Asklemmy

I’m a therapist and also trained in hypnotherapy. It is possible or but harder IMO. I just tell people to “pretend” instead of “visualize.”

“Pretend you are standing at the top of a staircase” is something most people can do even if they don’t get a visual. It’s “a felt sense.”

You can do this test: if you pretend or imagine to bite into a lemon, do you start to salivate a bit even if you can’t see it in your mind’s eye? If yes, you can be hypnotized. If no, doesn’t mean you can’t, but it means there will be extra work.

I have aphantasia.

Personally I never thought being hypnotized was possible for me

When someone says "Imagine an apple" I think of the concept or idea of an apple. I would need them or me to give more details about what this imaginary apple has. Green/red, leaf/no leaf, connected to tree or not.

The more details I add the more I have to think about it to hold all the details together.

Example, I know my house very well. I can tell you every detail I remember about my house. But if you told me to imagine your house and just threw details at me I wouldn't be able to remember the majority of them. If I physically walked through your house I could remember a ton of details.

Feel free to ask any questions!

Bower or Bowers wrote a book debunking the "hypnotism doesn't exist" pseudoscience, decades ago.

Basically, if you get 2 populations, & have 1 population go into hypnosis-session intentionally faking it .. and you don't have the other population going into it faking,

& the hypnotist is competent,

THEN the measurable difference-in-behavior between the 2 groups is proof that it's real.

Hypnosis is as real as multiple-personality-disorder, or as different-personality-while-in-shock-from-trauma.

It's just a more unconscious-mind dominant state, is all.

Dreams are real, too, btw.

Lack of visual-imagination doesn't affect hypnotizability.

I'm aphantasic: it's wrongly-named.

It means "no imagination", but the truth is we've plenty of imagination, just not visually.

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IMO yes they'd be successful.

Full disclosure, my experience with hypno is more kink related and not in a medical context, so my experience will be drastically different than those that get into hypno for therapy because most of the time the people performing it in my case are amateurs leaning heavily on preexisting dom/sub power dynamics (ie not "true" hypnosis). YMMV.

I don't really visualize things in my head at all. Sometimes on a good day I can imagine almost a fuzzy smoke like outline, but this isn't a typical day for me. I can imagine sounds, smells, tastes and especially touch/sensations.. ickplant@lemmy.world made a great point in one of the comments here. Using the word "pretend" is a far better delivery.

In my personal sessions I have the best experience when people can suspend my disbelief and make me believe they are incredibly skilled, even if maybe they aren't. Part of that is just me really wanting to be hypnotized, and honestly that's the biggest thing. If you want hypnotized you will be hypnotized, and if you don't, you won't.

I can pretty much just think about the sensation I feel during hypnosis and put myself into a sort of pseudo trance at this point. I listen to audios occasionally and try and do a session with someone about once every couple months. I'm not really fully educated on the mechanics of it all, but I know I enjoy it.

Person with partial aphantasia (when I really try, I can get about the graphic fidelity of Star Fox on SNES on a monitor with a broken backlight) here:

I always found those thought-journey thingies somewhat pointless when teachers at school n such tried to do them with us. Of course they weren’t experts, though, so maybe someone who really knows what they’re doing could invoke something but realistically, probably not.

On the other hand, dimming the lights, closing my eyes and the relative quietness of only one person calmly telling a kind of story, made me calm and sleepy regardless, so maybe the imaginary journey isn’t necessary anyways.