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What is Hypnosis Part 3, James Tripp Responds

Here is a recent discussion James Tripp and I had via email.

James is a master hypnotist and changework artist. Go check out his work. It will be well worth your time and money.

What do you think?

James Tripp:

OK, I think we are on a similar page (maybe).

I would agree that state shifts are part of hypnosis… that state shifts must happen, otherwise NOTHING has happened! For me, hypnosis is the process of shifting/attenuating/amplifying ‘state’… although it is really the experienced reality that is my focus rather than the state.

I totally agree that that dissociation thing just isn’t it. If anything, ASSOCIATION is what is more important! How richly the subject associates into the experience.

I agree also that dreams are not a special thing – IMO they are our brain doing what it does all day long, shaping our experience. When we ‘dream’ the external data-feed is switched off so we can spin out more creatively. In hypnosis the external data-feed is not always switched off, but we do get to influence what data is paid attention to, and also how it is interpreted. We can utilise it and make it part of a new experience of reality. So state shifts as attention shifts.

Al the very best

James

My response:

Perfect.

It’s dissociation from one stimulus and association into another. Responsiveness is a zero sum game.

The thing is that dissociation from external experience (while maintaining awareness) IS a special state (measurable on a brain scan) sometimes. It’s called REM and hypnogogia.

And so it’s entirely possible that using suggestion and relaxation we can is some cases put someone into that measurable state. Hence they tune out unimportant external stimulus (anything but the hypnotist), and the hypnotist becomes their reality.

You (James) do it primarily by increasing association to the hypnotist. As a side effect they dissociate from external things. Awareness is a zero sum game. Jon (Chase) however goes the other way. He dissociates them from external things. Then there is the space for the hypnotist to be reality.

As REM is a special state, Jon sees this level of dissociation from external reality to also be a special state. A bit ‘lighter’ then sleep, but quite close. As Elman says.

And so realize that relaxation helps you! It dissociates them from external stuff and therefore they can associate into you the hypnotist. Thats also the idea of ‘deeper deeper’. It means ‘deeper inside and away from regular external existence’. That creates space for the hypnotist.

And so we’re all one happy family!

Joe

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Hypnosis Against Someones Will

Perhaps one of the most asked questions that I get as a hypnotist is “can you hypnotize someone to so something against their own will?”

It’s a good question, an important question, but a very poorly worded question.

Here’s why. Hypnotists are very good with words, frames, and manipulating your perception of reality. And so once you ask a question that leaves certain abstract concepts like ‘hypnosis’ ‘will’ ‘against’ and ‘do’ open, that leaves space for the hypnotist to manipulate the answer to imply what he wants you to believe and still say ‘the truth’.

And so here is the question reworded. Without any wiggle room. If you want to know the answer to that big question, here is how you ask it…

-Say it’s 1980 and the USA and the USSR and at war. You live in Moscow. You are Russian, but you love the good ‘ol USA. You have just secretly found out that Colonel Alex (a committed Russian patriot who believe the USA is the root of all evil and must be destroyed) has punched in the launch codes to nuke the USA. The nukes will launch tomorrow at 12PM unless you get the redirect codes out of him. If you do punch in the redirect codes, the nukes will be rerouted to Colonel Alex’s home town and will kill his family. It’s your only option.

Here are 3 scenarios.

1. Colonel Alex has come to you the hypnotist for nail biting. You have just tested for name amnesia and it has worked as far as you can tell.

2. Colonel Alex has come to you the hypnotist for nail biting. It’s the beginning of the session, and you have no idea as to his level of commitment, his capability as a subject, or his ability to follow instructions.

3. You meet Colonel Alex in a bar. You can’t mention hypnosis, mentalism, or magic, as Alex has been warned to never speak to a hypnotist, mentalist, or magician.

In each scenario, out of 10 random times, in how many would you be able to get the launch codes out of Alex? You have no knives or guns with which to threaten him. You also are a lot weaker then him physically. He also knows that you aren’t authorized to get the codes no matter what you tell him.

Here are my answers.

Scenario 1 9/10
Scenario 2 6/10
Scenario 3 2/10

What are yours?

Comment and share.

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What is Hypnosis Part 2, De-constructing Heap

Michael Heap has written a wonderful article on hypnosis. You can find it here.

I think that it’s a wonderful article. Heap comes very very close to understanding hypnosis.

In light of my recent understandings I’ll now show where he’s wrong.

Read the Heap article first. Without it you won’t quite understand what I’m talking about here.

Enjoy.

Heap talks about the importance of automaticity. And thats great. However he struggles to understand how that automaticity is created. Here is a quote

“There appears to be a consensus amongst academic psychologists who study hypnosis that any theory of hypnosis must account for the subjective experiences of involuntariness and realism that the suggestible subject finds so powerful.

One line of approach that is now popular is to consider that when responding to suggestion, the highly suggestible person is able to exclude from conscious awareness elements of the experience that would normally be available to consciousness. For example, when I raise my arm I am conscious of my arm lifting up and my intention to lift my arm. If however I am able to exclude from conscious representation my intention to lift my arm, it will seem to me that my arm is “lifting on its own”, i.e. involuntarily.

Similarly, if I am given the suggestion that my best friend is standing in front of me, I may make the effort to imagine him, to think of his voice, to imagine my feelings on seeing him, and so on. If I can remove from consciousness awareness the effort and intention that I make in creating this experience, then it will seem more like my friend is really there. To develop these ideas we can and indeed must – use models and theories from mainstream cognitive psychology and neuroscience.”

So Heaps solution to automaticity is the exclusion from awareness that I am choosing to do the act.

I find this absurd.

Classic conditioning has long ago proven that we can condition a reflex. And so if I hit your knee with a hammer a few times and at the same time I ring a bell, and then I only ring the bell, it will automatically and involuntarily twitch (Twitmyer, E. B. (1905). Knee jerks without simulation of the patellar tendon. Psychological Bulletin, 2, 43.)! In that case you don’t postulate that the person has decided to twitch the knee but has excluded that knowledge from awareness. Salter (1941) talks about using classical conditioning to condition pupil dilation. Would Heap argue that this is also voluntary but excluded from conscious awareness?!

And so once we have shown true automaticity, let me give you another example. One which Heap brings earlier in the paper.

The lemon test. If you imagine a lemon vividly enough you start to salivate.

I once again ask, is the secretion of saliva a voluntary act which you excluding from conscious awareness?!

Now of course you voluntarily imagined the lemon which then led to the saliva, but the saliva itself is involuntary. Salivating is something you can’t do it voluntarily and on command!

And so we have proven a key key point. And that is “If I imagine a context for which there is an appropriate response, that response will involuntarily be elicited”. And so you can’t vividly imagine the lemon without salivating. And therefore, so long as you imagine the lemon, the saliva is involuntary.

With that in mind, explaining an arm lift that happens without effort is rather simple. So long as you imagine a context in which that response is appropriate (helium balloons), the arm will respond with true automaticity.

Now lets take it further. Let’s say you imagine a context in which every response happens. Like the idea that the hypnotists is in full control. In that case, so long as you continued to imagine that, then responding to the hypnotist would be genuine, automatic, and involuntary. The only solution you would have would be to stop imagining that the hypnotist was in control.

And so here is the final step. Lets say you imagined that the hypnotist is in control, and you also imagined that you have no control over any of your imagining. In that case, there would be an automatic response of being unable to stop imagining this reality! And so you are genuinely and truly stuck! We have closed the door or stopping to imagine via imagination! We have closed the loop!

THAT is what hypnosis is. True honest automaticity.

Lets move on in Heaps words.

“Let me now describe three experiments and challenge you to think about the possible explanations in terms similar to those I have just described.

Hypnotically suggestible subjects when given the suggestion that they cannot see a chair in front of them may report convincingly that they cannot see anything. Yet when asked to walk across to the other side of the room they walk around the chair. People who are told that they must only ‘pretend to be hypnotised’ usually bump into the chair (Orne, 1962).

Secondly we suggest to some very suggestible subjects that they can no longer hear their own voices. In the case of those who respond to this suggestion we then ask them to speak into a microphone that is connected to an amplifier and a pair of headphones that the subject wears. The amplifier causes a delay of say half a second in the subject’s speech that he hears through the headphones. This is called ‘delayed auditory feedback’ and it is very difficult for people to speak coherently when at the same time they are hearing their voices delayed for a fraction of a second

What happens to those subjects who insist that they cannot hear their voice? With delayed auditory feedback their speech is disrupted as under normal conditions (Barber & Calverley, 1964)!

Finally, subjects learn a list of words and are then told that they cannot remember any of these words until a signal is given. Some very suggestible subjects may report complete or almost complete amnesia for the words. However they still show a characteristic electroencephalographic response when presented with words that appeared on the list Allen, Iacono, Laravuso, & Dunn, 1995; Schnyer & Allen, 1995) and this material still interferes with the subjects’ recall of another list of words that was not included in the amnesia suggestion (Coe, Basden, Basden & Graham, 1976).

Some people think that the results of these experiments indicate that these very suggestible subjects are simply pretending. With no other evidence this is the best explanation. However, the further evidence that has accumulated has led most researchers to reject this explanation, although it is still entirely possible that some subjects may be pretending.

What seems to be happening in each of these experiments is that very suggestible subjects have the ability to exclude from consciousness awareness the explicit representation of the stimulus – hearing their voice, seeing the chair, or recalling the list of words. However, these stimuli are still implicitly registered in their behaviour and thinking in the usual way – their speech is affected by delayed auditory feedback, they avoid bumping into the chair, and the ‘forgotten’ material still interferes with new learning. This is a plausible way of understanding what is happening.”

Powerful stuff!

But there is a solution…

Here it is.

In every example he gives a suggestion presupposes awareness that contradicts the suggestion itself. If you tell me not to see a specific chair, then at some level I need to be aware of the chair in order not to see it! If I wasn’t aware of the chair at all, then how would I know what not to see? It’s like most of my clients who want their problem gone. But so long as that is their goal, they presuppose having the problem for eternity! You can’t know something is gone unless it exists at a minimum as an idea.

The same is true in the other 2 examples. In order for the subjects mind to process the suggestion, it has to be aware of what it’s supposed to be unaware of. Hence the ‘hidden observer’. The suggestion itself builds in that hidden observer!!

Here is how to really test it. Suggest that a subject is completely blind. Then see what happens.

Salter (1941 “What is Hypnosis”) talks about suggesting deafness and then firing a gun next to the subjects ear. The subject didn’t flinch.

Now if I’m correct (as the lemon test proves without doubt), that means we simply need to imagine a context vividly and the resulting response will be a hypnotic one.

This depends on 2 things.
1. A subject with a good imagination.
2. A hypnotist who gives good suggestions. Most hypnotists say ‘your arm is stuck’. Thats a bad suggestion (unless the subject has responded to that type of suggestion already). In that suggestion you hope the subject imagines your command to be true and therefore you get the result.
A good suggestion is one where you tell the subject to imagine the context “Imagine I’m in control of your reality”, and then ‘closes the door’ via imagination “imagine you are unable to control your imaginings, even this one”.

The rest is simple. The more we are dissociated from external reality, the better we imagine. As in a sensory deprivation tank, as in REM sleep. In hypnosis the subject is dissociated from external reality and very strongly associated to the reality of the hypnotist creating reality. Hence the zombie look you often see. It’s dissociation from external reality (excluding the hypnotist and what he suggests). And so an as I proved in Part 1.

Your thoughts?

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What is Hypnosis?

In the last week or so I have developed a new understanding of what hypnosis is.

I have come to realize that there is a special state where people become more suggestible.

I have also relaized the nature of dreaming. It’s not what you think it is 🙂

Enjoy, Share, and Comment!

1. Assuming you listened to the ‘Reality is a Scam’ webinar http://wikihyp.com/events/free-conference-call, you know my understanding of hypnosis. Imagination uses the same neural pathways as reality does. The only way you can tell the difference between reality and imagination is because imagination isn’t that vivid. There are other ways, but thats the main one.

2. And so hypnotic phenomena is simply vivid imaginings to the point where it’s real. Hypnosis is when the subject vividly imagines that everything the hypnotist says is automatically reality. The subject truly experiences the suggestions as real. It’s not pretend.

3. And so it follows that bad subjects primarily are bad subjects because they are bad imaginers.

4. But even bad imaginers have a state where they imagine perfectly and vivdly. That state is called REM (and hypnogogia which is when your waking up or falling asleep).

5. The REM state is a real special state. It can be seen on a PET scan.

6. And so it would logically follow that if we put someone in a REM or hypnogogic state that they then will be able to imagine more vividly and therefore be an excellent subject.

7. Relaxation helps put people into that state. Just like when you fall asleep at night. Suggestion also helps.

8. Ergo, relaxation can lead to a special state where someone imagines better and therefore can do hypnotic phenomena better.

9. And so both sides are right. Hypnosis is all about imagination. Everything can be done without the state. BUT there is a special state where imagination becomes more vivid and by definition the person becomes a better subject.

QED.

10. Put someone into a sensory deprivation tank and they start to imagine and hallucinate vividly. This proves that cutting off sensory input and dissociating the person from the outside reality enhances imagination.

11. And so Occams Razor would tell us that dreams are a scam. Dreams are simply vivid imaginings. The reason we dream is because we are cut off from all outside input while we sleep (much like a sensory deprivation tank). The REM state isn’t a dream state. It’s simply a state when you’re asleep (cut off from outside input), but also aware, and so your imagination runs wild and it’s experienced as reality.

12. And so dreams are simply a subset of imagining. They have no ‘purpose’.

13. And so the ‘state’ is one of dissociation. Thats where the subject focuses inward and away from outside reality. In that situation imagination is vivid and enhanced. Dissociate them far enough and you end up in sleep land.

Your thoughts?

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Hypnotizing the Conscious

Here’s the standard line from the standard hypnotist “I can’t make you stop smoking, you need to want to stop”.

Let’s examine that now.

We as hypnotists work with the subconscious of our clients. Thats how we can get all the splendid hypnotic effects such as amnesia, hallucination, and ideomotor movement. We simply have the subconscious accept our suggestion for name amnesia, and presto like magic, they can’t remember their name no matter how hard they try and no matter how hard they want to.

Can someones SC work against their wishes? Of course it can! Look at any phobic, they didn’t ever want to become a phobic, they got hypnotized into it without their consent and without their willingness, and there doesn’t seem to be anything they can do to stop it.

We find that phenomena of people being unable to consciously fight the SC on many levels. We find it with emotion, thoughts, habits, and beliefs.

So if we as hypnotists work with out clients SC minds, so long as they follow our instructions during the session, why oh why would they have to consciously want to quit?

So here’s the thing. As good as we are as hypnotists, we aren’t perfect. So while we might change beliefs, habits, patterns, and emotions, for all we know there might be some pieces of the puzzle that we haven’t gotten to. Those remaining associations and learning can reinstall the old smoking issue.

Along with that, even if we did zap the smoking issue completely and remove all traces from the SC, the conscious mind of a person is their own hypnotist! Not always is it the most effective hypnotist (as we see in the case of a phobia), but it’s a hypnotist nonetheless. And so it’s possible that even after we have changed the SC so the problem is no longer there, they might rehypnotize themselves right back into the habit.

Recognizing that, we enlist the aid of their SC so that they don’t fight us and rehypnotize themselves, and so if we missed something, they will hypnotize themselves and finish the work.

And so to summarize, I think that we most certainly do not need the person to want to quit. So long as they come to us and follow instructions during the session, we can change the SC to the point that they can’t smoke no matter how much they want to. We can also change the SC to the point that smoking means nothing to them and holds no attraction for them.

However we do recognize that the way they think consciously has a powerful hypnotic effect on their SC. And so to make sure that the job gets done even when we haven’t done a perfect job, we enlist the help of their 24/7 hypnotist, and that is their conscious mind, to fill in what we missed. We also want to make sure that they don’t fight what we put in there and reinstall the habit.

This concept applies to almost any change we make. If we enlist the on-board hypnotist (the conscious) and teach him how to use his power well, we can have our clients finish the job that we started when what we did wasn’t quite enough.

So it’s a lie that the client needs to want to quit, but one that seems to work in the best interests of all involved.

Because of the demographic I often work with in my private practice (male, 18-30, Lawyers, Engineers, and Scientists) I get a lot of clients with very active conscious minds. And so I have had to develop a whole range of techniques and ideas to work with them and ‘hypnotize’ the conscious. In my upcoming online group hypnosis supervision you will have a chance to learn my methods and practice them with live feedback in class.

You can find more information and sign up here.

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Conscious and Subconscious Mind

A few quick thoughts on the ‘conscious’ and ‘subconscious’ mind.

Our brain is a neural network. The patterns it runs are very different than binary symbolic logic patterns. Thats why we can do face recognition so easily, but we aren’t that good at math.

At the same time we use use language, symbols, and numbers. We do use symbolic logic. This obviously runs on the NN hardware, but it follows the rules of deductive binary symbolic logic just the same. (you could say this is our internal dialog, but I’m not 100% certain).

And so we have 2 ‘modes’ of processing.
1. Pure pattern matching (neural network), evolutionary style thinking, not predictable, open ended, intuitive, non logical, parallel processing, and so on.
2. Deductive symbolic logic. Step by step, exact, predictive, and so on.

Now Erickson decided to call them ‘conscious’ and ‘subconscious’. To me, consciousness is awareness and that can be awareness of either ‘mode’, but those names have stuck.

And so I think yes, there is a hard split between 2 ‘minds’, but it’s really just 2 styles of processing.

One of the ways of getting hypnotic responsiveness is to slow down or eliminate the symbolic processing logic type of operation (the internal dialog perhaps). In my opinion this is what Elman meant when he spoke of bypassing the CF. It’s what creates the trancified look of fascination that we often see in awesome subjects. Without internal dialog, thats how you look 🙂

What do you think?

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Skype Conference Call Recording

So the Skype call went quite well. We had a very distinguished audience and a couple of really good questions.

As there were technical difficulties and some people couldn’t get on the call, I have decided to release the recoding of the call for free to ya’ll. Enjoy and comment if you have anything to ask or add.

Here are all the clips from the call…

Enjoy!

What is Hypnosis?

Context and Expectation

How Inductions Work

Indirect and Covert Hypnosis

Hypnosculpture and Win E

Instant Inductions and Nonverbal Inductions Explained

IM and Street Hypnosis

Triggering Models

Difficult and Analytical Subjects

Imagination and Stories

Answering the Questions

Emotion and Cognitive Dissonance

Hypnosis Doesn’t Exist

If you found these ideas useful, you might be interested in joining my online supervision group.

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Skype Conference Call

I recently put a few dots together and collected a whole lot of information ‘under one roof’. I’m going to be doing a free conference call on skype on Wed Jan 5th at 3:30PM EST and I’m going to be giving it all over…

You probably already know a lot of this information… and at the same time you might have not put it all together as a cohesive whole. That will be my goal.

Here are some of the issues I’m addressing.

What is hypnosis?

What is an induction?

How do instant inductions work?

We always hear the experts say “tell them whats going to happen when you say sleep… or else they don’t know what to do…” Isn’t that cheating/faking hypnosis?

Can you hypnotize someone who has never heard of hypnosis?

I always hear about ‘being confident’ and being ‘The Hypnotist’. What does that have to do with my subject going under?

I hear alot about compliance and getting the subject to listen to you. What does that have to do with hypnosis? Isn’t that just compliance?

Why is the pretalk so important? Why can’t we just zap them under?

I have heard ‘inductions aren’t magic spells’, if they aren’t that what are they?

I have heard that inductions are rituals… What does that mean?

You can add me on skype at joe.10000 and IM me if you want to join.

This is all free as I haven’t yet gotten savvy enough at the internet marketing thing to figure out how to sign you up for a never-ending email newsletter…

Looking forward to seeing ya’ll.

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When NLP fails…

NLP is the ultimate hypnotic metaphor for analyticals. They love to believe that working with people is exactly like programming a computer.

The problem is, it’s not a fair comparison.

Here’s why.

There are too many parameters and variables involved in a human for that model to work. A computer is a controlled environment where what you do and what affects your code is clearly defined and controlled. There are no complexities and other factors affecting what goes on.

A person is a very complex thing in which every communication has so many variable effects that to say “if you do X then Y will happen” doesn’t hold up.

You can point to trends and techniques that often lead in the direction of a desired outcome, but to think about it in black and white terms, that A always results in B,like a computer, like NLP does, that doesn’t really work.

A fair comparison to a computer would be to one that is constantly being programmed by many other programmers too, that has been previously programmed in many ways that interact and change how the things you’re inputting affect it, that you have poor information as to the input and output at any given moment, and that has it’s own free will and choice to accept or reject what your inputting!

How many times has the “subconscious” agreed to change using real genuine ideomotor signals, and then hasn’t changed… According to NLP that can’t happen.

How many times has the fast phobia cure not worked. According to NLP it MUST work. I heard an interesting interview with Jorgen Rassmusen who talks about being by a seminar by Bandler where Bandler did the FPC and it didn’t work. How Grinder fails. How they all fail. Even though they do the techniques perfectly.

This misperception that NLP installs, that people can be simply manipulated with perfect results by using this model, simply doesn’t hold up in the real world with real clients.

Find someone who claims it does, and thats someone telling you that he doesn’t actually work with clients.

And thats why so many NLP guru master trainer people are still messed up… Why don’t they just go in there and zap a few submodalities around?!

Once you realize that we aren’t working with computers, that we’re working with real, live, complex, human beings, you begin to look for ways to maximize your success and for ways to create the most change possible, realizing that even after the ‘perfect session’ it’s still possible that the problem remains!

This is one of the core concepts I work with and teach.

If you found these ideas useful, you might be interested in joining my online supervision group.

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Secrets of the Subconscious Part II

(You can find part I here)

Imagine a small child, around the age of 18 months or so, who is just beginning to learn about language and abstraction. Learning that there can be ‘the thing’ and ‘the thing but not the thing’. This understanding is key in learning language as words are an abstraction, an idea. They symbolize the thing but are not the thing themselves.

This is what differentiates humans from animals. This is why animals can’t learn language (outside of a few words that are pushed in via brute force Pavlovian conditioning). They can’t grasp ‘ideas’. That something can mean something but not be that thing itself. And so they are restricted to the world of concrete things and realities, they can’t go beyond that and think about pure ideas.

As this child ‘gets’ this concept and begins learning language a wonderful thing starts to happen. The child begins to engage in imaginary play.

How are those two things related?

It’s simple. Before one can distinguish between a reality and an idea, they can’t distinguish between fake and real. After all, ‘fake’ is real with the idea of fake wrapped around it. One who can’t understand abstract ideas can’t understand fake.

And so before a child knows about fake and real they can’t imagine, as if they did imagine they would be psychotic! They wouldn’t be able to realize that their imagination isn’t the reality, and they would respond to their imagined world as if it were real. That would be quite dangerous. If a child imagined that there was no fire and there was, and they didn’t realize that their imagination wasn’t the reality, they would stick their hand in that spot and get burned.

And so once we gain the ability to distinguish between real and fake, it becomes safe to imagine. Losing that ability to know whats real and whats fake would be the most dangerous thing that can happen to us.

We mentioned in Secrets of the Subconscious Part I that when we find our beliefs challenged we get very emotional. When our beliefs are challenged, we are in essence being told ‘your reality is not reality, something else is reality’. That to our subconscious, the message that you should start believing a fantasy as reality, is a very dangerous message.

This brings us to why techniques like EFT work so well. When someone does EFT, instead of fighting their emotions and reality as they usually do, instead they accept it and allow it to be. The moment you do that, your SC feels very safe and no longer needs to fight you.

The lesson is a simple one. Just like when you argue with others they get very defensive and try to defend themselves at any cost, when you argue with yourself and your own SC mind, it fights back to protect it’s reality and won’t give an inch. The secret is kindness, understanding, and diplomacy… with your own mind.

In the next segment of Secrets of the Subconscious, I will give you a super powerful tool that holds the key to controlling how you feel in any situation. This is what I teach and give to almost to all my clients right after the very first session. Using that magic technique, you can respect the message that your SC sends you and you can then persuade it to act differently. Once you do that, you become unstoppable!