Trance-Formations: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Structure of Hypnosis

Description

What is a trance state? How do you access a previous trance state? What is pattern interruption? Stacked realities? Generative change? Reframing? And how in the world do you use all this stuff to do anything productive? Better yet, how do you keep from using all this stuff to be unproductive? Well, this will give a you a taste of what lies in store for you in this book. It's the best book to learn about real hypnosis, the structure of hypnosis. There are many books that can teach you to hypnotize people, but few that can teach you to break through the consensual trance that you are already in. This book can get you on the road to doing that. "Hypnosis is a word that usually gets strong responses from people" - positive or negative. Often, people associate trance states with mysticism or magic, which has not helped the reputation of hypnosis. We encourage skeptics to suspend their beliefs or assumptions about hypnosis long enough to read this book. NLP cofounders Bandler and Grinder studied the famous therapist Milton Erickson to determine the structure of hypnosis. This book turns the "magic" into specific understandable procedures, some of which are useful in everyday conversation. In addition to the hows of hypnosis (basic and advanced), the authors describe numerous important uses for this science. A great introduction to the subject - and an important reference book for hypnosis practitioners. Review: The Bible of of NLP Books. Interested in NLP? Get this book! - John Grinder and Richard Bandlers collaboration in Trance Formations truly aims at the heart of what NLP is all about. While many other books and individuals have tried to capitalize upon the methodologies within NLP, this book is probably where a lot of the other books derived from. Because of this, the book is highly concentrated with information about linguistics and most importantly, using it to your advantage. This highly distilled book is comprised essentially of the transcript of a seminar which doesn't allow for the best outlay that you may come to expect in a book. There is no table of contents or an index. However, the fact that what these guys are saying is so clear, so distilled, and so elucidating, it's extremely easy to forgive them for the lack of structure in the book. I personally carried this book around like a bible after I had first bought it reading as much as possible. Most of the seminar transcript is also where Grinder/Bandler are using the NLP to influence the audience, so you can actually see how masters of NLP use their technique. Some of the topics that are covered are: presuppositions, nominalizations, unspecified referential indexes, deletion, mind-reading, ordinal numerals, awareness predicates, and a whole slew of other techniques. It was only after the usage of this book that I truly began to integrate the use of NLP into my life and finally understood how language, pacing, breathing, and touching can truly allow someone to experience things in a different manner. This book took me a little extra time to digest, keeping in mind that the intended audience is well educated therapists. However, their speaking style is not difficult to comprehend and anyone wanting to learn NLP and you can do so very well with a solid study of this book. Review: Interesting, thought provoking book - First, I agree with the reviewers about this not being a beginner's book. You would probably get more out of reading a different hypontism book first. NLP is a somewhat controversial approach to hypnotherapy. The version presented in this book is not really a science so much as an art, which requires deep personal experience and understanding to make work. For this reason it will always be on the fringes of psychotherapy. This book is one of the classic books about NLP and therefore should be read critically by anyone interested in it or related topics (including how the brain processes language). I found the book to crystalize what I had learned from life experience and by watching others. Given that experience I think I got a lot out of the book, perhaps more than the authors intended. However I can understand how others might take wrong turns trying to see this as some sort of short-cut (when it is really a power tool). Having said this, I think if folks read the book critically, it will lead to greater insight. I wasn't sure about all aspects of the book. For example, while I understand the idea of symptom substitution as a possible good, I found the examples in the book to be questionable in the long run (while they might be good for transitional measures, they seem to help rob an individual of the need to address some circumstances directly). All in all, though, a very thought-provoking book and worth reading.