NEURO-THERAPY Training: 

Brain Based Rather Than Idea Based

By Marilyn Michael 

Part III of III

NEURO-THERAPY Specialists use the hypnotic state to help people, but in different ways than other hypnotherapists. Their approach is brain-based rather than idea-based. It helps people make desired physical, chemical and mental changes by developing the natural therapeutic potentials of the brain. It brings therapy with hypnosis into a clinical framework making use of it desirable to a much broader base of clients. 

Opening Pathways In The Brain

 If you are driving down the highway and a deer jumps in front of you, in a fraction of a second, you go from sheer terror to calm perceiving things in slow motion. You’ve experienced your brain’s amazing, genetically built-in ability to react in a way that dissipates or neutralizes fear. In NEURO-THERAPY Training this reaction is referred to as the Ancient Alert. One very important way the hypnotic state is used differently from other approaches to hypnotherapy is as a mental platform to trigger the Ancient Alert. The hypnotic state can open the pathway to the brain’s own survival mechanism. Like it can turn terror to calm, this brain reaction can remove the emotion from the thought in the face of damaging situations and negative, destructive memories. By using the neurological technique, SUBVERBAL SHIFTING, to stimulate the Ancient Alert, NEURO-THERAPY Specialists can take a woman who was raped at sixteen and, within a few session, teach her to open up her brain’s own abilities to remove the emotion from the thoughts of that negative situation. She trains the intelligence of her body to manage her responses to any future negativity. 

Hypnosis Is A Neurological Technique

Hypnosis, itself, is a powerful neurological technique. Expertise in using hypnosis is what can put hypnotherapists at the forefront of the neurological revolution. If, though, hypnotherapists continue to merely offer what one client referred to as “psychotherapy with your eyes closed,” in many cases not even emphasizing self hypnosis work by clients, they are missing the greatest historical opportunity to surge ahead as leaders and definers of a new model of helping people. Too often if the mechanism of the brain is not disciplined, inability to use its full potentials will erode gains made by even the best psychotherapy techniques available. 

Traditional training in use of the hypnotic state is limited. It is used primarily to enhance memory or heighten suggestibility. Helping someone into a state of superconcentration and teaching them to use it regularly on their own can automatically bring about many desirable physical, chemical and mental changes. There should be a focus on intensifying those changes.  

From a neurological perspective most hypnotic inductions have three basic weaknesses. These weaknesses get in the way of developing the natural potentials of the state of mind. These weaknesses even lessen effectiveness if the goal is enhancing suggestibility. First, inductions are often too linguistically complex. They use long, often compound sentences, abstract ideas and words. Second, they commonly employ too much variation in messages and deepening techniques to allow for effective training of the mechanism of the brain. Third, many hypnotherapists do not seem to have a sense of the overall structure of an induction in regards to intensifying its effectiveness. The message is primary; the framework of delivery is secondary. 

Putting The Brain Through Its Paces

The inductions of NEURO-THERAPY Training put the brain through paces; train the brain. A primary goal is developing more instinct responsiveness to override negativity from the conscious realm. There are, though, other important reasons for the focus on intensifying the activity of subconscious brain mechanisms: that is the realm of brain most involved in coordinating healing. It is also, the realm of brain, according to leading neurological researchers, so underutilized by modern humans that it may not be responding effectively to non-cognitive signals such as come from tumors deep in the body.* Adding a more brain-based approach could enable hypnotherapists to work more confidently with and offer far more to people facing diseases and other physical problems.

“Hypnosis can cure warts.” NEURO-THERAPY Training looks beyond long held beliefs such as this and asks, “What about it does that?” Warts have a viral basis. Viruses are weakened and killed by heat. The brain’s own ability to generate a condition of internal heat is the most naturally powerful healing technique available to people facing viruses, the basis of many modern diseases. Unless the brain is trained, and disciplined regularly, though, a person cannot use their mind effectively for that benefit. 

We grow and change through many pathways. By learning about and incorporating a more brain-based approach or techniques like SUBVERBAL SHIFTING, hypnotherapists can use more of the potentials of the state of mind in which they’ve chosen to specialize.

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* See Mind Matters by Michael Gazzaniga