Can't keep your resolutions? Try hypnosis

From magic to mainstream

Along the way toward respectability, hypnosis is shedding its flaky image of the past. It doesn't require quacking like a duck, walking around in a daze wearing flowing robes or submitting to someone else's control. Construction workers, medical professionals, attorneys, schoolteachers and others use it to lose, gain or alter behaviors.

And today's hypnotists won't be confused with tarot-card readers at a Renaissance fair.

Zimmerman, for instance, looks and sounds like a college counselor or professor. For an interview at her midtown office, she's dressed in a smartly tailored suit with a pretty scarf, her voice and manner attentive and gentle.

Zimmerman says that, rather than a truly altered state, hypnosis is an everyday occurrence.

"As you go to sleep at night, you're in a state of hypnosis; when you wake up and don't know what day it is, you're in a state of hypnosis," Zimmerman says.

During such times, suggestions are particularly powerful in shaping expectations and future behavior. For instance, when clients who suffer from insomnia are in session, Zimmerman may simply tell them, "You'll go to bed and sleep great."

The one prerequisite is a desire for change.

"It is extremely successful when people are willing to change," Zimmerman says.

Ronda Graf, a local hypnotist in practice since 1998, says that resolutions are a natural fit for hypnotism.

"January and February are our busiest months," she says. It seems fitting that Jan. 4 is the fourth annual World Hypnotism Day.

Maude Schellhous, another hypno- therapist in town, who has worked in the field for more than 12 years, said that she knows whenever hypnosis makes the news – as it did when Ellen DeGeneres worked with hypnotist Paul McKenna on her show in October 2006 to quite smoking.

"Every time she mentions it on TV, I get calls," Shellhous says.

Graf, like other practitioners, says most people respond to visual suggestions and imagery. It's important to guide smokers to see themselves as nonsmokers in the mind's eye and to give them verbal cues, or "anchors," to help them tap into that vision and reinforce it. For example, when clients are faced with the temptation of an unwanted behavior, Graf may suggest they say to themselves, "Cancel, cancel, cancel, I'm in control."

Zimmerman and other hypnotherapists say the biggest barrier for many people is a fear of losing control. She and others explain that when hypnotists such as Terry Stokes perform at the State Fair, inducing audience members to do truly peculiar things (including acting like animals), people are seeing an authoritative type of hypnosis designed for amusement rather than the therapeutic variety in which a therapist offers suggestions for change rather than commands.

"There's still a notion that this is silly entertainment," says Bill Blank, a hypnotist who has been in practice about 20 years locally and focuses on smoking cessation.

In fact, hypnosis can restore feelings of self-control rather than reducing them.

"It's so empowering," says Karen Cisneros, a marriage and family therapist who lives in Elk Grove. She went to Zimmerman for help with weight loss and other issues about two years ago. She weighed about 200 pounds and now weighs 130 pounds.

"Some of the biggest things that helped me was realizing that I do have control over my eating, and realizing I had to make a priority for myself to make sure I got exercise," she says. "No one's making me bark like a dog."

Another common misconception, Zimmerman says, is that not everyone can be hypnotized.

"It's so natural, but people think it must be something they've never felt before," Zimmerman says. "Anybody can learn to do this, and on some level it is magic."

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• Call The Bee's Alison apRoberts, (916) 321-1113.