How Emotional Triggers Can Boost the Impact of Your Hypnosis

Emotional Triggers are a very powerful part of what you will be doing as a hypnotist.  They are an unconscious response that is triggered within the body to develop a physical or emotional behavior.  As a hypnotist you will want to be able to imbed these triggers in your subjects so you will have the ability to produce behaviors in them that will lead to the positive outcomes set in your goals.

Emotional triggers were discovered at the turn of the century, sometime between 1901 and 1902.  A Russian researcher named Ivan Pavlov is credited with the discovery of unconscious responses, which are in essence an emotional trigger.  In his experiment known to us now as Pavlov’s Dogs emotional triggers were presented to the world.

In this experiment Pavlov would ring a bell directly before sending food to them through a shoot.  The dogs developed an emotional trigger in a short period of time.  The dogs began to associate the ringing of the bell with the expectation of food.  After a while just the sound of the bell would cause the dogs to salivate. 

This was a profound discovery in that it astounded people to actually be able to see such an unconscious event controlled by the nervous system to take place on cue.  Salivation is a bodily function that can be consciously controlled.  It is an automatic nervous system function that was being triggered due to the ringing of a bell.  It was a very graphic example of emotional triggering and one that is still talked about in history today.

Before Pavlov and his dogs were recognized for this discovery of unconscious responses or emotional triggers there was an American doctor by the name of William Twitmeyer who is considered the unsung hero of discovery in unconscious responses.  William Twitmeyer discovered the Knee-jerk reflex. 

The knee-jerk reflex is when you firmly tap the soft part of the knee cap to extract a reflex in which the leg jumps and straightens out.  Twitmeyer also realized in his discovery that after around 50 to 100 times of repeating the process just holding the hammer in a position that suggested he was about to tap the knee the person’s leg would automatically jump and straighten out.

This accidental and unconscious response was the first discovery of unconscious responses and emotional trigger.  It is also a very powerful example of an unconscious trigger that was either intentionally or unintentionally implanted in the patient.

This research by both Twitmeyer and Pavlov shows us today that there is a truth in the conditioning of unconscious responses and emotional triggers.  These are referred to as post hypnotic suggestions. 

Post hypnotic triggers are emotional triggers that can be set by a hypnotist within another individual to create a specific reaction.  Many times these triggers are created by environments and sometimes they are created unintentionally by other people.  No matter how they come about they are there and they can be created by you.

Emotional triggers that are created by our environments naturally occur on a daily basis.  This can be something as simple as hearing a song that brings back specific memories of a time in your life.  Any time you hear that particular song you are instantly taken back to a certain memory or set of memories.  When this happens you are reliving the memory as you think of the events and feelings it brings to mind.

Some very common examples of naturally occurring emotional triggers are songs, the smell of perfume or cologne, smell of cookies baking, pictures, phrases or even the voice of someone familiar. 

One of the most common examples of an emotional trigger is in advertising.  The advertisements we see everyday utilize this principal by way of packaging.  They access the unconscious response through the recognition of boxes in the advertisements, when we see those boxes or packages on the shelves of the supermarket we instantly recognize them.  The package seems to stand out from the others surrounding it. 

This is just one example of the many unconscious responses and emotional triggers that are common to us everyday.  It is your job as a hypnotist to learn how to recognize and develop this skill for yourself so you too can create these emotional triggers in the people around you.

In order to do this you must learn to create your own hypnotic triggers that will access emotional states from the people you are helping.  Triggering people into an emotional state is a powerful technique to learn.  It will give you the ability to obtain certain behaviors or thoughts put into action from the people around you.

In learning how to implant an emotional trigger in your subjects you must take certain specific steps to ensure you are doing it correctly.  The first of those steps is to follow the 4 Stage Protocol.  In the 4 Stage Protocol you will absorb the attention, bypass the critical thinking, activate an unconscious response and be rewarded with a desired behavior or thought pattern.

After you have successfully done this you will have set the scene for creating an emotional trigger later on.  Before you can actually set the emotional trigger there are conditions that you must be aware of in order to be skilled in this area.

The first condition you must we aware of is that you must have access to a clear state of mind.  Without this you will have difficulties in the future accessing the exact strong state of mind you were originally seeking.  If you want your listener to relax you must access it fully, there is no room for mixed states of mind here.  Whatever state of mind you have access to when you set your trigger will be the state of mind that is presented once your trigger is fired.

After you have successfully done this you will want to continue with the next condition.  This is to set the trigger.  The trigger you are setting can be anything you can work in to a casual conversation. 

It can be a word, gesture, smell taste, touch or sound.  However it is good to know that while you can use any of these the easiest to work with are the touch, sound and sight triggers.  Examples of these are simple.  Do something they can see you do, hear you do or feel you do physically.  Once you have decided on a trigger you set the trigger simply by doing it.

After you have set the trigger you will want to condition it through repetitive actions.  This is the third condition for setting an emotional trigger.

The final step and one of the most important is to test the trigger.  You can do this by simply breaking the concentration with a distraction.  It doesn’t matter how you do this as long as you leave them with a clear state of mind.  This is important because once they are in a clear state of mind you will set off your trigger once again and then watch to see if it has taken effect. 

When you fire the trigger and the previous emotional state returns you will know you have accomplished this short term goal of setting an emotional trigger.  If the state does not return you simply need to start over from the beginning and try again.  Keep in mind this is a very powerful technique of accessing states of mind and should be done with caution.

For more information please visit http://www.conversational-hypnosis.com