Active-Alert Hypnosis to Achieve Personal, Professional, and Therapeutic Goals

Hypnosis does not always require suggestions of relaxation in order enter into this state. It can also be induced through suggestions of activation and cognitive alertness. This procedure and the hypnotic state caused by it has been called active-alert hypnosis (AAH). In this chapter, we describe a strategy to increase the probability to achieve goals using an AAH technique in which we ask the patient to move his arms in an alternate way, while imagining that he has a pair of dumbbells of several kilograms in each hand, in order to produce a hypnotic age progression phenomenon, in which the patient is oriented to a positive future and mobilizing hope, and could see himself achieving his goals, creating “memories of the future.” We report several clinical cases in which this hypnotic strategy was used.