Dawn Jepson has a pleasing voice. I came to her office in downtown Wilton to get some ideas about her business and what she can do for people. Now I’m leaned back in my seat and nearly falling asleep to her words. How embarrassing!

“Your body relaxes,” she tells me. “Your mind relaxes. You are aware of our voices. You are not aware of anything outside.”

The room is very warm. There’s soft music in the background and the chair — I seem to be sinking down into its ocean of foam. But above all is that voice, so soothing and soft. It is softer than the chair itself or anything else in the world.

I feel as though I am asleep though connected to the waking world by the velvety voice. I really should apologize for nodding off when I’m supposed to be conducting an interview.
Dawn Jepson is very understanding.

“You get all dreamy and warm. You don’t have to do anything,” she tells me, all low and sonorous. “What could be more enjoyable than closing your eyes for half an hour?”

And there you have it. A lifetime of doubts about the role of hypnosis disappeared from me over the course of an hour of talking with Dawn and her husband, Dennis.

For 12 years they have been treating a range of human maladies through the power of suggestion. Many of those years were in Farmington. Now they are in Wilton, helping people to lose weight, quit smoking, sleep better or improve their golf game.

Most people are like me. They have no idea what to expect. They have doubts that they can be hypnotized at all.

“When people come out of a session they’ll ask: ‘Was I hypnotized?’ They thought they were going to have this out-of-body experience,” says Dennis, a bearded man with a voice more comforting than any robe. “They expected this mystical experience. It’s not like that. It’s deep relaxation.”

And here, while I am still in control of my faculties, the Jepsons explain what is true and what is not true about the still misunderstood field of hypnosis. They studied for three years to get degrees; she now has an alternative doctoral degree in clinical hypnotherapy to go along with two other conventional degrees. Together, they share what they’ve learned about the benefits of hypnosis.

It wasn’t always easy for the work of a hypnotist to pass the straight-face test.

“There was a lot of alienation when hypnosis really got going around the late ’80s or early ’90s,” Dawn says. “It was really just coming out of the shadows.”

Hypnotists were regarded in the same vein as those selling snake oils or miracle cures.

“People don’t really know what to expect, especially in this day of medication. Medication is fast. It’s instant gratification. That isn’t to say the results of hypnosis can’t be fast,” Dawn says, “but it’s not a magic wand.”

The misconception is common: a hypnotized person becomes completely under the spell of a dazzling mesmerist, who can implant any command he or she wants simply by dangling a pocket watch. At least that’s what the finer B movies out of Hollywood would have us believe.

“We’re constantly working to undo that kind of thinking,” Dawn says.

It would make the Jepsons laugh if those misconceptions weren’t so tenacious. There are people who still believe that simple hypnosis can make a robot out of a person, a so-called Manchurian candidate that could be instructed to do something horrible at the behest of the person giving the commands.

“They don’t do anything against their will,” Dawn says. “They don’t violate their moral values.”

“The unconscious mind,” says Dennis, in that glorious basso voice, “is only going to do what’s in the interest of the person’s well-being.”

And here is where the good of hypnosis comes into play. Here is where a person, in a deep state of relaxation, can accept and absorb suggestions uttered by the hypnotist. With the mind clear of all the senseless volume of the waking world, it can more easily see a goal and understand how to meet it.

“That mind clutter, that negative talk, it seems to not be present,” Dawn says. “Sometimes that critical part of our mind blocks us from connecting. It blocks us from what we really want.”

“People talk about what they don’t want, what they don’t like, what isn’t good. We want to find out what they do want,” says Dennis. “The person might want a change, but they haven’t completely sold themselves on it. One of the big things behind hypnosis is belief.”

It’s not an overly complicated concept. Free the mind and the body will follow.

Sometime over recent decades, traditional medicine and the world of science began to embrace the powerful influence of the unconscious mind. They now openly talk about things like rapidly changing behavior modality and cognitive behavioral therapy.

“I smile when I read about that,” says Dawn, “because that’s what we’ve been doing for years.”

Before I got into the comfy chair and let them have a go at me, I was a complete non-believer. That does not offend the Jepsons, they say. Lots of people are skeptical about their own ability to be put into a trance.

“Part of that first session is determining if the person is a believer,” says Dennis. “If it’s not a fit, we don’t want them to spend their time and our time. In that first hour, if we don’t think it’s going to work, we’ll shake their hand. We won’t charge them for that hour.”

At just $50 for a two-hour session, many people are willing to give it a shot. They come to fix bad habits or develop better ones. Dawn says there is a fair number of people who come in for past life regression, in which she specializes.

“Many are trying to understand what happens when we die,” she says. “A lot of of the time, it’s just curiosity.”

But not everybody who comes for a treatment is there to tackle such heady concepts as the afterlife. Some just want to perform better on the golf course. The Jepsons say they can help with that, too, by quieting the mind so that a person can better see himself making that long putt.

“It’s a mind game,” Dennis says. “It’s the use of the mind to visualize what’s going to happen.”

That’s not to say a person needs to visit his neighborhood hypnotist every time he craves a smoke, a doughnut or a good day on the golf course.

“We teach independence,” Dawn says. We’re working with individuals so they can do it on their own.”

The benefits of hypnotherapy are well documented: better sleep and a lasting sense of well-being, for starters. The Jepsons hope the people who leave their easy chair will also have a clearer idea about how to achieve what they want to achieve.

“It helps a person build self-confidence. They get clear in their head about what they want,” Dawn says. “The side-effects are so beneficial. We want to help as many people as we can.”
I left their office feeling relaxed indeed. I went home, put on some Enya and tried relaxing in my own recliner. Sadly, without the reassuring voices of Dawn and Dennis to pillow my thoughts, it just wasn’t the same.

Hypnosis as entertainment

If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

Or it could be some stooge on the stage with Roderick Russell, an entertainer known for hypnotizing entire groups of people. When he’s not swallowing swords, that is, or reading minds.

A devilishly handsome man, Russell has no interest in curing your smoking habit or helping you lose weight. His brand of hypnotism is reminiscent of the mysterious traveling shows that used to cross the American landscape. It is meant to baffle and entertain, not to cure.

He gave that up years ago. And while he lauds hypnosis as an effective treatment for a variety of woes, he finds it much more fun to employ his magic in less clinical ways.

“One of the moments that stands out in my mind is the time that I made a woman on stage believe that a very fat man in the audience was her favorite movie star — Brad Pitt,” Russell recalls. “As soon as she saw him, she went wild! She literally took off running and screaming into the audience, hopped on his lap and was giving him great big hugs, and even told him that she wanted to have his children.”

You may laugh all you’d like, but it could happen to you. Russell is not among those who insist that only a select type of person can be put under a spell.

“Anyone can be hypnotized,” he says. “It’s an enormous misunderstanding that some people cannot be hypnotized. If you are a normal, functioning human being, and regardless of IQ, social, economic, ethnic or racial background, you can be hypnotized. All it requires is an ability to focus and relax.”

A lean man with a sly grin and a thin mustache, he would be portrayed in a movie by a young Vincent Price, if only Price were still young, or still alive for that matter. In one national review, Russell was described as “strangely sophisticated.” Ripley’s Believe it or Not, on the other hand, declares him “one of the world’s most bizarre and unusual people.”

Hard to believe he started as an academic.

“I started my career as a clinical hypnotherapist, and the benefits of hypnosis to a medical and therapeutic practice are extraordinary,” he says. “It’s quite common now to see hypnosis employed in many hospitals, and it makes a great addition to more traditional treatments. As a stand-alone treatment it’s also remarkably effective. You mention the ability to stop smoking, and not only is that one of the most popular uses for therapeutic hypnosis, it’s also one of the easiest and most effective! A good smoking-cessation therapy occurs in only one session — one hour and you can shift from being a smoker to a non-smoker for life.”

But people don’t pack audiences to see Russell help a chain-smoking reporter kick the habit through a serene one-on-one encounter. They come to watch their friends act like buffoons, like they did when he performed at the Oddfellow Theater in Buckfield last month.

So, how does he do it? How does he make entire groups of people roll around on a stage and act like idiots?

“In truth, the suggestions to the audience start even before the show begins, and can be unconsciously seen in everything from the marketing to the stage layout.,” Russell says. “To induce hypnosis in a group that is as diverse as 25 random people can be, I use a method known as progressive relaxation, forcing the mind and body into an advanced state of concentration and relaxation through the use of words and imagery.

“Every person has a different style of understanding though, so I have to tailor my precise words to each member of the group on the fly while simultaneously addressing the group as a whole,” he says. “I change the structure of my language, the rhythm, timbre and specific choice of words every single night to accommodate the specifics of each new group. Once I’ve induced a base level of hypnosis — and the audience knows when this has occurred because people are often collapsing out of their chairs on stage — I then perform a series of what are called deepeners — visualizations and suggestions to firmly affix their mind in a deep state of hypnosis.”

It’s a long answer, which means we may all be under his spell right now. Let’s hear you bark like a dog.

For more info, visit: roderickrussell.com

Hypnotherapy for child birthing

One group of people who are turning to hypnotherapy more and more are women getting ready to deliver a child. Some hospitals have such therapists on staff. Megan Parks of Lewiston chose a private therapist when it was time to deliver her first child.

The use of hypnosis in delivering a baby aims to produce harmony among the muscles used in birthing. Parks said that through a series of classes, she was also taught to substitute ugly words with more relaxing ones, such as “surging” instead of “Oh, my God, it hurts!”

When it was time for her to go into labor, Parks listened to a recording of her hypnotherapy work over and over. This sent her into a state of relaxing hypnosis, which she describes as not at all scary like a Wes Craven movie.

“I never felt I was under someone else’s control or anything,” Parks said. “It is just a really mellow, deep in thought, ‘go to your happy place’ type feeling.”

It’s important to remember how to find that happy place when your newborn starts wailing at 2 o’clock in the morning.

To learn more, visit: hypnobirthing.com