How To Create Emotions in Humans
What you’re about to learn is arguably the most important behavior you can master.
When having a conversation with another human, you will be altering emotional states (AKA state). That’s the nature of human-to-human communication. If you’re a mental healthcare professional reading this, it’s crucial that you are guiding clients to the states that will produce optimal change in the therapy room.
I have witnessed and coached a lot of humans on how to change someone’s state ranging from mental healthcare professionals wanting to induce hypnosis or help a client escape the hold of depressive behavior to humans who wanted a romantic connection with another human being.
You can say the right words, do the right things, and have the best of intentions, but you will never fully master the art of creating states in another human being until you know how to create states within yourself.
The key to guiding others into the state you want them to feel is going first.
When you develop rapport with someone, you become synced with them. This is commonly displayed when someone in a group yawns and others begin to yawn as well. Humans will even say, “Stop yawning! You’re making ME yawn!”
When I lead others into hypnosis, I go first. In other words, I begin to narrow my focus down to a single point, I turn my attention inside, and I occupy my conscious mind with the task of watching the progression of my subject. Because I have rapport with my subject, they begin to follow me into trance. My breathing rate slows, I relax, my voice deepens and becomes softer, and we enter trance together.
For the therapy room, your responsibility as the leader is to get your subject where you want them to be and then conduct the session with them. This means that you are not associating totally into the state. You create a unique state in which you are both in the state that you want your client in with a second layer of uptime trance. This allows you to be in sync with your subject and hyperaware at the same time. (Trust me, you can do this.)
Let’s take an example outside of the therapy room. Imagine you’re with someone you very much care about, and you would like to set the mood for a romantic evening. You must create the storm of emotional states within yourself so you can lead your partner down the same path. Perhaps you create a state of deep love, a state of wanton desire, a state of strong attraction, a state of adventure, a state of heightened sensations, and a state of excitement. In other words, you are mixing the cocktail for romance and being turned on.
This is probably the skill that is the most fun to master and practice. Simply practice putting yourself into different emotional states. The more you practice, the faster and more associated you will become going in and out of states.
When you have a few states that you can quickly enter, begin to practice going into these states when you are with another human and pay attention to how they react.
