Enhancing workshop safety: learning from colleagues' adverse experiences (part I--structure/content)

Recent studies demonstrate that unwanted responses to hypnosis during training workshops are not uncommon, and usually are covert (Kluft, 2012). Adverse events usually occurred subsequent to inadequate realerting from previous experiences of hypnosis. Inadequate realerting almost invariably was associated with unsuccessful permissive instructions for dehypnosis. Further, workshop faculty tended to accept partial dehypnosis as adequate dehypnosis. This article, the first of two related communications, offers 13 suggestions for minimizing workshops participants' risk of experiencing adverse events. It recommends safer replacements for techniques and stances often associated with adverse outcomes, and advocates using measures of alertness, such as the Howard Alertness Scale (Howard, 2008) to identify those at risk for unsuccessful realerting and the problems associated with it. Additional safety-related recommendations are communicated in Part II.