Hypnotist – Master of Language

To a large degree, being a good hypnotist means being masterful with language.

After all, as I jokingly tell my clients, I don’t give prescriptions and I don’t offer potions. I offer water—and my language.

At the beginning of my career, I sometimes wondered why I had chosen hypnotherapy as my profession. English isn’t even my first language.

When I immigrated to Canada, I was told by some people in the Chinese community that good career choices for Chinese immigrants were IT and accounting. The language requirements in those fields, I was told, were relatively minimal.

No, thank you.

I didn’t have to think very hard about that one. They may be excellent career choices, but they were not for me. I’m far too creative to be entrusted with numbers. And as for IT, my mind already understands that everything in physical reality is acode, so apparently I don’t need to learn another kind.

Cliché though it may sound, I know that hypnotherapy chose me.

I have written an entire chapter, Onto the Promised Path, in my second book, Carol’s Lives, about how hypnotherapy found me. Looking back at the chain of events that led me here, it seems almost obvious.

And yet, once I arrived, there was still this little obstacle called language.

It turned out that the obstacle was also an opportunity.

Because English is my second language, I have an unusual relationship with it. I don’t always take words for granted in the way a native speaker might. Sometimes I take them literally.

And that turns out to be rather useful for a hypnotherapist.

In my experience, the unconscious mind often responds to language in a surprisingly literal and associative way. It doesn’t necessarily process words only according to the intellectual meaning we consciously intend. It can notice sounds, associations, ambiguities, metaphors, and multiple layers of meaning.

As a non-native speaker, I sometimes find myself naturally standing closer to that way of processing language.

Take the question, “So, what brought you here?” I know perfectly well what it means. But my mind still goes: “My feet did.”

Or: “How can we even pay the bills?”

My usual answer is: “Online,” even though I’m aware this can be irritating to my native-English-speaking partner. But this habit of taking language literally has become part of how I work.

Once, a participant in one of my Self-Hypnosis classes explained that she wanted to learn self-hypnosis techniques because she was feeling overwhelmed by stress.

I offered her ways to become “underwhelmed.”

She responded with a laugh, “I think that would be quite boring.” We could see in that moment, the laugh already released some of her stress.

Following that laugh, we settled on the possibility of becoming… well-whelmed.

That little exchange illustrates something I love about the work I do. Language by nature is hypnotic.

Sometimes you don’t need to fight the mind. You simply need to give it another way to understand what it has offered in words.

Different languages also create different habits of thought. Chinese and English, for example, are structured very differently, and learning English gave me an appreciation for how unusually English can sometimes construct an idea.

Consider: “I don’t think you are right.”

As a Chinese speaker learning English, I remember finding this structure surprisingly strange. Why are we negating the act of thinking just because you are not right? The more accurate way to express is this: What I think is that you are not right.

That statement literally expresses two straightforward facts:

• I think.
• You are not right.

The same thing happens with trust: “I don’t trust that he is going to do what he said he was going to do.”

Again, my literal-minded brain notices something interesting. I clearly have a very definite belief about what he is going to do. I am not lacking trust altogether. I am trusting something very specific: that he probably will not do what he said he would do.

This is one of the reasons I find language so fascinating in therapeutic work. What we casually say can contain meanings we are not consciously paying attention to.

And this is where my relationship with English became less of an obstacle and more of an opportunity. I began to play with it.

After all, that is a large part of what a good hypnotist does: Play with language. Not manipulate it. Not hide things inside it. Play with it. Language is a code that can help us find the doorway that is already there.

I had a client going through IVF for the third time who decided to include me as part of her support team. The previous two procedures had ended in miscarriage, leaving her with significant trauma and grief. In fact, when she first came to me, it was specifically for trauma release and grief.

So when she decided to try IVF again, supporting her emotionally and mentally through the process became a natural extension of our work together.

The embryo transfer day was a big day. Her appointment with the doctor was at 11 a.m.

At 8:30 that morning, she was in my office. And I found myself becoming wonderfully fluid with words. Transfer. Trance for you. Transform. Transparent.

Words can carry different meanings on different levels. Sometimes a word can become a bridge between the conscious mind and the unconscious. My work indeed is that bridge for my clients.

So this is some of what I offered her:

Allow yourself to go deep into TRANCE, FOR you, now, with each count you hear from 5 to 0. Because the deeper you go now, the better TRANCE you A-PARRENTLY can BE in.

Later on today, you will walk into the clinic projecting confidence to the doctors in charge. With that confidence, they can be more relaxed and do their best work.

After all, they are the well-trained experts in TRANSFERing embryos into the uterus.

So allow yourself to open up your unconscious mind’s ability to give you that inner confidence and resources, so that your conscious mind can be calm, peaceful, relaxed, and TRANS-PARENT with your unconscious confidence.

That’s right.

A little smile affirms that deep, beautiful, easy TRANCE, FOR you and for the baby.

A baby is life at its freshest, after all.

So you can be TRANS-PARENT with the baby to come, from the very beginning.

That has obviously BECOME A-PPARENT to me.

This is what I mean when I say that hypnosis is, to a large degree, an art of language. The words themselves are not magic spells. The magic, if we want to call it that, is in the meanings we create, the associations we activate, the attention we direct, and the possibilities we open.

English may be a very structured and pragmatic language. It can sometimes feel awkward when we try to express certain subtleties of emotion. But perhaps that is exactly why I learned to listen to it differently. I stopped trying to overcome the “problem” of not being a native English speaker. I started using the difference. And that is something I have learned repeatedly in my work:

What looks like an obstacle may simply be an opportunity that has not yet been looked at from the right angle.

Which brings me to another little language game I play.

Whatever someone may judge me as—whatever negative XYZ they might put after “You are…”—I tend to ask: “Am I a good XYZ? Or a bad XYZ?”

Once, someone told me: “You are a fake, Kemila.”

I asked: “Am I a good fake? Or a bad fake?”

Either way, I’m out.

Language is powerful. Not because every word contains some mystical power of its own, but because words give the mind something to work with. And sometimes, when you change the way you listen to a word, you change what becomes possible.

That is the work.

That is the play.

And that is why, after all these years, I am rather glad English is not my first language.