-told story.   You feel the story in your body as though it were really happening to you now.   You identify with a character and attempt to influence other characters, and are the viewer at the same time.   These are the same techniques that hypnotists use that increase the effectiveness of change for the client that are the same that movie makers use to increase the power of their movies, to make their story more compelling and rewarding.    Movies create trances of romance, outrage, terror, sorrow, appreciation and healing.   Movies take the willing viewer ‘’on a ride’’ of experience.   We land somewhere different than where we started, “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothea.”   To do so, the viewer has to be willing to suspend disbelief and accept the movie’s plot as plausible in some way.   The hypnotist takes the client on a ride of suspended disbelief that ends with the requested resolution for change, growth and healing.  

     Some of our class time will be studying selected movies in detail for their techniques to induce change.  Since movies are such a powerful medium, the study of hypnotic techniques can be enhanced in this pleasant and convincing way, by appreciating how movies can influence the viewer for change. 

   There are methods of “anchoring” new experience to images and music, thoughts, emotions and sensations.  A musical passage will become associated to a given scene and the corresponding emotion.  Through the movie, the same music theme will be repeated [compounding] to increase intensity until the climax of the movie uses the same music to enhance the emotional effect, make the point, deliver the message, create the healing.   Sample study questions are,

1.       What was the main character’s initial trance [belief about self and the world] and how did it change by the end?

2.       How did the movie draw you in, or fail to?

3.       How did the characters appeal to, or convince, or ‘’hypnotize’’ each other?

4.       Was there healing in the movie?   If so, how did the healing affect you?   Did you feel it?    Believe it?

5.       What suggestions about life did you accept as valid by the end of the movie?  What was true for you?

6.       Could you feel the movie, ‘’take you for a ride”?   At what point did the ‘’ride’’ begin? 

7.       What accessories in the movie, such as lighting, music, rhythm of scenes and events, did you notice or affect you?  

8.       Think of the ‘’shock-value’’ scenes, what preceded them and followed them, and how they affected the plot, and how the movie would lead the viewer in growing appreciation, and keep pace with the viewer’s ability to follow. 

9.       Did something in the viewer heal from having experienced the movie?  

10.   How does the movie treat psychology; a journey through an ordeal of becoming, flashbacks from trauma, victory over self-doubt and fear, recovery of self into wholeness.  

Why become a Hypnotist?

  1. The professional hypnotist offers the usual business of helping clients to quit smoking, lose weight and manage stress, among many other benefits. A nice middle class income can be made by developing this service business like any other. For therapists, knowledge of hypnotism greatly enhances understanding and practice of psychotherapy, offering a theoretical model of distress and procedures for healing. Even if the student never practices hypnotism, the training is transformative and a gift of personal growth.

  2. But the training is much more than preparation for service. It’s much more than technical skill. Learning hypnosis changes your view of the world. The study of hypnosis, for open minded students, is much more than being a technician. You start to appreciate how hypnosis is everywhere that there is an influence. Religion, advertising, politics, education are among many technologies that change peoples’ minds.

  3. Self hypnosis. Like the deeper forms of meditation, self-hypnosis enables the identifying, evaluating, choice of, and dismissal of thoughts. Thoughts are not who we are. There’s another part of the mind, cultivated as the observer, who can observe thoughts and decide which thoughts are worthy of following. We can often choose what sensations we pay attention to, and which ones we ignore, as in pain management and pleasure enhancement.

  4. Emotional states and attitudes can be seen as trances. We experience the trance of abundance v. the trance of lacking. We experience trances of joy, passion, shame and regret. Trances can be induced, changed and eliminated. When advertisers or other emotional manipulators exploit these trances, so many are suckers for the vacant glitter and zing. Gambling vacillates between the trances of lack and abundance, mostly enriching others.

  5. The hypnotist can view our existence as the theatre of life. Movies and stories, if appealing, become an alternate reality to be experienced, often leaving the viewer changed from before. Movies, stories and theatre are all trances. If you accept the influence, the viewer goes on the ride of the story as though it were experienced for real at this moment.

  6. Who becomes a good hypnotic subject? Anyone of average intelligence and an open, curious mind into the mysteries of life.

  7. A professor of mine said many years ago, ‘’education is the process of disillusionment’’. We often educate our subjects by properly disillusioning them of the ideas that keep them unwell. The Hypnosis Training can be taken for personal growth regardless of vocation.

  8. The spiritual process. Trance is the entranceway into religious, metaphysical states. The mind’s usual critical judgment will soften to allow deeper consideration of experience and imagination. Can’t prove it and can’t disprove it, but the experience of spiritual states can be transformative.

  9. Sickness is augmented or even created by sick and disempowering thoughts, regrets and judgments. Healing arises from the trance of acceptance, forgiveness, release. Your view of human nature will change.

  10. Course outline for topics covered; how to induce trance, habit control such as weight, smoking. Stress management. Pain management. Self-hypnosis, evil, fears, age regression, past life experiences, spirit involvement, and fear of embracing death. Hypnosis training is for growth, pleasure and well-being.

  11. New forms of assertiveness, directing theatre, leading and pacing the process, timing of experience and emotional reciprocity between hypnotist and subject are all skills to be started.

So becoming a hypnotist changes the way that you look at life and at people. The training is 100 hours of personal growth that isn’t going to stop when the training is done.

Hypnotists, among other types of therapists, have developed exercises to create the emotional space to contain the process of finally playing out (grieving) the previously disowned, troublesome emotions and experiences, and processing them to completion, resolution and forgiveness.

Hypnosis Course Outline, One Page Overview, 2025

 

Hypnosis Course Outline, One Page Overview, 2025

1. Day 1. Intro to Hypnosis, Manual Lessons 1-15, essentials prior to actually hypnotizing subjects, including definitions of hypnosis, suggestibility tests, influences, cautions, history and theories. Inductions, purposes and values including depth stages of hypnosis, suggestion management, and emerging procedures. About the ‘’Pretalk’’ How movies employ hypnosis, and how to find hypnotic elements in movies. Practice the Elman Induction.

2. Day 2. Processing the Trance of Manipulation. The Con Artist as hypnotist. Scent of a Woman. Stress management, Manual lessons 15-25, Development of suggestions and scripts, applications, including smoking cessation, and stress management programs. Conscious and unconscious mind functions and the use of anchoring and post-hypnotic suggestion. Depth testing. About necessary compliance and manipulation.

3. Day 3. Processing Trance of Religion. Jonestown. Using Dialectical Behavioral Therapy exercises and cognitive waking hypnosis, affect bridge. & hypnotist scripted roleplay. The desire to believe and the true believer. Conversational hypnosis.

4. Day 4. Processing the Trance of Seduction and Desire, 91/2Weeks. Gibbon’s Hyperemperia. Scripts of intensity. Advertising, seduction, desire and pleasure. The works of Mark Cunningham, David Shade and Ross Jefferies. Manual lessons 19-25, On compulsions and Weight management. Session structure, behavioral assessment, and goal setting. Hypnotic Leading and Pacing, Affect Regulation practices. Uncovering techniques. View Boyne’s Case of Lee.

5. Day 5. Processing the Use of Hypnosis for Evil. Definition of evil. Devil’s Advocate. Recognize the effects of depravity. Scenes from the movie, The Sacrament, sociopaths, codependents, religious abuse, narcissists and their hypnosis, non-verbal body memory, Rothschild and Levine trauma treatment and hypnosis. Conversational hypnosis, religion and politics.

6. Day 6. Processing Trauma, view The Prince of Tides. Studying issues of trauma and shame. The Release Technique. Informed Child Technique. Emotional Freedom Technique Lesson 18, Ethics, standards of practice, and recommended terminology. How to build your hypnosis library; essential books show and tell. Toxic Shame video by John Bradshaw. Empty Chair and other Gestalt techniques. Dissociation test.

7. Day 7. Processing Out-of-body Experiences. K-Pax. Learn and practice Self-Hypnosis. Hypnosis for Dream Processing. Healing through catharsis and forgiveness. Anxiety, age regression to cause, Case of Bunny. The ‘’walk-in’’ spirit possession. Hypnosis sleep and for resolving dreams.

8. Day 8. Processing Pain. Psychosomatic trance, NLP. Sharon Forrest’s Prenatal Suffocation Syndrome. Psychosomatic disorders and Sarno’s, The Divided Mind. The work and script for David Frederick’s Flash Technique. AFTERNOON: HYPNOSIS PARTY. Local hypnotists, students and graduates invited for our potluck lunch and practice sessions.

9. Day 9. Processing the Unseen. Meet Joe Black. Making peace with loss, grief and death. Hypnosis for ‘’past life’’ memories, spirit attachment and release. Transpersonal Psychology Hypnosis as a treatment modality. About the ‘’walk-in’’, “Parts Therapy”. ‘’Past-life’’ metaphors and Roger Woolger’s, Deep Memory Process, spirit releasement/exorcism’’ metaphors, Fred Leidecker video. ‘’Deathbed Therapy’’ from Case of Bud.

10. Day 10. Processing Death. Review selected and requested topics. Bardo and afterlife. More on Transpersonal, spirit releasement and past-life experiences. Final Exam. Free years membership into the National Guild of Hypnotists. Congratulations.

Revised and reformatted, the experiential in-person NGH Consulting Hypnotist Certification Training Course will be offered January, February and March of 2025.  The training course includes the Manual of the National Guild of Hypnotists and meets their standards for content and experiential learning.  We use instructional video, specific scripts, and practice sessions to emphasize smoking cessation, stress management and weight loss programs.  At satisfactory completion, the student is recognized as a Consulting Hypnotist and a member of the National Guild of Hypnotists. 

Once the basic theory and procedures are learned, this course focuses on personal growth by addressing our cultural trances.  We use specific movies to identify and understand the trances of shame, desire, religion, evil, trauma, spirituality, the con-artist, and death.   We will understand the trances that we live in, are programmed by, and can find more freedom to believe what we choose. 

We also have, Class #8, an afternoon when local certified hypnotists are invited to practice with our class to greatly increase the practice time and diversity.

I run a once a year professional hypnosis training program for consulting hypnotists and licensed therapists who wish to become hypnotherapists. For the full course outline; see above, or call me at 518-577-8367, or email at jmh@jameshislop.com.

 “I learned hypnosis, identified my fear, neutralized my fear, neutralized the family context for the fear. I can "worry" in the normal range now, as opposed to the previous constant state of worry. I enjoy life now, get on with living instead of obsessing over things. I look at life in a much more positive way...”

— Natalie, Amsterdam, NY