Do you want to be capable of helping any client who comes into your hypnosis office?
Then what you’re looking for is The Mandel Model of Therapy. Many others have tried, but few have been able to develop a concise model that works for almost every client’s problems in hypnotherapy.
Mike Mandel’s model works so well because it’s unique yet surprisingly simple. In this blog post, you’ll learn:
- The exact meaning of “model” and why models are so useful.
- The Mandel Model of Therapy principles and why it works so well.
- How to apply the Mandel Model of Therapy in client sessions.
- How to hypnotize people to help them with all kinds of problems.
The Map Is Not the Territory
When you look at a map, you’re not seeing the actual geographical area it depicts. It’s just an inaccurate representation of a particular piece of land.
It’s inaccurate not because it’s a bad map but because that’s how maps work. You can’t accurately replicate thousands of square miles into a single plain image.
But maps are useful nonetheless. They help you understand various locations, political divisions, and what kind of geological structures permeate the land. A map is just a representative model of a place in the real world and a handy one.
That’s also how we describe the Mandel Model of Therapy: it’s a valuable model to understand a client’s problems and how to get them their desired results. The model isn’t a replacement for symptom diagnosis, nor does it explain how specific behaviors work in the brain. Instead, it’s a simple, metaphorical way of approaching the client’s problem.
We focus on getting good and fast results for our clients. We want to improve their lives by helping them leave our office dozens of times better than when they came in. And for that purpose, the Mandel Model and many other valuable models work like a charm. We know they aren’t the actual truth of things, but they work. That’s all that matters.
Watch the video below to understand how it works or keep reading until the end of this article.
Lost in a Labyrinth
As a straightforward yet helpful way of compiling all the reasons a person may come to see you, the Mandel Model of Therapy correlates with many well-known protocols and techniques.
The Mandel Model states that the client is inside a labyrinth and can’t find the way out. That’s how to approach almost any client’s problem as a hypnotherapist.
In Greek mythology, the labyrinth was a vast and intricate maze. It was full of dark tunnels and turns that led nowhere. On top of that, it was also crawling with monsters—a truly terrifying place.
In our model, the stuck client is, in reality, a labyrinth of their creation. That’s because people make changes and decisions based on what they perceive things to be. In other words, it’s not events that change us; it’s how we choose to respond to them.
By responding to life events in an unhealthy way, many people have built complex and scary labyrinths around them. These labyrinths are very easy to get lost. They’re full of repetitive patterns that get people running in endless loops. These loops are the cause of extreme pain and suffering for a lot of people.
Finding the Way Out: Being At Cause
For a person struggling with unhealthy patterns of behavior, the solution is almost never inside the labyrinth they’ve created.
It can be tempting for therapists to dive into the metaphorical labyrinth with their clients, wanting to slay the monsters and lead them by the hand to safety. But that’s just impossible.
If this were your approach to helping every client, you’d have to invest a tremendous amount of time interfering with their personal lives and choices. You’d have to start living their life for them. That’s ineffective and keeps the client from learning to take responsibility for their change.
Remember, they are the ones who built the labyrinth in the first place, so it’s only their responsibility to find the way out and escape.
So how can you help?
The first step is to help them take control of their decisions. Help them get to a place of being at cause instead of at effect of their choices. This youtube video explains how you can achieve that.
Basically, they must believe they’re in control of their life. Regardless of the circumstance or situation, they are still in control of their choices, responses, and reactions.
People living in a mindset of being at effect of their lives are completely vulnerable to whatever circumstances they find themselves in. They can’t break out of the labyrinth of their own lives because they’re powerless in the face of the walls they’ve unconsciously raised.
Putting them at cause of their choices, your client can take on the responsibility of defeating the monsters and finding a way out of the labyrinth. Being in charge of your own life is liberating and empowering.
In other words, we equip the client to find the resources and encourage them to take the necessary steps toward finding the solution to their problem. From outside the labyrinth, we metaphorically shine the light on the way out by guiding them to the knowledge and the tools they’ll need to face the challenge ahead and finally point them toward the exit.
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Some Final Considerations
This model aims to guide the mindset of those who dedicate their lives to helping others through hypnosis and other therapeutic modalities. To an extent, it’s an oversimplification of what happens in a therapy session.
Although very useful, it’s not enough to always follow the Mandel Model without considering a few more things to make the session ecological and effective.
So always keep in mind:
De-traumatize First
You don’t build a big beautiful new house on top of an outhouse. Dig the outhouse first and make a new foundation. Or, to put it simply, you don’t build powerful and resourceful states on top of trauma, or they won’t last.
Age regression is probably the most popular technique for de-traumatization due to its history of success. But any skilled hypnotist or hypnotherapist can easily treat past trauma with various techniques. The Rewind Technique and NLP timelines are sometimes perfect for painlessly removing emotional scars from a traumatic experience (Read: The Best Ways To Learn NLP).
We teach all of those and more inside the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy.
Hypnosis is a Psychodynamic Loop
Many people are foolishly led to believe that being hypnotized is a passive experience where someone puts you in a trance, reads a script at you, and you wake up magically cured of whatever illness you had. That’s a naive misconception of how hypnosis works.
We have strong opinions on hypnosis scripts and why you shouldn’t use them in client sessions. Click here to read the full blog post where we discuss this in greater detail.
When you think about it, reading a script at someone and expecting those magic words to change their behavior suddenly is the opposite of teaching the client to be at cause and take responsibility for their change.
Hypnosis is a psychodynamic communication loop between the hypnotist and the subject(s). A competent professional will calibrate the session and adapt each client’s unique response to the process. So make sure you understand the basic principles of hypnosis so you won’t have to rely on scripts to try and lead someone out of her labyrinth.
Because you will be trying, but you won’t be doing it.
What’s Next?
Inside the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy, we’ll teach you how to change people’s lives using hypnosis. Whether you’re doing it just for fun or want to make a career in hypnosis, MMHA is the place for you.
We’ll teach you the basic principles in detail so you won’t ever need hypnosis scripts again. Then we’ll move you up the ladder and teach you advanced techniques to deal with trauma, phobias, anxieties, and other everyday problems.
Click here to get started with a no credit card required, 100% free Test Drive of the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy.
