Of course we must include everyone's favorite book "Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy" by Banyan/Kein and a little tome called "The Secret Language of Feelings":
With Halloween coming, i thought it'd be interesting to try an experiment. During pre-talks, i always mention natural examples of everyday hypnosis, like getting absorbed in a book or movie. I enjoy reading short stories of horror or fantasy, especially old-tyme stories. So i got to thinking, maybe i can enhance the experience (which isn't exactly "enjoyment" now that i think about it, rather a thrilling sort of dread) by self-hypnotizing myself before reading a very scary story.
I wanted to try this because from what i understand, even in hypnosis, your mind protects itself from obviously negative influences, by only allowing acceptable selected suggestions. Well, if i were intentionally exposing myself to the negativity in a horror story, just like the crowds that go to see those awful modern horror/torture movies at the multiplex, wouldn't that be something i am selectively choosing to accept into my subconscious?
Would the mind's need to protect itself be more powerful than the desire to read something that makes one feel really creeped-out?
The short story i chose to read was the classic "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, written in 1899. It's a famous story about a woman who slowly goes mad in a room that is lined with decaying yellow wallpaper. This yellow wallpaper contains a strange chaotic pattern that reflects the disintegration of the narrator's mind.
Here is a link to the story: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/ylwlp10.txt
The results of the experiment:
I felt a great sense of unease during and after reading the story while in hypnosis. However, i am not sure if being intentional about going into hypnosis had any impact over and above the normal effect of reading this story.
i believe reading the story has exacerbated an existing fear of certain types of patterns (like paisleys, jagged geometric shapes, striated muscle tissue, etc.). The story may actually have contributed to this fear of patterns when i was younger and first read the story.
I am a bit frightened now by the idea of looking out of windows, as in the back of my mind i worry about seeing shadowy figures creeping along paths, just as the woman in the story began to see.
Worst of all, there is a round mirror above a fireplace in my room, and last night for the first time i noticed that it reflected the dim nighttime lights outside in a way that makes it look like the half-lidded eye of a deformed frog. At other times it looks like the bulbous eye of someone who has fainted, with the whites of their eyeballs showing. It disturbs me that this mirror has been watching for so many years without me noticing it til now; now i catch it watching me at the periphery of my field of vision.
I worry that if i ask my wife to put this mirror away, then it will be packed up and put in storage in the basement. Somehow the idea of this mirror-eye being kept in a box in the basement is even more dreadful than seeing it out in the light. If this mirror gets left out with the trash, then either it will get broken into a million bits, or someone will come along and put it in their own house. Even if a mirror gets broken into pieces, it still reflects (and sees), so that won't help. If it ends up in someone's house, then it will be as if there's some portal between that person's house and mine, no good. If I paint the mirror over, that would just make the eye blind, and trap all the things that are inside of it.
Anyway, I do hope the effects of reading this story fade away after a while. Once again, i'm not sure if doing self-hypnosis while reading it made the effects more pronounced. More experimentation is called for. Just like the scientist in the old version of "The Fly", i would be my own test subject of course.
Next up i think will involve reading some HP Lovecraft while in hypnosis, his dream-quest stories seem to be suitable for this type of thing. Although I wonder, if the concepts surrounding the Law of Attraction and "the Secret" are valid, wouldn't they apply not only to things like attracting success, or unnecessary drama in one's life, but also to things of a more cyclopean nature?
Wait... that sound of flapping wings outside the window... growing louder... titanic leathery wings by the sound of it. Aiiiiii!! The three-lobed burning eye!!!!
===
The above message, which our forensic investigators determine is 90% factual, was reconstructed from half-burned fragments found in the ruins of Miskatonic Hypnosis Center, Arkham MA.
Friday, September 14, 2007, 05:53 PM EST [General]
Howdy all. I've been getting spam emails for hypnosis products and services from people and places I have never dealt with. Apparently some folks think it's ok to add emails to their business mailing list without asking for permission.
It's not, and it's also against the law. Most spammers can get away with this behavior because it's difficult to track them down. But when hypnotists do this, i hope it's just being done out of ignorance, as they make no effort to hide the source of the email. Please read:
"Federal law dictates that anyone violating anti-spamming laws can receive a fine of up to $11,000 per offense." I believe countries besides the U.S. have similar laws.
Please note: I am not referring to email sent from folks from whom I have bought products/services, taken seminars or training with, or just friendly individual ppl who would like to chat.
Just thought I would drop a friendly note about why spamming fellow hypno-nauts is bad:
1. people will eventually report you as a spammer and your email acct will likely be blacklisted. If you are using a personal email account to send out these mass emails, then your other emails will never get to their destination either, as you will be flagged as a spammer by the automated email gatekeepers. You may also run into problems with your internet provider. If you are using a paid bulk mailing service, then you will get booted off the service because they need to protect themselves and their servers from being identified as spammers (this is typically a part of their terms of service).
2. it reflects poorly on the sender of the unsolicited mass email. it puzzles me that people who are in an empathetic profession would not understand how thoughtless it is to flood people's inboxes with products and services without their permission, just because they want to sell stuff (and justifying it by saying "But I'm sure they would want to know about this!" is not a good enough reason).
3. many email programs allow people to identify emails as spam. this trains the system and allows it to learn what is typical spam content. Keep sending spam related to "hypnosis", and eventually hypnosis-related emails may end up with the same automatic junk filtering as emails related to "FREE VIAGRA!!!" or "LOW INTEREST MORTGAGES - REFINANCE NOW!!!" That's not good.
i understand that most hypno-people aren't expected to know the potential impact of sending mass emails like this; but i hope this info proves useful in preventing problems in the future.
Saturday, September 8, 2007, 01:36 PM EST [General]
Greetings fellow hypno-nauts... thought i'd share a PowerPoint pre-talk presentation i use with clients, exported to Adobe PDF format:
http://tinyurl.com/3y9lhr
It includes my interpretation of Cal's Secret Language of Feelings "Feel Bad/Distract" cycle, with appropriate acknowledgement given, I hope. I use this presentation in conjunction w/ whiteboard and the "Get the Facts" poster from the Banyan online mall:
http://tinyurl.com/3xdtje
I am finding that a thorough pre-talk is crucial. Sometimes I get the feeling that clients experience changes just from the pre-talk; I have had occassions where the client has only had time to come in for the pre-talk (which is what they know as an "initial consultation"), then in the following session they report improvements already. Especially in regards to Cal's SLF model, i sometimes even suspect that the hypnosis process itself is just there to "seal the deal" made in the pre-talk if the client has gained better understanding of their behavior. It's common for people to point at the "Feel Bad/Distract" diagram and say "That's me up there!"
PS. I think the "Get the Facts" poster is useful for two reasons:
a) because it provides addtl credibility to the content of the pre-talk; after all, anyone could just make "facts" up on their own, but having a professional-looking poster with the facts is a bit more believable
b) it provides oppty to test client and to loosen them up at beginning of pre-talk - i point out the poster and say "since there are smiling people on this poster, that must mean it's perfectly safe, right?" Most of the time people laugh and relax right away, but if they have blank expression, that provides useful information about them or their state of mind.
Got one of those "I'm very strong-minded; maybe some people can be hypnotized but I doubt it would work on me" emails recently. The implication that only weak-minded people can be hypnotized really bugs me. Sharing the gist of my response here:
"Dear Miss Muckerman [not real name], ...You have to understand that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. The hypnotist is just coaching you as you put yourself into the state. Since hypnosis involves strengthening a person's ability to control their own mind, being 'strong-minded' is good. Sometimes hypnotized people can go through things like childbirth, dental work, and even surgery, using their mental abilities to deny the existence of pain and discomfort; I would not call that sort of person weak-willed. Golf Digest magazine says Tiger Woods underwent hypnosis training, and he says it's inherent in what he does now; would you call him weak-minded?
However, if by 'strong-minded', you mean that you are the type of person who would refuse to follow a coach's simple instructions (such as 'please count from 1 to 5', or 'please relax your arm'), then that will make things difficult. But I would point out that that attitude is not really a sign of having a strong mind..."
[end of response]
If the hypnotist operator is really just a coach or a guide helping the client enter hypnosis, I wonder if a useful way to think about "hypnotizability" would be thinking in terms of "coachability". If someone has had fears of hypnosis removed, and they still have difficulty following simple instructions, maybe they just have the type of personality that is less-than-coachable.
I have had one experience with an extremely uncoachable person. When I asked her to begin counting slowly and softly, she immediately opened her eyes and asked "Why? Can't you just hypnotize me?" Trying to do an instant induction, I asked her to press down on my hand and close her eyes. She just laughed and said "That's not gonna work!" After a few rounds of this silliness ("I don't understand what the point of all this counting is!"), I thanked her for coming and sent her on her way.
Things became clearer when she was leaving, and she said to her friend: "See, I told you I couldn't be hypnotized!" Feh!
In that instance, maybe the person had more of an ulterior motive (proving to herself and others that she couldn't be hypnotized). But I would guess everyone has worked with someone who says they have no questions or fears, who says they are motivated, but who have difficulty following the most basic instructions. I understand that there's a difference between compliance and suggestibility, but still maybe it'd be useful to think in terms of helping these folks be more "coachable", instead of more "hypnotizable". But then, probably the most effective way to make them more coachable would be through hypnosis. What a dilemma!
This post from Seth Godin has more on the subject of coachability (i think Godin has an interesting point about coachability being related to emotional maturity):
PS. I just learned that Richard Feynman, the famous Nobel-Prize winning physicist, was very hypnotizable, to the extent that he could be burned by matches without feeling pain. Feynman wrote that he found hypnosis to be "a very interesting experience". Encyclopedia Britannica says he is "widely regarded as the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field [theoretical physics] in the post-World War II era."
So if some smarty-pants implies that only weak-minded simpletons can be hypnotized, be sure to mention Feynman, who was not only an undisputed genius, but a true maverick and free-thinker.
PPS. The writer of the email that i mentioned at the beginning of this post also mentioned that she had many fears of things such as spiders, driving, etc. But she did not believe in hypnosis because it does not have a concrete existence. Hmmm, can you spot the inconsistency there?
