Ideomotor questioning is a way to determine the existence of a dysfunction, learn enough about it to formulate effective suggestions, and get the subconscious mind to sign off on the suggestions.

Use Who, Where, When, What and Why

• Who.

Ask questions to determine if there are other people involved in the problem. For example, has someone such as a parent or teacher said something in the past that is now blocking you? Is the dysfunction caused by an experience with someone else? If so, who?

• Where.

Location can sometimes give you insight into the source of a problem. Where were you when it started, or where were you when the triggering event occurred?

• When.

At what time in your life did the problem start? How old were you? The specific date or even time of day that something happened can sometimes help develop insight.

• What.

The "what" is usually the crux of the problem. If you can get to the "what" of a dysfunction, you will find your suggestions practically composing themselves. The "what" could have been something said to you by a parent, or it could have been your interpretation of something you sensed or experienced, or just about anything else in your history. This history includes both public events—those things someone else could also experience or witness at the same time—and private events, the things that go on only within yourself and that are not directly observable by others.

• Why.

Remember, the "what" you are looking for is not the same as a psychotherapeutic "why." You may uncover some of the "why" in your questioning, but that is not particularly what you are after. For example, consider a man I once helped who had trouble dealing with women with long blond hair. This was not just a mild aversion, he really had a pathological problem. He had usually been able to avoid such women, thereby avoiding any confrontation with his problem. But he had just been transferred to a division in his company whose director, his new boss, had long blond hair. He was in trouble.

The disclosure sequence of the standard therapeutic sessions with this man is fascinating, but only if you are interested in standard approaches to psychotherapy. I am no longer interested in that sort of thing, so I will just jump to the chase, as they say.

Throughout the course of therapy, which had to be fast because he ran a serious risk of being out of work if we didn't get this thing fixed pretty quick, I and eventually he kept coming back to the subject of a particularly obnoxious little girl in his neighborhood when he was a child. She had bullied him and even hurt him physically a few times. But she had had short brown hair and she was just not working out as the source for which I was looking. Then one day we broke through and he had the standard issue emotional, cathartic insight.

It came back to him in a flood of emotion that the bully-girl's dollhad had long blond hair. She used to hit him with that doll. Once she hit him in the mouth so hard it knocked out one of his teeth. It was just a baby tooth that was already loose and on the way out, but it hurt and bled when she knocked it out. That had been a very traumatic experience for him.

This was a very simple and unusually successful example of depth therapy. The guy was able to deal with his problem following his insight and everyone lived happily ever after.

Now here is what I think this client could have done for himself with self-hypnosis and ideomotor questioning. He would have started from the same point, with the awareness of a problem with women with long blond hair. He would have formulated and started applying suggestions that he would be able to come up insights about his problem. Ideomotor questioning would have led him to his early childhood experiences and maybe the insight about the doll.

But not all of that would have been necessary. All he would really need was a little information about the "what" of his dysfunction. This would include what his response to such women was: fright, anger, some other emotion? Once he knew that he could formulate verbal and image suggestions.

He probably would have uncovered fear as the dominant reaction to blond women, so his verbal suggestion might have been, "Each time I am around a blond haired woman I am feeling more and more safe and secure."

The image suggestion might have been a mental picture of himself nestling safely in the lap of a large, blond woman who was being very protective and supportive. (The more striking and positive the imagery, the better.)

Both of these suggestions would have been cleared for safety by the subconscious mind through ideomotor questioning.

The suggestions would have been successful and he would never have had to dig down into the material about the bully-girl and her amazon doll. On the other hand, he probably would have spontaneously remembered that at some point when his suggestions were being successful. But knowing the "why" would not have been necessary.

Of course you can work toward insight toward the "why" if you want to. You can try to get at the reason underlying the dysfunction, but I have tried to make it abundantly clear that you do not have to. In fact those kinds of insights may not be all that worthwhile. Entire forests have been sacrificed to print all the speculation, theory, hypotheses and transcripts of everyone —journalists, therapists, patients, philosophers—involved in reductionist attempts at explaining why people do what they do. For you to attempt to discover why you have a particular dysfunction is not quite as difficult as, say, coming up with a grand theory of human behavior. But it might be more trouble than it is worth.

Having said that and given you fair warning, let me say that trying to come up with the "why" of a dysfunction can be quite illuminating. Even if you don't get to the ultimate reason you will learn other things about yourself in the process. But be prepared to spend some time and to experience a good deal of frustration while you attempt to come up with the right questions to get at the real why of a dysfunction.

But for the last time, you really don't need the why of a dysfunction in most cases. As long as you know what it is, you can formulate suggestions to change, overcome, modify, or remove it.

Validate All Formulations

Ideomotor questioning is extremely beneficial in the validation of a suggestion. Subconscious validation does not automatically guarantee success, but it tells you that you are probably doing the best you can.

Validate a suggestion by asking, and getting satisfactory answers to, the following types of questions:

• Is the suggestion acceptable?
• Will it be effective? (It may seem strange to ask this question. After all, if the subconscious mind answers "yes," then why would you have to bother with the suggestion? The reason is that the subconscious mind does not work the same way as the conscious part of the mind; you will still have to follow through with the full suggestion application procedure.)
• In what time frame will the suggestion be effective? How soon will you (use "I" in your questioning) begin to notice results? (Use bracketing to get numbers and dates.) The answers form commitments by the subconscious mind and commitments are good things.
• Is there anything else it is important for you to do to get the results you want? If you get a "yes" to this one, you will have to start playing a guessing game with your questions in order to find out what else you will need to do. Or you could use a spelling-out method to get the subconscious mind to answer with a word or phrase.

Keep a Record

There are several good reasons for keeping a written record of your ideomotor questioning sessions. For one thing, and perhaps most important, your questions will be much more specific and appropriate if you write them before you ask them. So write down a question before you ask it. You will have to write and ask one question at a time because subsequent questions are usually dependent upon the answers to prior questions.

Another reason is to avoid repeating yourself and asking the same questions again. Ideomotor questioning takes enough time without wasting it.

A third reason is for future reference. You will cover a lot of ground in a typical ideomotor questioning session with questions and answers that will be valuable to you later. And believe me you won't remember them if you don't write them down.

In addition, keeping a written record of your questioning has a good effect on the subconscious mind. Maybe this is because the additional effort shows you are serious, or maybe it's because the subconscious mind is a firm believer in the "no free lunch" philosophy. If you are interested, you might conduct a questioning session to find out why your subconscious mind responds better when you keep a written record. But be prepared to ask a lot of questions. The subconscious mind gets pretty shy when it comes to divulging its own dynamics.

Answer Sheet for Ideomotor Questioning

These are the six most common answer directions for the Chevreul pendulum. More than six directions make it difficult to distinguish adjacent directions when the pendulum is swinging. Fewer questions do not present enough answer options for questioning.