You can't make someone do something they dont want to do with hypnosis.

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Permalink Reply by Vince Black on July 2, 2008 at 5:51pm

I think that maybe I am not being quite clear enough here with my communication. What I am saying is that sometimes people are influenced by people that really are powerful communicators, but do not realize sometimes what they are doing with their communication. One example in my life is my Grandmother. She was a really smart lady. She was very fearful and thought she really had to scare the shit out of people to keep bad things from happening to them. As a result my Dad was very phobic. She would always say things like " The people you love the most are the ones that die." He was always thinking one of us family members was dying from cancer. It was not a very healthy situation. She also told my Dad he was such a bad driver that he would kill someone in a car wreck, he did. I really dont think that we need a weak ego for that to happen. Obviously a lot of this was going on when he was a child, and probably a lot more suggestable than a full grown adult, (in that context.)

I am not talking about coming to someone on the street and doing an instant induction and having their hand float gently to their wallet.

Neither do I think that the person necessarily has an evil intent. Im sure that my Grandmother was trying to protect my father. I had to do a lot of work with my Dad to undo these states of panic that he went into when he thought that I had lymphoma or some other strange disease.

I would call it an induction. She would have you sit down, get your interest and start telling you about these terrible things that happen to people.
She was a great storyteller, I would go inside and make vivid imagery of the things she was telling me.

In my life I had to discontinue my association with some people because of the influence that they had on me. It was subtle, but I would notice if I was succeeding at something and they were scared of having to look at me surpassing them they would say subtle little things about how things wouldnt work out. They probably werent aware of them and Im sure they werent out to get me but none the less I couldnt always pay full attention to what I was agreeing with and what I wouldnt let by my critical factor.

Thats all, Vince.

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Permalink Reply by Richard Nongard - HypnosisGurus.com on July 2, 2008 at 6:02pm

And you have demonstrated again, how natural trance and hypnotic suggestions are so powerful apart from "formal hypnosis". You have good insight Vince...

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Permalink Reply by Vince Black on July 2, 2008 at 6:26pm

Thats all......you said it better in two sentences than I did in several paragraphs.........Thanks

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Permalink Reply by Richard Nongard - HypnosisGurus.com on July 2, 2008 at 9:40pm

but your paragraphs werre more interesting! LOL

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Permalink Reply by Doreen Cohanim C.Ht on July 2, 2008 at 10:02pm

Dear Vince,

I was talking about individual who cannot be hypnotized to do what ever they do not wish to do, in my opinion it is totally different from being affected from others , of course we are, I was only talking about hypnotizing someone to do something they do not believe in and want to do.

I also don't think that you were able to struck a bit of a nerve within me, I was challenging you when it comes to hypnotizing me to do something I do not wish, beside it will be nice to prove me wrong if you can make me do something I am not willing to do it up front.

I hope we are not in a war here :) still want to challenge you :)~~~~

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Permalink Reply by Vince Black on July 5, 2008 at 4:05pm

Of course we arent in a war. I cherish the fact that I can express my opinion, so It would be ridiculous for me to begrudge you yours. I appreciate the fact that you joined in the discussion. I think we are all professionals and handle a heated discussion. I am up in the air on this a bit myself.

My hypnosis teacher had someone show up at a seminar. I guess people will pay 900 bucks for a training just to screw with the teacher. Well anyhoo this guy gets into this deal "if youre a hypnotist then you should be able to make me do something I dont want to. Needless to say this guy was being kind of a jackass. Well my teacher asks him "are you wearing underwear?" He got an affirmative answer and just said to the guy hold on. Well about 45 minutes goes buy and this guy just bolts out of the chair and drops his pants. Now we are talking about someone who decidedly had both feet planted in the ground and was determined that noone could make him do anything with hypnosis.

There was a hypnotist from where I am from. He did Friday groups. His deal was helping people with cancer. This nurse came into his class. He was speaking about helping people lose lots of weight before surgery and told him that hypnosis is bulshit and sying that what he was doing with weightloss was medically impossible. He told her she was entitled to her opinion. Well a bit later on this nurse had her eyes closed and was yelling I believe you I believe you can hypnotize people I believe in hypnosis.

That is my experience with people being hypnotized when the were opposing it.

Vince

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Permalink Reply by Melissa J. Roth on July 2, 2008 at 9:12pm

I agree that if you "set the stage" properly people will do almost anything. In my life before hypnotherapy I owned a consulting firm. One of the things I did for my clients fell under the umbrella of corporate spying--worming out trade secrets from their competitors. I got paid really BIG bucks to do that. I was very successful at it because I knew how to set things up to let people talk. And talk they would. Financial professionals would give me insider information without even realizing they had compromised their company. Engineers would explain in detail their newest designs. Success begins in the pre-talk.

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Permalink Reply by Don Gibbons, Ph.D. on July 3, 2008 at 3:36am

Several years ago, I was asked to testify in the case of a man who had falsely advertised himself as a psychologist and had begun hypnotizing teen-age girls in the area, one of whom subsequently accused him of rape. In order to make its case that hypnosis could be used to compel behavior, the prosecution had pointed to an incident in Eastern Europe several decades earlier, in which a stage hypnotist had handed a man a pistol loaded with blanks and commanded the man to shoot him. The hypnotized subject, who was an off-duty police officer, drew a loaded revolver from his pocket and shot three members of the audience.

I testified that while hypnosis cannot force people to people do something which is against their moral and ethical codes, it is impossible to conclusively demonstrate in the laboratory whether or not hypnosis could be used to compel anti-social behavior. You could never actually allow such behavior to occur in an experimental setting, and the subjects know it. But, in what I like to call "the laboratory of life," the results are more clear-cut. Hypnosis in its modern form has been around for over two hundred years; and if you have to go half way around the world and back several decades in time in order to find even one instance of its alleged use in the commission of a crime, then it would be easier to conclude that this individual was psychotic or personality disordered than to conclude that his behavior was the result of his being hypnotized. If hypnosis could be used in such a manner, by this time its anti-social applications would be well-documented -- in international espionage, by thwarted lovers, and in many other settings. And the evidence simply is not there, although it is difficult to convicnce people who were the victims of an abusive relationship of this fact. Carla Emery (1997), who was herself the victim of an abusive love relationship in which hypnosis was present, even went so far as to conclude that the practice of hypnosis involved a vast conspiracy which was designed to protect the income of those who used it, while preserving the freedom of those who would employ it for anti-social purposes to continue to do so!

With regard to the possibility of seduction under hypnosis, the problem is not with hypnosis, but with the power differential inherent in a therapeutic relationship. This trust must never be abused. The responsibility always lies with the person in authority, whether a physician, psychologist, priest, teacher -- or a hypnotist. It is necessary for the trusted person to maintain strong boundaries and to stop any inappropriate relationships from developing, even if a client displays seductive behavior due to transference, a personality disorder, or a mental illness. A teenager would be especially susceptible to such an authority figure; and If she accused the hypnotist of rape, then chances are, he abused his position of trust in order to have sexual relations with his client, which is tantamount to rape. Therefore, the prosecution's mistake was to attack hypnosis, rather than the power which the hypnotist (who called himself a psychologist) had abused while hypnosis was present.

Unfortunately, the man was acquitted of the charge of rape, and his girlfriend later thanked me for my testimony. I was frankly amazed by her continued loyalty as the intimate details emerged of the relationship between her boyfriend and his accuser, in addition to his organized pattern of attempted serial seduction.

Instances such as these tend to be reported in great detail by the media, and are amplified still further by depictions of hypnosis in fiction. For example, in the motion picture, Jungle Book, a snake is shown hypnotizing its prey; and in the movie, Happy Feet, an Emperior Penguin, surrounded by a bevy of dozens of adoring females, admonishes them, "Avert your eyes, for I've been known to hypnotize!"

Because of episodes such as the one just described, and the publicity which results from them, there are many people who will not have anything to do with hypnosis . And because these abuses continue to surface from time to time, the public is probably never going to be won over completely, despite our repeated assurances that hypnosis is perfectly safe in trained hands. Hyperempiria, on the other hand, with its emphasis on increased aleretness rather than diminished awareness, does not carry the same potential for abuse of the therapeutic relationship as does hypnosis, and is much less likely to be perceived by the general public as inherently dangerous.

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Permalink Reply by Brian David Phillips on July 3, 2008 at 3:49am

Excellent post, Don.

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Permalink Reply by Don Gibbons, Ph.D. on July 3, 2008 at 4:56am

I forgot to include the reference to the book I mentioned by Carla Emery. It is:

Emery, C. (1997). Secret, don't tell: The encyclopedia of hypnotism. Claire, MI: Acorn Hill Publishing Co.

This is quite a read, with over three hundred thousand copies in print, according to the publisher. Her references are dated now, and she obviously has a point to make, but it's all there -- Trilby, Svengali, "The Control of Candy Jones," and all of the other stuff we might have heard about, and much that we probably have not.

Carla was obviously the victim of an abusive relationship in which hypnosis was present, and which owed its "power" not to the abusive power of hypnosis, but to the fact that she was so hopelessly in love with her abuser.

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Permalink Reply by Brian David Phillips on July 3, 2008 at 5:05am

She uses fiction as part of her evidence of what she believes can happen in real life. Last I checked Svengali and Trilby are fictional.

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Permalink Reply by Don Gibbons, Ph.D. on July 3, 2008 at 11:39am

She uses fiction, casual encounters, speculation, and a blend of every other thing. But it's informative.

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