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emotional triggers

How to Create Emotional Triggers in Hypnosis

by Jack on August 30, 2009

Emotional Triggers are a key element in Conversational Hypnosis.  These skills will help you to embed your suggestions is a pure clear state of mind.  They will make change for the people around you easier and more efficient. 

In order to create a new Emotional Trigger in a person there are skills and concepts you must learn to do first to be successful in implanting an Emotional Trigger.  Before you start to practice the concepts in this article be sure to have the principal of 4 Stage Protocol mastered.  The 4 Stage Protocol will help you to set the right environment to set a successful Emotional Trigger.

Aside from the 4 Stage Protocol you must also be able to understand and utilize the technique of ‘going first’.  Both these concepts will help your subject to enter the clearest state of mind to whatever emotion you are trying to provoke.  Once you have mastered these two skills and are well practiced at the other beginning skills you will have the ability to smoothly set successful Emotional Triggers.

When you have a listener and you are ready to set an Emotional Trigger in them you must first utilize the 4 Stage Protocol.  If you will remember this is used to bypass the critical filter and keep the listener from analyzing your trigger.  If you cannot use the 4 Stage Protocol then your attempts at setting triggers may likely go unsuccessfully for the simple fact that the conscious mind will be too involved to let the trigger in.

Your trigger may not even make it past the critical thinking of the person and be rejected before it is even set.  Setting Emotional Triggers is an act that needs to happen when the conscious mind is not aware of what you are doing.  This way it will take less time and effort to set a successful Emotional Trigger.

On the other hand it is possible to set a trigger when someone is consciously aware.  The danger here is that it will activate the Law of Reversed Effect.  The Law of Reversed Effect if you remember is the harder you try at a thing the more likely it is you will fail.  The harder they are trying to consciously activate the state you are trying to trigger the more likely it is they will fail.

Another pitfall of setting triggers while the conscious awareness is checked in is that it will take more and more repetitions to set the trigger.  The reason for this is you will have to work harder to bypass the critical filters as they will still be in place if the person is consciously aware.

So the first step in setting Emotional Triggers is to use the 4 Stage Protocol, the second step is to induce a State.  This is done by actually giving direction to the person’s inner experiences; this will assist you in accessing hypnotic experiences.

Inducing a State is easiest done by asking questions that will be vivid enough to bring the experience back to life.  There are other tools in your language that will help you with this.  The main language skills you will want to use are detailed descriptions that bring a set of vivid pictures and feelings to the forefront of the listener’s mind.

By doing these detailed descriptions in vivid detail you will be triggering an already existing emotional trigger.  This is a trigger that was previously developed through environmental experiences or because you created it purposefully in a previous session to trigger the state you are looking for.

Pre-existing triggers, whether created environmentally or by you, will be helpful in your job as a hypnotist especially when working with the same subject consistently.  This happens because once a person is used to or recognizes your hypnotic tone or auditory shift to a hypnotic voice it will tend to trigger responses much quicker. 

This shift to your hypnotic voice when working with your regular clients will help them in accessing hypnotic experiences.

This is why you must develop several different voices.  Your speaking voice must have a different tonality than your normal speaking voice otherwise you could send people into trance at inappropriate times. 

Think about if you were to always use your hypnotic tone with people who are conditioned to go into trance when they hear it.  It can produce dangerous situations for you and your subjects.  Hypnotic states should only be accessed when the person is in a situation where they are not consciously concentrating on any other thing.

At this point we should add that it is important to really polish your skills so that you are aware that you are only setting triggers and inducing hypnotic states when the outcome will have a positive effect.  These should be used to bring to light positive changes in a person and because these triggers are set accidentally around you and possibly by you everyday it is important to become aware to only do it when the time is right.

The third step in creating Emotional Triggers is to intensify the State.  This is pivotal; you must produce the cleanest, clearest and most pure state of mind possible in order to get the best result in setting your trigger.  The stronger your subject’s state the easier it will be to not only set the trigger but also to activate that trigger to access the state again later. 

Finally the fourth step in creating an Emotional Trigger is to associate the State to the Emotional Trigger.  This is just as it states, you will be attaching the clean state of mind to the emotional trigger you want it associated with.  After you accomplish this you will use the ABSAIL formula to link it all to an action that is carried out by the person you are working with. 

After you have accessed a clear state of mind you will set your trigger, this is done simply by firing the trigger.  Do whatever it is you want the trigger to be, if it is your voice use that voice.  If you want the trigger to be a gesture or mannerism use that specific gesture or mannerism. 

Remember that your tone of voice is important and will often work alone with those you have been in hypnosis with before.  It is also important to remember that the trigger you set should be something you can use within the context of a normal conversation.  This way it is easy for you to fire the trigger later with little to no extra effort.

It is important to also remember that setting and creating Emotional Triggers in people is a powerful action and will be one of the key elements in the basis of your hypnosis.

A quick review of the vast amount of information here is that you will set Emotional Triggers by accessing a pure state of mind.  At the height of their emotional experience you will set off the trigger you have chosen, this attaches that state to that trigger meaning whenever you want to access that set of emotions in a person you will use that trigger to do so.

It may be possible that with some subjects you will need to repeat or condition the trigger, this is simply done through repetition.  Always keep in mind that the more powerful the state is the easier the trigger will set. 

After you have set your trigger you will want to test it to be sure it was set correctly and accessing the correct emotional state.  This is done by breaking the state the person is currently in and re-firing the trigger, then observe.  If the person re-enters the same state, meaning you see the signals that show you they have re-entered that state, your trigger was successfully set.

You will remember these signs from the Signal Recognitions System we reviewed earlier in these articles.

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How Emotional Triggers Can Boost the Impact of Your Hypnosis

by Jack on August 29, 2009

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.

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