Hypnotism Therapist Renee Lin
Like a brain surgeon, hypnotism therapist Renee Lin digs into the mind to heal the ill - only he doesn’t need a scalpel. All you need to do is to close your eyes and relax...
HK Magazine: Wait! Where’s your pocket watch? Are you hypnotizing me with your eyeballs already? What do you want from me?!
Renee Lin: We ceased using the pocket watch about 60 years ago. Hypnosis is not about getting subjects to do our bidding. Mostly we just talk people into a trance, and clients know what they are doing the whole time. They are just more relaxed, so suggestions enter their minds more easily. We merely plant a small voice within you during the hypnosis.
HK: Planting a small voice - what do you mean?
RL: Say, if you want to use hypnosis as a way to quit smoking, we plant a suggestion in your mind, like “Cigarettes are not food - you don’t need them to survive” and associate it with an action - say, whenever you pick up a cigarette.
HK: So you could hypnotize me to kill someone...
RL: As an ethical person, I would not plant such a voice in your head. Moreover, if killing is highly against your values, then it would be impossible for me to hypnotize you to do such a thing.
HK: Then I’d better be careful what I wish for... What kinds of clients visit you?
RL: People who want to quit smoking, lose weight or have some mystifying emotional outbreak. For example, some people might grieve a loved one’s death for years without knowing why. During hypnosis, we may find that he or she felt there was something left unsaid. We would then ask the person to say what he wanted to say and in many cases, the patient starts getting better.
HK: But that’s not even real...
RL: The subconscious is not very good at telling what’s real and what’s not - it is far beyond logical. That’s why it can exert such a powerful influence over us and we behave so irrationally. The whole essence of hypnosis is about getting access to the subconscious mind, which stores a lot that we repress or forget. Even the police use hypnosis on victims and witnesses to retrieve forgotten details.
HK: So what is former life therapy?
RL: It’s a kind of regression therapy which gets people to recall something that goes far back in time when they were young, or even before that. It's the so-called former life. It is just like rewinding a tape in your memory, and some people can go so far that they recall something of their former life.