Using positive emotions in hypnosis

Positive emotions are very important when helping people with hypnosis. Emotions, both positive and negative emotions, generally have a positive purpose. Emotions often provide motivation and protection. Without emotions, we would become zombies who don't want anything at all. When people have a problem and they want to solve it through hypnosis, it is important as a hypnotherapist to be aware of how to use emotions during therapy.

In this blog, I discuss how positive emotions can be used to help people solve problems or fears.

What are emotions?

Emotions are feelings that are triggered throughout the day. For example, you are at work and the printer fails again. You may become irritated by that so you have the printer replaced. Or you watch the news and get a little emotional when a child is pulled from under rubble after an earthquake. You then feel relief and pity at the same time.

Emotions can be felt even in your body. You get muscle tension, a stomach ache, a lump in your throat, tears or you just get the weak laugh.

Many emotions make you feel bad which you want to get rid of. Negative emotions therefore often cause you to take action to avoid, evade or even confront danger.

So they are incredibly important to our daily actions and behaviors.

What are positive emotions?

Positive emotions are emotions that do not make you feel negative immediately, such as joy, happiness, euphoria, kindness, admiration, wonder and pity I also put in this list.

Compassion may not be the first positive emotion that comes to mind, but when you compare it to negative emotions like fear and anger, you have to admit that compassion is, after all, a positive emotion.

Positive emotions also usually do not have the effect of making you want to flee, freeze or fight as negative emotions often do. For example, for fear you want to flee, while someone who is furious may still want to strike a blow.

So even in the^1st response to emotion, you can find out whether an emotion is positive or negative.

What positive emotions can you use during hypnotherapy?

As I mentioned, positive and negative emotions can be used during hypnotherapy. What is important before playing people's emotions is to keep in mind the purpose of the emotion and whether the purpose of that emotion can help solve the problem of the person you are helping.

There are 3 persuasive emotions that are positive, namely:

• Compassion
• Kindness
• Admiration

Compassion

Compassion is the feeling of pain you can get from pain experienced by other people. You feel as it were the pain, or a fraction of it, of people who are experiencing pain in some way because you sympathize with them. You can imagine how painful their situation is, and with that you can evoke those painful emotions.

Compassion is a motivating emotion; it motivates people to help other people. The underlying idea of helping other people is that when you find yourself in an unfortunate situation there are other people helping you.

Helping other people under the influence of compassion is an attempt to accumulate karma points.

Pity is often felt for people you hold dear who have something happen to them that they don't deserve. If a loved one of yours is overcome you probably feel very sorry for them. In doing so, something may have happened to that person that you fear may happen to you.

Pity is generally elicited for people worse off than you.

Because compassion motivates people to help other people, this emotion also needs a moment when it is released, usually by helping the other person. If this emotion is not released, this is already necessary during hypnosis, guilt may arise. In that case, it is important to help the person under hypnosis to get rid of the guilt.

You can make compassion disappear in the following ways:

Give reasons why the person deserved what happened to him. Criminals usually do not have to count on pity when they receive a prison sentence.

Individuals you have a lesser connection with also tend to receive less compassion. For example, you can point out that the "victim" looks nothing like the hypnotized person.

Overcoming the fear the victim has been victimized by. When the fear is gone that the same thing could happen to you, you often have less compassion.

Sometimes people want too much compassion. If the victim expects too much help, this can also stop compassion. However, this technique must be used with caution because it can easily turn into anger.

What if you are worse off than the person you feel sorry for? By indicating that the hypnotized person feels sorry for someone much better off than him or her, you can also make pity disappear.

Kindness

Kindness is actually more of a verb than an emotion. Kind emotions make you want to do something for another, or do something for another, without expecting anything in return.

Kindness is something that usually only happens once a person fully accepts and loves themselves. Strengthening self-compassion is one of the best ways to foster kindness.

You do get multiple rewards when you show kindness, namely admiration, gratitude, affection and status.

Showing kindness is one of the best ways to improve personal relationships and heal emotional wounds.

Unfortunately, the desire to be kind can also be stopped. For example, if your act of kindness is not appreciated the motivation to be kind often disappears. There are exceptions, of course.

When kindness is used to increase your status and people around you realize this, the kindness is often not accepted. Indeed, people may then start to find you arrogant and actually lower your status by gossiping.

Admiration

Did you have an idol when you were younger? Did you want to do the moonwalk just like Michael Jackson, without feeling jealous that he could do it and you couldn’t yet? That is the foundation of admiration and using admiration in a positive way.

You can have the desire to be admired, but you can also have the desire to be more like people you admire.

Admiration for others is triggered when that person has qualities or behaviors that you would like to have as well. It has to remain a win-win situation, though. So it's a bit different than being jealous of someone and wanting to "take" something from that person.

Instead, admiration motivates you to become a better person. For example, by displaying behaviors that the person you admire also displays, such as kind actions, or conversely by finally overcoming fears. In that case, the person you admire is usually not afraid of them.

Admiration is an emotion you can diminish if, for example, it is misplaced or does not help you move forward.

When you yourself have a quality stronger than your role model, the admiration often diminishes, because you can do it yourself. Then it's time to find a new role model.

When you stop caring about the quality or behavior, the admiration can also stop. This is often noticeable when you leave high school and find "being cool" no longer important. That cool classmate suddenly gets much less admiration.

Insecurity triggered by the person you admire or by something else can turn the admiration into jealousy or envy. Then, for example, you may suddenly start bringing down the person you admire to boost yourself (in your mind).

Even if the person you admire stops being admirable, the admiration can suddenly stop.

The three positive emotions of compassion, kindness and admiration have as their main motivation to become a better person. A better person in the social sense, by helping other people, for example, and a better person in the more selfish sense namely that you want to develop certain qualities in yourself or overcome fears and other dark feelings.

By using these emotions during hypnosis, you can also help other people under hypnosis achieve these goals in life. Want to learn more about hypnotizing other people and how to use emotions to help people? Then take a look at the training courses offered by the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands.