Hello, Luke Michael Howard, clinical hypnotist and owner of Lukenosis Hypnosis here.
And today, I wanna answer a question that I get quite a lot actually over the last year or so. Is hypnosis good for children?And the answer is yes. Children, certainly below the age of five, are a little hypnosis machine, some people believe up to the age of five to seven. Until your conscious mind, your analytical, logical mind comes into play, we're all completely unconscious. I don't mean we're mindless zombies, I'm not calling your children mindless zombies, but as much as it's not a conscious thing that they're doing oftentimes with volition, at least to the age of five to seven, depending on what studies that you read.
So hypnosis is very, very good with with children. Now, some of the changes that I make when working with children is... Typically, a session I'll work with an adult will be about 15 minutes in length. With a child, certainly below the age of 10, a session's generally about 25 to 30 minutes because of attention spans. So that's one of the caveats, one of the changes I make. When I do hypnosis with adults, it's always me and the adult in the room alone, so there's no transference of anyone else being in the rooms. We can do nice, clean work, of course, say, a loved one, a trusted person can be outside of the office door, absolutely. When it comes to me working with children, I like to have a parent in the room, a guardian of the child who's not talking, not participating in the process but is there in the room, watching the process go along, so that the stuff that I'm teaching the child to do with their imagination, I'm also teaching you, the adult, the parent, the guardian of the child, so you can help to become their hypnotist and learn these skills for yourself because it will help you. And so those are some of the differences.
Now oftentimes, people think, "Oh hypnosis, he's eyes closed and relaxation," and there's not a lot of kids that like to close their eyes and just completely relax their body so I have to utilize other skills, distraction skills, if you will, when working with children, hence why I have many tattoos and many different gimmicks going on. It seems to captivate young minds, which is awesome.
Some of the pluses with working with children is they have amazing imaginations. If I say, "Hey, think of a blue chair," they're already there. Not like, "Well, I can't think, I don't visualize things inside my head." Children visualize, are hypnosis machines. It's just as we get older, we stop thinking that we're thinking and we start to think that it's real. And we stop using our imagination for good purposes and oftentimes use our imagination bad purposes. So working with children, they use their imagination all the time. They're daydreaming all the time. It's just about tapping into that, enabling them to daydream, to visualize, to imagine, to pretend of more what they want in their life, in spite of all the stuff they no longer want and no longer need to imagine, whether that be some kind of a trauma, whether that be some kind of anxiety, whether that be some kind of a sadness in their life.
So this is some of the differences between children and adults. Oftentimes times when I'm working with children, again, I'll have to utilize and change my techniques because if I say to my children, "Close your eyes and keep your eyes closed and we'll actually [inaudible 00:03:15] so much so that you cannot open your eyes," it might work really well for a while. But after a while, that kid, their mind goes off another tangent somewhere and they get distracted. So my job when working with children is to be the best shiny object in the room so I completely distract them from their old ways of being, enable them to go down a trance tunnel worth having more success in their life to be free of the ailment, the problem or what they came in with.
So it's a certain different type of skills when working with children, but I've had amazing success in working with children, helping them to stop peeing the bed, stop experiencing chronic pain in certain areas of their bod,y and having night terrors and having to sleep with their parents all the time after the age of seven rather than go to their own beds. I've had amazing success in these areas but I had to fine tune the skills that I had as a hypnotist, realizing the way that we treat an adult and the way that I would treat a child and the imagination is very different. So hopefully that explains that yes, hypnosis is very, very good when working with children, some of the changes that I make when working with children and how amazingly effective it is.
Always Believe,
Luke Michael Howard CHT
Clinical Hypnotist
