The Intrapersonal Approach
by James Middleton – Saturday, 7 August 2010, 05:42 PM
The placebo effect – particularly with medication, is based on a frame. You don’t go to your local chemist or pharmacy for a bottle of “placebo” tablets. You go to your medical practitioner, who based on past failures, or successes, decides you could do with medication which has an active ingredient of nothing and knows it is likely to work as well as medication which has an active ingredient of something.
This medical practitioner, will use all his past experience in prescribing a placebo. He will use both his general experience with placebos and other patients and his specific experience with this particular patient.
Having worked for a number of years as a hypnotherapist I tend to favour, create and use a very specific frame at the start of therapy a great deal of the time for my clients.
I explain about the left and right side of the brain, and how they have different functions. The left brain being our logical side, mostly conscious thinking and the right being the creative side, mostly unconscious thinking. I go on to explain that hypnosis helps us access our unconscious creative side, and that this helps us find solutions to our difficulties. That the process of learning and practicing self-hypnosis, which they will learn will help them do this much more easily. They will likely find over a few sessions that their thinking, feeling and behaving will alter automatically and that they will find their “other mind” will effortlessly find new ways of doing things, which will likely be much more helpful for them.
I tell them that it is likely that if they practice their self-hypnosis homework regularly, they will get better. It has little to do with me or my therapeutic techniques, and everything to do with how they apply themselves to their self-hypnosis homework. It is simply their brain changing and working much more efficiently.
I often don’t need to do a great deal after this rigmarole, they tend to do the necessary rest themselves.
BHR
Creativechanges - Ericksonian hypnotherapy 
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