Session #233: Doug O’Brien on Ericksonian Hypnosis

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This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, session number 223, Doug O’Brien on Ericsonian Hypnosis. Welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast with Jason Lynette, your professional resource for hypnosis training and outstanding business success. Here’s your host, Jason Lynette. So it’s a bit of a curious thing how we can often become inspired in ways far beyond.

Far beyond even NLP in terms of the trainings and courses that we as practitioners often go through, which is a wonderfully cryptic way of introducing Doug O’Brien. To all of you, Doug is someone who quite honestly, I give a lot of credit to for in the ways that he’s inspired the work that I do, and a story that some of you may already know that I’m clearly holding back from.

Buckle up. I have to tell it in a few moments because it’s back around July, 2012, which remember that month by the way, July, 2012 that I traveled up to Maryland where Doug was a guest at a training that I went to featuring slight of mouth. One of the big topics that we’re gonna cover in this week’s podcast conversation, slight of mouth, if you’re not familiar with.

And Doug’s gonna give a full history to it as well. Here in this recording is the mindset of basically taking someone else’s belief structure and feeding it back to them in a respectful way that by doing so, the belief structure does not quite hold up the way that it did before. And Doug describes it as a bit of like, Verbal akido, which is instead of martial arts being a style of who can hit or punch or kick the hardest, it’s instead about using the opponent’s energy to feed back to them in such a way to take them down.

So it’s a very respectful system, and I’d share it’s very much the mindset behind, as soon as someone calls me up and the same way into their problem is the way out of the problem. The same way that often dealing with business, that the possible objections. Concerns someone would possibly have about going into the process are then fed back to them in such a way, respectfully using their own words and their own belief systems that then brings it into question and now they break through their own blocks and start to create some awesome changes.

And again, back to July, 2012, or of that week, we’ll come back to it in a bit. I wanted to have Doug on the program. Because tracking his work in terms of social media and then email marketing streams as well. Of course, picking up that around 2013 is when Doug got interested in the practitioner of Havening and just an amazing story of where these methods come from and the ways that he’s.

Really built this integrative system working with his clients through conversational hypnosis, formal hypnotic trance, as well as the connection with the havening methods. So you’re gonna hear a rather robust conversation talking about his whole approach. And Doug’s definitely a guy you’re gonna want to get in touch with.

All the links and details are over at. Work Smart hypnosis.com. And for those that don’t know the story, it’s earlier in 2019, this year that I’m recording this episode intro here that Doug and I connected by email and he had just mentioned, Hey, I’m gonna be at Hypno Thoughts Live for the first time this year.

Could you put up a testimonial because you took my class and I responded to. Yes, I have a testimonial that I have owed you for years, but I have to do it my own way, which I’ll shorten the story here because basically realizing only in recent years that the last date of the slight of mouth training with Doug O’Brien was actually July 13th, 2013, which exactly nine months later was the birth of my son, Max.

That’s right. April 9th, 2013, which for what it’s worth, my wife and I had been trying at that point, but it turns out the one magical night. Thanks, Doug. His middle name is Michael, by the way, not Doug, which we’ve had that chat as well. So again, we can derive inspiration from wonderfully unique sources.

So I’d highly recommend any of Doug’s materials. He’s got an outstanding online course teaching some of these materials as well, and my side effects may not be yours. So you may learn with wonderful delight and enjoyment and maintain the size of your family as you listen to it as well. Yeah, hypnosis is fun while you’re also online checking at his courses.

Head over to hypnotic workers.com. Hypnotic Workers is the all access pass to my hypnosis training library. Everything from Rethinking Classic Inductions, a whole lot of work on hypnotic phenomenon, creating those magical moments in the change process, and more importantly, linking it to the change. Plus some unique client testimonials and client demonstrations, which have been fully transcribed for you to model the language patterns of everything from migraine removal to weight loss to stop smoking.

Plus coming into the system really soon, working with a client with some sleep walking issues and just. Getting a full video waiver signed off, so I can share that with all of you as well. Check that out. That’s coming soon to hypnotic workers.com. Here’s a wonderful conversation talking about all things Ericsonian, hypnosis, nlp, and havening.

Here we go, episode number 223. Doug O’Brien. On Ericsonian Hypnosis. Hey. So yeah, my first introduction to NLP and hypnosis was way, way back when, when I was a professional musician in New York City and uh, had a girlfriend that had taken Tony Robbins’ fire walk experience. And back in those days, the way that marketing went for Tony was to kind of like that forum.

Model is to bring your friends and family next time he was in town. So she dragged me kicking and screaming to this fire walk experience in 1985, and I’ve been forever grateful. It was amazing. I don’t know if many of your viewers have done that, but it’s quite remarkable. And Tony at the time was an NLP trainer.

He was act actually using the firewall as an. Two nlp. So that was my first taste of NLP and I, I just wanted more and I went to his certification. I got much Robert Delta’s certifications, Richard Bandler certifications, pretty much anybody who was teaching it and would let me in. I went and learned from them.

And that of course, led me to Eric Sonia Hypnosis, which led me to various trainers of. . Yeah. And I’m curious to ask, from going back to that experience, what would you say it was that grabbed your attention that that piqued your curiosity about NLP in the first place? Yes. Oh gosh. You know, the fire walk is a pretty good demonstration that it works.

At least, you know, that’s my, my belief was that it, it. I was able to walk across these hot burning coals, which were very hot burning coals. They say 1200 degrees Fahrenheit. I’m not sure that’s accurate, but it’s certainly hot and, you know, walk out across ’em without a blister was, was great. And then, um, you know, just other things as well, the, the switch pattern that I learned early that weekend and other things that really I could notice in effect with that is that the holy crap, this stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. So then from there, what was that, You mentioned doing, uh, quite a bit of training after that. Any sort of experience stands out in terms of, you know, getting that training and then kind of realizing, yeah, this is something I wanna devote a lot of time and energy into. Yeah. Well, as I said, I was a marathon.

I didn’t say this. I was a, I was a musician, I was also a marathon runner. Oh, okay. I just wanted to get better at those things in the first place. So NLP wasn’t about me becoming a trainer or becoming a, a therapist or whatever it was. me improving my life and NLP was about that. It was about modeling people who are great at what they did, so you can take that ability on yourself.

So I wanted to become a better musician, a better marathon runner. I wanted to, you know, run faster and qualify for the Boston Marathon. You know, I had these goals that I thought NLP could help me accomplish. So was it a matter then of let’s say performance enhancement or was it a matter of kind of clearing away some of the things that were making it not as effective for you?

Yeah. Okay. Got it.

Yes, exactly. So yeah, it was exactly those things. You know, it’s funny thing about NLP and hypnosis is that it really does allow a person to get in touch with their good stuff, but a lot of it is really kind of getting your, your. Blocks out of the way so you can just do what’s necessary to make it happen.

You know, practice more. It’s not gonna make you a great musician just because you, you know, took a NLP class or something. But it will help you get out of your way so you can practice more and practice more effectively. You know, you still have to work at stuff. Mm-hmm. , you know, it’s not just all I wish it were, by the way.

I wish it were all just sort of go to a hypnotist and get this zap in your, you know, everything’s better, but you still have to, you. Diet and exercise, basically, if you’re gonna lose weight and keep it off, you know, still have to change your lifestyle. You have to do those things. I think NLP, hypnosis just helps you do those things.

Yeah, I love that as a mindset that, you know, I, I used the phrase that you can bring me an opera singer and I can work with her to feel a whole lot more confident on stage, but in terms of her ability to actually hit those notes, it’s gotta come down to her training, her experience, her preparation, and her readiness as well.

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, like Yogi Barris said, success is 90% preparation in the other half is work or something that don’t remember exactly what he said. But yeah, it’s that there is belief obviously in there. You knows a belief. I can hit that hot high note when I’m, you know, on stage. And it’s, it’s that moment when everybody’s watching me and I can, I can do that.

That’s, that’s belief. And the other 90% of it is, you know, the preparation and the. Which, by the way, that’s a true reference, except when I said that to the client, she then corrected me going, I do not hit notes. I cares the notes. Oh, sweet. Which, that’s a whole other episode. Oh my God, that’s great. Yeah. I that right

Well, you gotta respect expertise, which you, you brought up two terms here, which the new student of hypnosis will often reach out to me and even ask the question of, Hey, here’s this upcoming issue. Here’s this client I wanna work with. Would you use hypnosis or nlp? What’s the Doug O’Brien answer to that sort of thing?

I, Yes. There you go, . All right. That was great. So plug your books, . Yeah, basically hypnosis is good for everything. I mean, come on. It’s good for everything because I, and, and that’s probably not a good. Marketing strategy. You know, you should probably have a niche or niche or rich as some people call it, because it rhymes with rich.

I’ve heard that somewhere. I heard that too.

Yeah, You should probably have a niche when it comes to marketing, but ultimately hypnosis is about. Belief systems and, and, and that’s gonna set you free or it’s gonna keep you trained? It’s, it’s what it’s all about. Any performance enhancement is about belief. Any, you know, getting rich and being successful, any, any relationship thing, it’s all about belief and hypnosis is about that.

Well, I think the question also goes back to the perception of, here’s the category of nlp and then there’s the category of hypnosis. How, how do you go about drawing that line? Ah, I. Good. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I basically don’t, over the years it’s just become such a blurred thing. There are times when, of course I will say, Okay, sit back, close your eyes and let’s, uh, do some hipp here.

But I’m from the sixties, so it’s hippie hipp. But throughout the session, you know, I’m, I’m telling stories, you know, I’m being aware of there, other than conscious communication. I’m, you know, interacting with. You know, with the body language other than the conscious communication, I, it’s all hypnosis in a way.

And then there’s some formal trat where I’ll just sort of buy into their belief system that we need to do that. It’s almost a convincer more than anything else, so we’ll just take 10 minutes or whatever and do some, some deep trance in order to just basically to convince them that they got the pill.

You know, just to, as a, as an example for that, for a moment, when I, I used to work with Dr. At Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, I was during presurgical hypnosis for patients prior to basically heart surgery, open heart or transplant surgery with him. This was in the nineties case of tracking it. We were partially there to explore whether hypnosis could be seen as a viable thing to use in a hospital setting, and it proved that it was, by the way.

And one of the things we noticed is, A person needs to know that they got the pill for a placebo to work. Hmm. You know, part of hypnosis is in effect the, the belief, you know, so therefore the placebo effect is part of our stock and trade, if you will. But they need to know they got the pill. If you snuck in the middle of the night and slip them a pill when they were sleeping and, you know, put it in their IV or something, and they had no idea that they got it, it wouldn’t be effective.

They need to know they got the pill. So in a way, you know, convincers and hypnosis and, you know, basically hypnosis itself is them getting the pill they need. Feel like, whoa, something happened here and that was different, that was unusual, and that means all this other stuff’s gonna work too well. I mean, that’s one of those elements that, you know, we can be in the session and if someone leaves with that perception of, well, I guess I was hypnotized, I felt really relaxed to give that proof.

So I’m curious, how do you, how do you incorporate that into the work that you do nowadays? If. Well, it’s, it’s always gonna be there. Um, like I said, with the hypnosis, it’s part of it. We want them to have some kind of experience throughout this, in this session that something out of the ordinary happened.

Mm-hmm. , you know, and I usually set it up and suggest that, you know, other clients that have had, have had this happen and that means this. So I’m using that sort of structure of a belief system that we get from slight of mouth, you know, if this happens, then that means this. I sort of set that up in the, in the pre-talk, etc.

And then we do it, you know, so they have that experience. So then they, you know, the arm reaches up by itself and touches their face and they can’t control it or, or something. They, they close their eyes where they didn’t mean to, or, or a time distortion happens. And, you know, 20 minutes went by, it felt like five.

You know, something like that. Whatever it might be. However, they can look back at it and say, Wow, yeah, that was, that was really something. And that, yeah, therefore means that all that other stuff’s gonna be true too. Which was a perfect transition to sort of er conversation over to these themes of slide of mouth.

Oh, how about that? How about that? Look at that, that quote, slip that in there. Yeah. Which, for those, for those that are new to this, could you give kind of an intro to this? Sure. Slight of mouth is basically NLP turned on itself. In other words, NLP was about modeling excellence. So Richard Bander, John Grinder modeled people like Fritz Pearls, Gestalt Therapy, and Virginia Sater and Family Therapy, and of course Milton Erickson and Ericsonian Hypnosis.

They modeled their abilities to do those amazing things, and that’s in a sense what NLP has become. It’s the codification of those strategies and structures that those people used. Along the way, one of the co-developers of nlp, Robert Dtz, was watching how Richard Bander was amazingly persuasive. They did this process throughout the certification courses, which back then were 28 days, which towards the end of it, they, they attempted to get the now almost certified NLP practitioners to say, Let’s, let’s see how persuasive you are.

Richard would adopt a belief that. You know, obviously not true, but he would challenge them to convince them otherwise, and he was very persuasive. Always won the argument somehow, and Robert D was sitting back. You know, astonishment and how he was always able to, to win these arguments, which correct me on this, if I’m re remembering it right.

Part of it was that a stage, a platform would be broken and he clearly broke it himself, but he would get someone almost convinced that they broke it or, or someone, someone in the audience. Sabotage the stage to, Yeah. And so he wanted that person’s identity discovered and have the person, you know, thrown out on their ear kind of thing before the seminar could continue.

So I’m not going another step forward until this is resolved and he’d make this big thing out of it, you know? And he was, he was very good at acting. You know, highly charged, let’s just say so. So it was like a big emotional thing and people were like, interestingly when when people are are emotionally charged, they, some sometimes go back to their old patterns.

So they had to stop doing that. They had to start to start thinking, what, what NLP do I know here? Instead of just going back to my usual fear state, , what I used to do. So it was really. Uh, an effective little moment in their trainings. So Robert Ds was watching this happen and noticed that he used certain patterns over and over again.

Like he used a consequence pattern he called it. So when Robert Dts noticed that, Richard was saying, Well, the consequence of your believing that is such and such, and he did that over and over again in various situations, Dilt said, Well, I’m, I’m gonna call that the consequence pattern. Mm-hmm. . And he basically, over the course of time, codified 14.

Different patterns that Richard would use. The consequence pattern, the intention pattern, the hierarchy of criteria pattern, you know, the redefined pattern, a bunch of them, 14 different ones, and then he made us little chart out of them so that he could have access to them very easily and efficiently, and that became slight of mouth.

Yeah, so then the application for this, it comes down to, correct me, this taking someone else’s belief system and I throw in the modifying word of respectfully feeding it back to them in such a way that the belief system doesn’t quite hold up anymore. That’s very well put. Yes, I would say that’s true, and not only does it not hold up anymore, but they see how there’s an alternative as well that they could go to.

So, you know, don’t to use an analogy of getting them out. The boondocks. You don’t wanna just say, I don’t wanna be in the boondocks anymore. I also now wanna go to the big city. You know, they want to go from here to there. Well, it’s that awareness at times that often the way into the problem is also the way out of the problem.

Exactly. So using the belief structure on itself. Right. Perfect. . Absolutely. Yeah. Is there, cuz you like, sort of explain like one or two of them Sure. For the audience out there? Yeah, absolutely. And interestingly, I, I’m gonna give away a little bit of, um, my way of doing it that’s different I think from Robert dsu, et cetera, is that I, I learned this thing from Tony Robbins a long time ago called the agreement frame.

Which I don’t know if he made up or not, but he taught it in such a way that I really got it. And it’s to say that when you are in an argument with someone, some sort of disagreement, I don’t know if that’s, I’m, I’m using the word argument as, you know, sort of classical argument. It doesn’t have to be an argument like you’re ding it out, something , but it’s, you know, you’re in a, a difference of beliefs about something through discussing the differences.

When you have this argument, people will often say yes, but. And they just basically hold their position by saying, Yeah, but, or, yeah, but you know, it’s kind of budding up against each other. And so what Tony said is that to get out of that, it’s kind of like a verbal, a keto, Because in a keto when sort of punching back, you accept the person’s, you know, thrust and redirect it down to the floor or somewhere else.

So with verbal keto, you say, yes. You know, like, I agree with you and let’s look at it from this perspective, or I respect what you’re saying and I think we can get better results from this direction. You know, it’s, I respect, or I appreciate, or I, I agree. And instead of using the word, but you always use the word.

And so that agreement frame is a very elegant way of, you know, accepting a person’s energy and aligning with them, having that rapport matching and, you know, standing with them and then, you know, guiding them to a different way of perspective. Just to seeing a different way of looking at it. So one of the intention, one of the slide of mouth patterns I also already mentioned is the consequence pattern.

The one I often start with that aligns with this agreement pattern so well is the intent pattern or the intention pattern where you basically say, Yeah, I see that. I agree. You’re, I see how your intention is to do this, you know, X behavior or this X result, and what you’re actually getting is. So why don’t you join with me and we’ll go and find a way to, you know, better accomplish X, which is your intention anyway, And then we can slip from the intention over to the consequence and say, because if you don’t, the consequence will be that you’ll be stuck at this Y situation.

And you’ll always be wondering why. Well, actually I be doing that. See what I did this, I know . So let’s put this into, let’s put this into the context of, let’s say there’s a lot of people listen to this and you know, one side of things for the strategies working with clients, but the other side of it, working with business.

So someone’s called in and here’s the scenario of, they very clearly have expressed I’d like to quit smoking, but now they hear the rate and wow, that’s a lot of money. I can’t afford that. Right. So you wanna use that as an example? Yeah. Let’s use that as an example to branch off of. Okay. So like I, I know your intent is to, to save money and what you’re actually doing is just stopping yourself from progressing at all in life.

So isn’t it more important to like invest your money wisely in something that’s gonna really give you great results, which will ultimately take you to a place that you’ve always wanted to go in your life? Nice. Which I love the use of the stopping in a different context there too. Well, yeah, in a way it’s like you wanna chunk up to different levels cuz they’re just talking about money, but you’re talking about, you know, direction in life, which is much more important.

Of course. Yeah. So then these are strategies that we can use, of course, not just in the conversation for booking the client, but also as part of the process to get the change in motion as well. Mm-hmm. . Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And by the way, it’s interesting because slide of mouth, as you said, is usually used for other people.

You use slide of mouth to change their beliefs. You can use it for yourself as well, cuz we all have beliefs and we all have stumbling blocks. I mean obviously we do. Sometimes they’re harder to notice our own than it is somebody else’s, but we all have. So it’s nice to be able to do kind of a self coaching strategy and, you know, notice what your beliefs are that are stopping you, and then find your own best way out of that using slide of mouth or other, other ways of doing that.

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So then, let’s say someone’s coming now into your space and just to kind of get that user feel of something someone’s now working with you. How, how would you characterize that process? How does it typically play out? Well, you know, it’s very conversational. I mean, for the most part, people don’t realize that the session has begun when the session has probably been already 15 minutes into the process.

We’re just talking. Part of what I’d like to do is I’d like to. Their new behavior with something they’re already good at. Um, something that maybe they’ve been good at in their lifetime that they’re not necessarily doing anymore. Like for instance, a person might have been a avid baseball player when they’re a kid on the little league teams and love playing shortstop or something like that.

Maybe they haven’t done that in years. Right now they’re a businessman or a businesswoman or nurse, anything like that. But if I can just sort of chat with them and find out what things they like to do when they’re a kid. , you know, discover this gold that’s in their history of being a first basement or shortstop or whatever, then I can use that later on.

And I think a metaphor is much, much more powerful when it truly aligns to what a person already has inside them. I mean, to look at the, the ability to pull something out that’s organic rather than craft some confident feeling that’s now fabricated and not, you know, natural to them instead to draw out what’s already there.

So later on in the session, I’d say, you know, it’s, it occurs to me that, you know, building this, this business of yours, this online presence is really just like playing baseball. And I just given two or three examples of how that would be true. And generally speaking, their unconscious mind starts going like, Oh my God.

That’s right. It is like that. And, and they, they have all those resources in there and they just start pulling ’em up and, and, uh, surprising everybody at. , massively re resourceful. They’ve become, but it’s actually, they’ve always had it. We’re just bringing out, and that’s kind of one of the essential, uh, ingredients or basic tenants of ericsonian hypnosis, which is to say that we all have the resources inside us already, you know, to do whatever we wanna do.

We just have to get access to, mm-hmm. . So to model what’s already there, and then draw it out, put it into use. So is that mostly done conversational in your world or is that perhaps more of a deep trans experience? No, it’s, it’s much more conversational. I like, I like to do both. I figure we have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind in a session with me, there will almost always be some deep trans, mm-hmm.

you know, we will at some point always get to the weather. It’s conversationally and they’re just sort of find themselves drifting off while we’re sitting in a chair. Or I’ll say, Okay, now close your eyes and go deeper. , we’ll get there. Yeah. Outstanding. So then I know one of the other elements of your work is that of Havening.

Could you chat about that for a bit as well? Sure. Love to. Yeah. The Havening techniques are remarkable. They’re psychos, censory therapy. Many people know what those are. Tapping is an example of a psycho censory therapy. EMDR is an example of a psychos sensory therapy. Basically what we do with the psycho censory therapy is we look to get a, uh, emotional.

Belief change, emotional or a healing on a psychological, emotional level. But we use the body to get there. So tapping, you tap on the face or the arms or the hands or whatever. You tap different places. Emdr, you move your eyes back and forth laterally. They use cross lateral stimulation to create basically the same change.

And what Havening has discovered is the reason those things work is when you do stimulation on the arms or the face or different places, what you’re creating. Very slow delta waves in the brain. In the body. The body is an electrical chemical system. And then when you do this stimulation, it creates Delta waves.

The delta waves is the secret sauce. Delta waves is why EMDR works. The Delta Waves is why tapping works, and what Haven has done is it’s recognized that, and it sort of has stripped out from the process. Anything that doesn’t focus on. And, and put all of its energy on what does create those, behave, those delta waves and, you know, takes it from there.

So it’s, it’s uh, it’s really kind of like a tapping or a emdr, you know, psycho sensory therapy, but next generation it’s, it’s amazing stuff. Yeah. And of course, with an audio podcast, this is where it gets into our wonderful, descriptive hypnotic language patterns. Could you describe the, the physicality of it, what it actually looks?

Sure. Basically, uh, Havening Touch is one of three places, and just by the way, this is not somebody’s opinion. This is, they did research on this that we, they know that when the body is touched in these three places, the. Body sends delta waves to the brain. The brain in turn releases oxytocin and dopamine and serotonin and calcium nerve.

I mean, it happens when you touch the arms from the shoulders down to the elbows, and it says downward stroke. They stroke, you know, just rubbing like you’re putting on suntan lotion, rubbing your arms from the shoulders down to the elbows, lifting off, and then stroking down again from the shoulders to the elbows in that direction.

The question could be asked why downwards? The answer is simply that it feels better. Um, when you stroke upwards, it’s like petting a cat against the grain, you know? Really? It’s weird, but it’s That’s true. You know, technically, technically it shouldn’t matter, but it, it does. I mean, it’s a simple throwaway, the, the hypnotic deepening method of having your hand on their shoulder, and as exhaling, you’re pressing down lightly.

In a recent class, someone goes, Why don’t we do it when they’re inhaling? And I go, Go off and try that. Yeah. Within 20 seconds, they’re going, Point made . Exactly. Got it. , right. And then the other places where you get delta waves is the forehead and the cheeks. Places on the face. You can do them individually, the forehead by itself, or the cheeks by themselves.

Or you can do them collectively by, you know, using an open palm on your face and just stroking. And the other place where you get havening delta waves, conveniently is the palms of the hands. So interestingly, places like the gamut point and places on the chest or whatever you get no delta wave. Like 1.5 or something like that.

0.5, it’s like no delta weight, basically you get a lot, like 30 times over baseline on the arms. You get like 30 to 40 times over baseline. You get like 60 to 90% over baseline on the face. So we focus on that. So you’re stroking in a gentle, natural way if you think about it. It’s very, very natural. With a mother, you know, has the, a baby.

That’s the stroking just happens automatically. The stroke, the face. Oh, the little baby. It’s, it’s, it’s petting, it’s stroking. It’s natural. If a kid runs to their mother in the middle of the night cuz there’s lightning and they’re afraid the mother doesn’t sit ’em down and tap ’em. You know, they don’t.

Do that. They, they, they stroke, they say, It’s okay, Johnny. It’s just a natural little stroking thing. It’s human, it’s beautiful, and it’s, and it’s very, very, very effective. And the client can do it themselves and they’ll get the same benefits. So if you, you know, if there’s a reason why the person doesn’t want to have the therapist touching them, which is fine, they can do it themselves.

They’re gonna get the same. . Yeah. Which I’m fascinated by the way that it all kind of blends together. Now that here’s a conversational style, there’s the actual, you know, let’s call it formal hypnotic work. Where does the havening fit in with you? Well, you know, when you do hypnosis, when you do deep sleep stuff, you get down to delta waves.

It’s dealt, you know, the brain wave action when you’re in a really deep state. Delta is the slowest brainwave. The slowest, it’s 0.5 to four hertz, so you’re generating that automatically. When you stroke the arms in the face and the hands, you’re getting delta waves. So it’s almost like a shortcut to the hypnagogic state by doing havening.

So when you combine them together, it’s just such a seamless. Combo that I, I use it pretty much every time. I, I, I would say I probably use Havening with about 90% of my clients at this point, partially also because they can do it for themselves and I want them to learn self-care. I want people to go home and, you know, build resilience by visualizing what they wanna have in their life and doing this havening stuff, which gets the, you know, the hippocampus involved and helps them consider.

Memories that haven’t happened yet cuz they’re visualizing something in the future. It’s, it’s remarkable work. Yeah. And I’m curious to ask this then, is this something that you’ve been using now for quite some time? Is it more of a newer development for you? Well, it’s newer in my history. I mean, I’ve been doing, like I said, Tony Robbins event was 1985.

I’ve been a full-time hypnotist and NLP therapist, if you will. Trainer since 1990. That has been my full-time gig since 1990. I learned HAVENING in 2013. Mm-hmm. . So for me, it’s relatively new. I became a trainer of Havening in 2014. So I would say to me it’s relatively new still, but it’s been six years.

Yeah. Which that, that’s a fascinating concept. What’s that measurement for you as to whether or not something gets added to the repertoire effectiveness? Pure and simple. Pure and simple. I, I, I’d learn things. I, I’m always taking seminars and learning stuff. I, you know, this is a lifelong journey for me. I, I’m open, I try to be anyway, open to possibilities.

If it works, then I keep it. If it doesn’t, I don’t, you know, if it works effectively and easily and, you know, I’ll sometimes keep it and throw something else. I used to do out re redesign things. Re re uh, evaluate. Well, I wanted to actually go back to something that you mentioned a little while ago, which was that it was a, it was a research project involving Dr.

Oz. Mm-hmm. Yeah, could you chat a little bit more about that? Cuz that was something that, that could be a whole topic onto its own . What was the shape of that, that research that you were doing? Well, 1994 I got involved in, was called the Department of Complimentary Medicine. I’m sorry, that’s not true. It was called the complimentary care center and basically it was Dr.

Oz and a few other people at uh, Columbia Presbyterian who are studying the efficacy of. And I’m doing air quotes here, alternative therapies. Could you, could you hear those air quotes? I could hear them really well. Yeah. I’ll make sure the editors highlight that. Alternative therapies in a hospital setting.

So we had people like me doing hypnosis. We had massage therapists and sheung teachers, yoga teachers, therapeutic touch practitioners. We had a number of different things, acupuncture pressure, bunch of different things were being. They found some really interesting ways of doing, like fo pressure acupuncture.

Like they had these, these needles that were in embedded in a bandaid so they could put a bandaid on and, and put a needle through. People wouldn’t know if the ba if the needle actually went through the bandaid into their body or not, so people could believe they were really getting acupuncture when they weren.

So it was really great. It was very difficult to do a FO hypnosis. Yeah, I was about to ask that. , it was really basically impossible to do a double blind study with hypnosis. So we did the best we could. And I mean, the best I’ve heard, there was one study that had, well, that again, this is still hypnotic suggestion.

There was one that was relaxation only. The other was relaxation plus suggestion, which I’m going well, the relaxation is now suggestion as well. Yeah. Yeah, so, So we did the best we could. And I will say that by the time this study was finished, there were only two, two modalities still in the hospital. And one of them was hypnosis and the other one was massage.

And pretty much everything else was, Gone from their, from their daily use there. So I think that’s kind of interesting, you know. Now were those, was this purely surgical, or what was the application? It was, well, in the, in the studies it was purely surgical, Yeah. Mm-hmm. , we wanted to see basically how much shorter hospital stay was, how much less pain medications they needed, things like that.

So things that were actually basically down to dollar amounts. If they, um, needed less medication than the. Paid less if the, if they were in the hospital a shorter duration than the person paid less. So it’s kind of like what could improve the bottom line from a hospital perspective. And hypnosis definitely did and, and massage definitely did.

Yeah. And was the focus then on just, uh, healing time suggestion, was it actually towards work during surgery as well? Yeah, we, my, my work was probably primarily presurgical. The suggestions. I, I would do at least. Live session with them and record the recording and give them recording that they listen to over and over again, and also during surgery.

So the surgical outcomes would be better and you know, fewer complications and that therefore they could get out faster with less pain medication. Yeah. Now the work from that, is that something that would you say influence the work that you’re doing nowadays? Absolutely. Yeah. How so? Well, you know, the medical efficacy, you know, does it actually work and can we, you know, have.

Some proof for that. And that’s basically, by the way, one of the reasons I like Havening so much is cuz Havening was created by Dr. Ronald Rudin, who is an m. And he is also a PhD. He’s got a PhD in organic chemistry. So he didn’t want anybody to know about his research until he felt he had proved it, you know, So he didn’t tell anybody for about six years except for his twin brother Steven Rudin, who is also a doctor.

But, uh, Doctor of Dental Surgery, dds, nobody knew about it for a good six years until he was pretty certain why this was. So it wasn’t conjecture, it wasn’t, you know, Chinese medicine or whatever it was. It was western studies, medicine, you know, kind of stuff that you could, you could look at. Yeah. Which I love that as an application cuz we do find ourselves not, not to spend the negative briefly, but we find ourselves in this pattern of, here’s the technique I like doing because I like doing it.

Here’s something creative and. We wanna see at the end of the day, does it actually work? Does it get the result? Does it get the result is the bottom line. For me, the reason Havening works is also even better than that, is not only does it work and it also has that science behind it. Mm-hmm. , you know, it actually is scientifically provable, which is like to me.

It’s like that’s That’s the golden, That’s the golden go. That’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful. Yeah, good to have numbers at the end of the day. So then nowadays, I know you’re up in New York, is there a specific thing that you tend to work with more than anything else? Well, like I said, I do havening with about 90% of my people, and that’s especially true if they’re coming for what Havening is originally designed for, which is phobias or traumas.

If people have those, then it’s certainly my go to situation. And that being said, I did NLP with the research and recognition project, the r and r. Dot org research and recognition project.org. It’s, it’s using Havening for, for traumas, havening with, with veterans and, I’m sorry, not Havening NLP with, with veterans and it worked fantastically, amazingly, much better than, you know, anything that the Veterans Administration had been giving them.

NLP works really, really well. Even in spite of that 90% I’d say, of the people that I work with for trauma. I don’t do NLP with them. I mean, I do some of course, but I don’t do that whole process we did with the veterans in this study. I, I do havening, it’s my go-to because it’s just so darn and effective.

Yeah. Is there a specific category of clients that are now coming in more for you? I do a lot of phobias, a lot of fears, a lot of trauma stuff. Yeah. Is there a story that kind of stands out of working with someone where it was this natural blend of these different elements? You know, it’s interesting.

There are, there are so many at this point in time that kind of, I still am amazed at the power of this. I’m still amazed at the I, I feel like I sort of sit back and watch miracles happen. But the one that is, I think for me the most moving to me at the moment at least, is that this, I was working with this autistic.

Who had been traumatized. I just won’t go into details, but let’s just say he was definitely on the spectrum and definitely been traumatized. I wouldn’t have been able to work with him with any of my other modalities. You know, I couldn’t have done NLP with him. I couldn’t do hypnosis with him. It just wouldn’t have worked.

And Havening didn’t seem to work at first either. He kind of had a seemingly negative reaction to it. And for a couple of days he was depressed. His mother said, and then she texted me and. I think it’s working. And I said, Okay, tell me more . I said, Why, why do you think it’s working? He says, Well, he came to me and he said, Mom, I can still remember that thing that happened, but it doesn’t bother me anymore.

And I just got chills, you know? It was just like, holy crap. You know, It, it, it really worked. So they’ve been now back for 2, 2, 3 more sessions and it’s just been, just been. Just been great. So Havening does, for me two things. It, it, it enhances what I’ve already been doing. You know, the hypnosis, the NLP is just not threatened by, but enhanced by Havening.

And I use them all interconnectedly very, very well. But it has also given me a sense of certainty, you know, that I didn’t always have before in spite of the fact I’ve been at this for a while. You know, I, I. Pretty well known for doing this stuff internationally. Known trainer of NLP and stuff. I still would sometimes, if a person would come in with a trauma or whatever, I’d be like, Oh golly, I hope this works.

You know, there’d be part of me thinking, Eh, I know I’m get 90, 95%, but still there’s that 5%, you know? Oh gosh. I don’t have that with Havening. Havening. I just have a hundred percent certainty. You know, a person comes in and goes like, Yes, I can. and I believe it wholeheartedly. It’s, it’s, it’s a certainty.

I know that I can, and that that has helped my practice immense. . Yeah. Is it something that you’re getting an instant read on or just having the research, having the efficacy behind it? It’s, it’s all that, it’s just the, the, uh, basically the a hundred percent success rate up till now has been very useful that, that has helped my certainty a great deal, having it have always.

Always work. I will say one thing, I, I did work with a woman who, who had been lifelong, She didn’t have like a trauma that happened like in 1997 or something like that. This was a lifelong series of events from basically birth. I, I’ve really never known anybody with such a. Devastatingly horrible life history.

I mean, this was, this was a challenge, and she had gone, She said, Of course the many, maybe people say this, but I believed it in her case, that she’d tried everything. You know, she’d been in therapy for a long time and tried many, many things and nothing had worked at all. She was not open to havening at first.

She wanted, she had read about the, the research and recognition project, the NLP thing, and she wanted that. But again, that usually works really well when there is a specific. Incident that took place, like, you know, for the soldiers, it was like this, you know, deployment that happened in Afghanistan, This one, one thing where, you know, blah, blah, blah.

You know, it was a specific thing. Hers was a lifelong history, and yet, you know, I, I had to, you know, go with what she wanted. Of course, there are times when you have to. Try to placate or whatever satisfy the needs of the person that is coming in there. So we, we went with, well, I mean, to embrace that sometimes there’s just, let’s use a hypnotic term.

Sometimes there’s just that hypnotic contract. Yeah. That the person will sometimes call me and say, Hey, I see that you’ve, you trained this specific protocol. I want that. Yes. And as much as I’ve tried to get clever over the years to try to, you know, reframe it to something else to realize, no wait, they’re giving me a gift, I need to at least start with that.

Yes, I can eventually bring in the other stuff. Exactly. But. Listen, listen whether it’s appropriate. Right, Right, right. So we did that and we’d got some results. I mean, it was better. We, So she saw something and I just, I told her about Havening and I told her what it was before. And so the next session we, we did that.

And like I think other psychos therapies, we use this suds scale, this subjective unit of distress scale. So we rate. Feeling of fear or whatever it might be called, on a scale of zero to 10, where 10 is off the chart, like it is the top of the list, you can’t get worse than that, and zero is, it’s gone. So we got her down in the first session using the NLP thing.

We got it down to like a eight from a 10, which was still something, or six maybe we got as far as that. And then the second session with the Havening, it got down to a zero, which she didn’t understand. She had never felt zero in her lifetime. Had no reference for it. So that was . That was pretty disturbing in its own funny sort of way that she just had no reference for this feeling of no fear whatsoever.

So she, she, uh, I was reported later that she, uh, had reverted to some. Fear that had come back and I wasn’t surprised with a history like hers. And then I, I, something came up, I, I won’t go into details, but it was a political disagreement. I said something about someone that she likes a lot, politically, that I don’t particularly care for.

And some of her religious views started coming to the surface that were at odds with some of my views. You know, I didn’t make a big thing out of it, but she was very, very, That, you know, there were some things that she just wouldn’t do or people she just wouldn’t talk to. So, you know, my politics, perhaps my, my who I am got in the way, a little bit of the treatment itself, So, mm-hmm.

so she didn’t come back for a third session. . Yeah. Which the reason why I’ve learned, ah, take the magnet off the back of the car. . Yeah. So it was very, you know, 99, 9 0.9% of people in the world. I’d say that thing too that, that I said, and they’d be like, Oh yeah, that’s right. But she, she was that 0.1% . And that was like you said, what?

Um, that I. Couldn’t un frame that or reframe that. I couldn’t. Although it does make me flash back to, I believe when we first met and I was in your sight of mouth class, one of the prompts was in terms of playing with the agreement frame during it full circle, someone then proposed, we use a mildly uh, Let’s call it polarizing prompt.

Mm-hmm. , which was that. And the beauty of this was you then had to switch sides. Right, Right, right. And then defend the other. So if we were supporting an idea, we had to get, gain our flexibility and then choose the other side. And one of the prompts was, and again, Doesn’t matter what your personal opinion was because in the exercise we had to argue both, and the prompt was, History will show that George W.

Bush is the best president we’ve ever had. and someone in the group. All he could manage was, I agree, he was a president, and. So that ability to be that chameleon in the room or, um, I flashed to George Carlin reducing the 10 Commandments down to wdu. I’ll keep th religion to that himself. , I wanna bring it all full circle cuz I know that you talk about the themes of neo Ericson, Ericsonian hypnosis.

Yeah. What makes it Neo Ah, well, that could be a whole podcast itself. And I’ll just say this. I, I, I, by training was a. Yes, I went to school for music. I got two bachelor’s degrees, one in composition and one in piano performance. I was offered a, you know, to go to a master’s degree. I was offered to go to music therapy and decided, I.

This dad had enough of school at that point in time and went to New York City to play in rock and roll bands. And then while I was here playing in rock and roll bands, I was introduced to, to Tony Robbins thing, and the rest is history. So I, my degrees are in music, and when I started learning about Ericsonian hypnosis, I said, Gosh, I, I want learn more of this.

Where, where can I go to learn this? I’ve discovered the Erickson Foundation and I said, Gosh, I wanna take your courses. And they said,

I said, No, you’re, you’re not degreed enough in the right way for our, our, our standards. So I couldn’t take their courses. I, I, I never learned from Jeffrey Zag, you know, not directly watched his videos a billion times. I guess he forgot about that part. read all the books and studied all that stuff, but I, I got most of my ericsonian training from a guy who didn’t do ericsonian hypnosis.

He. What he could did, which was other than conscious communication, he, this guy named Dr. Dave Dobson and I learned a lot from him. I also learned ericsonian from second generation Exonians like Steven Gilligan and Bill O’Hanlon and others who would let me into their classes. Not that Ericson was alive at the time.

I, I tried, you know, just, just the Ericsson Foundation wouldn’t have be Right. Yeah. But, but few people would, Gilligan would, and o Hammond would and some others. So I, I learned as much as I could. But then I realized that when I started teaching Ericsonian and I didn’t really have a a, a right in a way, to be saying that what I was doing was Ericsonian.

Cuz I was learning from Dobson, who disavowed his, his ericson, He’d only met Ericsson once, but mostly he developed his stuff separately. . So although it was very, very similar if not parallel to Ericson, it was still not ericsonian hypnosis and all the NLP stuff I learned and was a master trainer of was not ericsonian hypnosis, it was bandler’s, um, in grinder’s version of it.

So just become more accurate in my description of what I did do. While it’s tremendously effective, and I would put it up against any ericsonian. Anywhere it, I can’t in all consciousness say that it’s ericsonian. So I, So Neil Ericsonian is the best thing. And I would say also that, going back to your opera singer example, you know, it’s if you try to do what you did before, It’s not really generative, it’s not really creating something new, it’s not really developing anything.

If I try to be as Erickson was, Erickson was doing his stuff in the fifties, in the sixties. Mm-hmm. and you know, we’ve learned a lot since then. We’ve learned a lot since then. We’ve built, we’ve stood on the shoulders of his genius and we can get better. In a sense collectively at what we do than, than he did as, as much of a genius as he was.

And I would say he was in fact a genius. And I am nowhere near that stature. But I can do things in a way that perhaps he couldn’t or wouldn’t, or didn’t. You know, because I’ve learned from Gilligan and Bandler and all those other people in my own experiences and now add havening to it and stuff. It, it just does a heck of a lot.

than what Erickson is actually capable of doing, which I love that as the theme of, I mean, I go back to being a teenager and having a hobby doing magic, and here is the book that I was told. This is the number one book on learning how to do slight of hand magic with coins and opening it up. One of the first things that I read was borrow a top hat from a gentleman in the audience.

That we have to recognize that, you know, we can, we, we can step back and say that, you know, these people were the grades, but at the same time, if they were still around, they would still be progressing. Which I love that as the aspect of you getting into this work and then nearly 10 years later, discovering something else and going, Let me add this into it as well.

Yep. So that continuation of that learning. So on that theme, perfect segue by the way, uh, on that theme. Where could people check out more for you online? Well, I have a couple of websites actually, to finally, just most quickly, doug O’Brien hypnosis.com is my website for, you know, working with me directly.

But if you want to learn what I do, if you wanna learn about Ericsonian hypnosis and NLP and that sort of thing, havening, then you’d go to the ericsonian dot. I got a call a few years ago from Carol Erickson, Milton’s daughter, and she said, Who are you? ? And I said, Oh, um, I’m Doug. Why do you ask me? I said, Well, how did you get Eric so.com?

And I said, I asked for it. And nobody else had taken it back in 1993 or whatever year it was when I got it. So yes, eric sonian.com is my website and you’ll find everything you wanna. There. Excellent. We’ll put links over to the show notes [email protected]. And Doug, you mentioned you’ve also got a training coming up for those that are listening to this as it launches in October.

Yeah, I’m doing, um, you know what, I’m gonna go give you the dates. I’m gonna go to my website right now. Yeah. I have a slight of mouth training in New York City in October, and I’ll give you the dates in just one moment. I have a, a HAVENING training in Oslo, Norway. October. Also, if anybody’s over there and your listening base, also doing a neo ericsonian training there, I’ve combined that a lot with nlp, so it’s a much longer training than perhaps some people are used to.

It’s a six day training, a neo ericsonian hypnosis training. So October 26th and 27th is one Slide of mouth is happening October 26th and 27th in New York City and the Neo Ericsonian hypnosis training surgery level one. Is three weekends starting in November, goes three weekends in November and December.

Awesome. And we’ll put links over in the show notes again [email protected]. Before we wrap it up, any final thoughts to share for the listeners out there? Just that you know, it is an amazing. Field that we’re in this, um, long, long, long time ago, I was reading these books by Carlos Cast NATA about the teachings of Don Juan.

Fascinating. I won’t go into it, but one of the things Don Juan always said is that you need to find a path with a heart. You know that your life path has to, you know, have a heart. You, you keep on. It’s not just for the money, it’s not just for the, the, the social standing, whatever. You do it because it’s, it’s deep, it’s it’s rich, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s got a heart and for me, When I discovered, you know, NLP and Ericsonian Hypnosis, it was just like, Yes, this, this is Ericson.

Osis is such a rich and deep thing. I, it will, it is my lifelong study in learning. I’m always learning where I, I, I’ve watched ericsonian videos, Ericson working with people. Dozens, hundreds of times, and I still learn more. It’s like, Did he say that before? You must. It’s a video, but , I didn’t hear that before.

I never got through my thick head before, so I’m always learning and it’s just such a wonderful. Rich, beautiful things, so just keep on keeping eye. Jason Lynette here once again, and as always, thank you so much for interacting with this program, for leaving your reviews online and sharing this week’s episode on your social media streams.

And once again, head over to the show [email protected] to see how to connect with Doug and pick up any of his programs or upcoming trainings. And also, once again, check out hypnotic workers. Dot com. Get the all access pass to my hypnosis training library and digital access format, plus a thriving online community that’s there to support you.

Check that out. Hypnotic workers.com. See you soon. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast and work smart hypnosis.com.