Movie clip

This is a clip from the film "My best friend's girl". It's not quite hypnosis but the psycology behind it intrigues me. Anyone who has read about attraction will instantly recognise what is going on here. It's David DeAngelo's concept of Cocky & Funny as an extreme sport.

It's also hilarious!



I love Kate Hudson because she's portrayed some really good characters over the years.

Attraction and Hypnosis

Okay, whilst I've been incredibly busy for the last three months I'm beginning to realise just how much I miss blogging and so I've come back for another fix. You lucky people.

The last three months or so have passed in a bit of a blur, but I have also learned a lot in that time. Those of you who know me will know that I broke up with my long term girlfriend a while ago, which was both very emotional for me but also represented a major change in direction for my life. I am beginning to rather enjoy the single life, the freedom it affords me, and being on the market again so to speak.

Well, when I say that what I mean is I seem to be filling up my time with fun new activities rather than going out with the explicit intention of finding myself a new partner.

Never mind, as my previous girlfriend was never particularly keen on this hobby my current unattached state means that the gloves are off. I now have the opportunity to talk about hypnosis and dating and how the two relate to each other. Or rather, the experience of being single and knowing about hypnotic phenomena.

I have to say that now I'm single I'm seldom in a hurry to bring up the subject of my interest in hypnosis in conversation. I think this is because the first thing that occurs to me about hypnosis is its massive potential for creepiness. There is the whole Svengali evil hypnotist manipulating people to his own ends cliche that still persists to this day attached to the term hypnotist. Many people are very wary of something that they do not understand; I know this because that's how I felt before I entered this world.

My experience of bringing hypnosis up in conversation has been that most people who don't know about it immediately equate it with controlling other people. Any woman who doesn't have the word "Svengali" in her vocabulary will still be completely familiar with the cliche, and will at least have seen hypnotists in TV shows like Little Britain in which a stage hypnotist uses his skills on a date with a woman, or to get a woman's phone number. These scenes are hilarious and obviously ridiculous but I think they deliberately make light of what to some people might be a legitimate fear about being controlled through hypnosis.

Despite this I think there are also a lot of things that I think work in ones favour. Good hypnotists are by necessity good communicators, so for example we know how to build rapport and have awareness of small signals from another person's body language, which a lot of people just don't have. There are also other things like knowing how to make people feel positive emotions and feel good just through interaction. These are all attractive qualities.

Hypnosis, to me, isn't about control, and there are words like relaxation, connection, escape, detachment and sensuality that seem more appropriate and women are much more likely to appreciate.

Yes I know the line "I know how to make you orgasm using only my voice" might attract some women, but I suspect not the kind I'd want to attract.

Anyone who knows anything about what qualities in men women find attractive will of course know that on a deeper level most women are drawn to men who are naturally able to be in control of the situation, the natural leaders. Another plus point.

One of the books I have been through in the last few months is a book called The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida. It's an extremely abstract book, but in it he describes the concepts of masculine and feminine, which exist within everyone, and suggests that attraction comes from the polarity between the two. Masculinity being characterised by strength, leadership, and being a secure fixed point, whilst femininity is colour, motion, existing in the moment and all that is beautiful in the world. This comes close to my heart in that it immediately makes me think of jive dancing, where like in most forms of partner dance the man leads and the woman follows, spinning and gyrating around him.

I think hypnosis is a kind of partner dance, in a way, because like the follower in a dance the subject is not being controlled but merely being led. This is probably why most hypnotists I meet are male, and most people who are really keen to try hypnosis are female. Just like with partner dancing there is polarity here and theoretically great potential for attraction.

So yes I feel there are upsides and downsides to bringing hypnosis up in conversation with women, but I think that the above just scratches the surface of this topic. There is a deeper question here I feel, which is to do with the concept of using ones knowledge of hypnosis in attracting women.

Let's face it, I've persuaded people that the person sat next to me is wearing a non-existent viking helmet and that their glass of flat cola is really the most delicious ginger beer they've ever tasted. Surely as a hypnotist eliciting the simple emotional response of feeling attraction toward me from women shouldn't be too difficult, especially with a little background reading from books written by experts in attraction such as David DeAngelo and Ross Jeffries.

Well it shouldn't, but how does this stack up morally?

Let's just consider for a moment that I could do a Kenny Craig. That it really would be possible for me to approach any woman I took a fancy to, wave my hands around, tell her to look in the eyes not around the eyes, snap my fingers and have her under my power. Say I could even maintain the attraction toward me from this gimmick indefinitely. What value would my connection with her really have? How would I feel about it?

It might appeal to some men but definitely not me, and I suspect in being the sculptor of her reality I would feel incredibly lonely. I think the most important thing for me in a relationship is that the person I'm with has qualified me, that they have a firm grounding in reality and yet they know me and are drawn to me because they recognise the person that I am and my array of positive attributes. I set the bar very high in being most attracted to strong, mature, intelligent and independent women; I think it helps drive me toward being my best possible self.

Okay, so we'll have none of this covert hypnotic manipulation or any of these attraction techniques. Just be yourself and be nice, like mother said, and everything will be fine, right?

Sadly not.

The unfortunate truth is that all of those things that women say they want in a man: intelligence; great conversation; being a good listener; sense of humour; adventurousness; being passionate about life; common interests; sensitivity; morality; these are all meaningless and might as well be completely invisible if the guy doesn't know how to spark attraction with the woman. If he doesn't in the best case the woman will just befriend him and in the worst case he'll be punished for his honourable intentions by being told he's creepy.

This is a big "aha!" moment that I have had in the last three months; the realisation that attraction in women, like hypnosis, is something that can be induced. Attractiveness is something that men can actually learn. Anyone who has read The Game by Neil Strauss will know that this is what in essence the pick-up artist community is all about. They have developed the art of procedurally creating the feeling of attraction in a woman and by means of such techniques leading her all the way to the bedroom. Seldom beyond it should be added.

Anyone who understands hypnosis will recognise that accidental hypnosis is occurring naturally all the time and spot it when it's happening. I experienced a similar revelation when I started to understand which male behaviours women find attractive. It's something else that's going on all the time, though most people don't realise what, how or why.

If these are things that people who are naturally good with others, and especially women, are using anyway I conclude that I have absolutely no qualms about using them myself. To not do so would be to shoot myself in the foot; to punish myself for having explicit knowledge about such things.

But wait is this manipulation? Well let's talk for a moment about something really manipulative, which is the more common approach men take. A man goes up to a woman in a bar and says "Can I buy you a drink?". He's offering her a drink but the subtext, whether he's aware of it or not, is that she is therefore obliged to talk to him or more. In fact, any occasion where a man is deliberately nice toward a woman he is attracted to in order to try to gain her approval he can unfortunately be assumed to have the words "...and please sleep with me" tagged on the end of his action.

Women spend hours prettying themselves up before they go out, enhancing their attractiveness to men's primarily visual sense of attraction with clothes that flatter them, styling their hair and using makeup. Is that manipulation? If a man's character really is to a woman what a woman's figure, face and hair is to a man, why not put in the effort to make sure that one is presenting ones best self, especially as the effects are even more pronounced for men than they are for women.

I can see why some people might object to what the pick up artists do and say they're taking advantage of the women they pick up. Personally whilst I don't condone telling lies or misleading people I think that the women who go for pick up artists know what they're doing and it's their right to enjoy enjoy themselves. Interestingly nobody seems to be raising the same objections about the proverbial busty blonde with the perfect figure who uses what she has to get what she wants.

I think the interesting question is where to draw the line when using this stuff. What is quite acceptable, and what is just self-serving manipulation?

The answer, to me, lies in the advice of John Morgan and his website Real Human Connect. Recently he and James Tripp have been putting together a dating programme called attraction games, which I'm sure will be well worth a look once it's up and running. The central premise to both of these sites is utilising the concept of play as opposed to work. The idea of just having fun and enjoying what comes naturally, as opposed to going out with a specific agenda. If the only thing on the agenda is to have a good time how can one be manipulative? Is it even possible to manipulate people into having fun?

So this is where I stand at the moment. Have to say I'm enjoying life right now.

Stay tuned. More hypnosis stuff coming.

Parkey.

A change in the winds

This is just a short message to explain a few things.

The last month or so has been quite a difficult one for me for a number of personal reasons, which I won't go into. Suffice to say that I am feeling a lot better now and a lot more positive about the future.

However, I also feel as though I am entering a new phase in my life and I don't think that BlackMeridian is going to feature much in it. Hypnosis is part of who I am now, just as anybody who has learned how to use and experience hypnosis will understand, but even with this being the case I don't feel as though I will have much time or energy to keep this blog up to date in the way I have in the past. There are other writing projects that I want to pursue.

I hope that the words I have written here will continue to be the help and inspiration to others that many generous people have said that they are.

Who knows, I may pop back long enough to write a word or two in the future, but for now this is farewell!

I wish you all the best.

Parkey

Helping the hypnotist

I have, on a few occasions, heard hypnotists saying this their subject:

"Don't try to help me, let it happen automatically"

Some of these times the subject has been me, and my own experience was that this instruction was very unhelpful, and even restricting, until I figured out a way to get past it.

I have said before that the biggest misunderstandings that some hypnotists have come out of their either being no good whatsoever as a subject themself, or else being a very good subject. This is, to my mind, another of such misunderstandings; a result of said hypnotist not appreciating what a subject with only mild abilities is experiencing.

Consider something like the magnetic hands set piece. You place your hands straight out in front of you, hands facing each other, close your eyes and imagine that there's a magnetic attraction between your palms.

Now, as you do that, consider this: Don't try to move your hands, let them move automatically.

Not that the exact phrasing of the statement isn't that important, it's more about the suggestion that there is a specific way in which the subject should respond. If you're anything like me you will be asking yourself the same question that I was, which I think is implicit in the statement: "Am I doing this consciously, or not?" The statement also gives the impression that consciously responding is something that the subject shouldn't be doing. "Am I doing something wrong by having my hands come together in this way?"

Now obviously this isn't the case for all subjects but the result for me, and for many subjects I've seen hypnotists fail with, is that the subject stops moving their hands together, or the equivalent thereof, consciously holds them exactly where they are, and stops to wait for hypnosis to move the hands instead.

My response to hypnosis is improving gradually but continuously and now I know how to respond to that kind of suggestion, which is to consider the question as to who or what is moving my hands to be unimportant, and appreciate that all that matters is that they are moving. To start with my response to many suggestions has felt very conscious and deliberate, but as time has gone on I have gotten better at responding and the process has felt more automatic.

This is why the learning analogy is something that works for me. The process by which my response to hypnosis has improved reminds me most, of all things in my life, of my experience of learning to play the piano. This started with me poking gingerly and very deliberately at the keyboard, but over time the process became much more natural and, if you like, "automatic". Conscious incompetence to unconscious competence is a gradual process for most people. It's now easy enough for me to find my way around a piano keyboard, play back tunes from memory, and sight read music, although I will confess I rarely practice these days. The one thing that was always guaranteed to throw a spanner in the works for me and bring any recital of a piece of music to a keyboard mashing halt was to try to think too consciously about the process, or worse question whether it was a conscious process.

I can easily picture a well seasoned pianist, who can barely remember when they were learning, or who was a child prodigy, telling a beginner to not just let their hands press the keys automatically; after all it's what works for them. I can also imagine someone who has never actually played a piano themself, but has heard that same mantra said by an expert, repeating that mantra because it works for someone who can play the piano very well and thus must be good advice.

This comes back to my feelings about that group of people that I have decided to call "undeveloped" subjects ("analyticals"). It is my belief that there is nothing wrong with these people as such, with respect to their apparent inability to go into trance, but that they simply lack certain important bits of information and practice with that information.

Many hypnotists, and as a result of my cynicism and the difficulty I had whilst starting out as a subject I would be inclined toward saying most hypnotists, do not know this information or how to teach it because they only work with subjects who already know it.

So in summary I would suggest this to you: You and your subject should not care what part of the subject's brain is responding to the suggestion; all that matters is that they're responding.

"Analyticals"

Something that has really been getting at me recently is the way in which the term "analytical" is applied to a certain group of subjects by hypnotists. I think it is high time for me to challenge this expression and question exactly what it is supposed to mean.

It seems to me that the term "analytical" is generally used to describe subjects who are difficult to hypnotise; people who are at the opposite end of the scale to those somnambulistic subjects who are an absolute gift to any hypnotist. There are some well known supposed percentages to quote here; setting willingness aside, 20% of people are easily deeply hypnotised, 60% of people are capable of basic hypnosis, 20% are very difficult to hypnotise. It is this latter group that are usually branded as "analytical" subjects.

I have talked before about why I think some people, despite being equally willing to cooperate, are more hypnotisable than others. I think it comes down to being able to think in a certain way, in an uncritical way. Somnambulists can do this well; anti-somnambulists, if you'll pardon the expression, cannot do this or at least not very well in the right context.

The very term "analytical" is, I think, inappropriate when describing these hard-to-hypnotise individuals, because it carries with it a lot of implications that are in themselves quite misleading. The biggest red herring is the idea that a difficult subject is troublesome because they are analysing the suggestions they're being given, which is can lead to a profound misunderstanding of why the subject may be finding hypnosis difficult and how best to proceed with them.

Everybody is "analytical" if by that you mean they take in what's going on around them, including what the hypnotist is saying, and consider what they think about it. Something that I think illustrates this well is one of the better subjects I have worked with and what they said to me after the first induction I did on them. I was feeling confident so I went straight in with a hand drop induction, which actually induced fits of giggling but those soon melted from her face as I continued to deepen. Afterwards she told me that she remembers questioning whether that was really all there was to it, thinking how funny that the whole situation really was, then being surprised by how much she was relaxing because she never relaxed like she was in that moment, and then her memories of what happened next were a bit fuzzy.

Now it seems to me as though there's a general expectation that the word "sleep" is supposed to make something dramatic happen by both hypnotist and subject alike, like for example stop the subject thinking, knock them unconscious or shift them to a different astral plane. Something that is irritating for me is this pervasive received wisdom that the best way for a hypnotist to deal with an "analytical" subject is to use a shock, confusion, or overload induction. The subject might analyse your suggestions if you go slow, god forbid, so hit them hard and fast and knock them out before they have chance to start computing what you're doing. I really don't think that this does anybody any favours because this approach only serves to accentuate the above expectation, and for certainly the majority of people who experience hypnosis that isn't really what the experience is like for them at all.

There are hypnotists who claim to have zapped "analyticals" into somnambulism with a shock induction, who like patting themselves on the back for being so clever. I'm afraid my answer to this is that if the subject did go into a deep trance from those sorts of induction I cannot see how they can be one of these lower 20% anti-somnambulists, and thus described as an "analytical". To me the implication being made here is that if a subject does not know how to think uncritically telling to them to do so more suddenly will suddenly enlighten them; of course in practice that can't and doesn't work.

A lot of hypnotists subscribe to the view that the subject is either in hypnosis or out of it and that every induction is an instant induction because there is a specific point in time when a subject goes from not being hypnotised to being hypnotised. So, get the subject "there" and you're home and dry.

I like to see hypnosis differently. To me it's a more like a channel of communication that exists between the hypnotist and subject. This connection, rather than simply being on or off, is more akin to something that is ramped up in intensity along a continuous scale. The "sleep! you are now in a trance" model is still something that can be utilised of course, but as I have mentioned in previous posts it really isn't needed to achieve phenomena. The intensity of this state is of course characterised by the phenomena that one is able to achieve with the subject.

This is the point that I am trying to get to: I don't care how much my subject analyses what I am saying to them, because as far as I am concerned being "analytical" is not a problem. In fact, my best ever subject holds degree in chemistry from Oxford and is currently doing their Ph.D at Cambridge and I don't think I've ever met anyone more analytical.

No, a subject being "analytical" is not an issue whatsoever.

Or rather, to put it more precisely, it's not the issue. So what do hypnotists really mean when they say "analytical"?

Well, I think there are a number of words that better describe a willing but hypnotically unresponsive subject than "analytical". Such subjects could be described as "critical" or "challenging" for example, as in being naturally inclined to challenge what the hypnotist is saying and seeking to correlate it with outside evidence before they believe it. Perhaps "curious" is another word one could use; the subject having a desire to be fully aware so that they can watch hypnosis working on them.

Ultimately though I think that it is better to see an unresponsive subject not as someone who is doing something obstructive to hypnosis, but as someone who is simply not doing what they need to be doing for hypnosis to work. I still see the ability to go into a hypnotic trance as a skill which comes to some people more naturally than others, but is within the reach of anybody given the right guidance and enough practice. This is the premise that best fits my own experiences, and those of others that I have met.

My conclusion here is that I would like all hypnotists to cast off the misleading and inaccurate term "analytical" and refer to difficult subjects by an expression that conveys the impression that like everybody the subject has a latent ability to be hypnotised that, as a consequence of their natural way of thinking, merely remains undeveloped.

That's settled then. Until I find a better word I shall refer to these people as "undeveloped subjects"

Spammers

I wonder if the spammer who keeps gracing my blog's comments with his self-promotional material realises how quickly I am made aware of what he has been doing, and how little I have to do to just delete what he's written.

Just a thought.

Quantum Physics

Something that I like about hypnosis is that whilst some may be inclined to label it as "alternative" healthcare it is different from the rest of this category in one very important respect.

There is a name for the parts of alternative medicine that have been proven to work beyond simply being a placebo, and that is "medicine". In medicine, the effects of any given treatment are put on trial, tested and evaluated to prove that it is effective for the patients that it is used on. If an easily available natural remedy actually works in a true medical sense it is most likely already in use; a good example is the drug asprin, which I believe is derived from the bark of the willow tree.

A placebo is a pill and a suggestion. For the treatment to work you can have the suggestion without the pill, but you can't have the pill without the suggestion. A nice illustration of this was given when James Randi, a stage magician, took a lethal dose of homeopathic sleeping pills on stage at a TED talk back in 2007. The video is definitely worth a watch.

Alternative medicine is the business of selling a diverse range of supposed remedies whose significant effects are derived solely through the suggestion put into the mind of the patient. In this sense I have absolutely no worries about placing hypnotherapy in the same category as homeopathy, crystal energy healing, and so on. They all work in much the same way.

The difference between hypnosis, specifically hypnotherapy, and these other alternative forms of treatment is that hypnosis doesn't need to claim to be anything that it isn't. There's no pseudo-science claiming that shiny crystals have psychic energy fields, or that a medicine is effective even when it's been diluted beyond the point of no longer having any medicine in it. There are no daemons to exorcise or pixies re-aligning your DNA. Nobody even needs to talk of secret ancient medical wisdom of a bygone age (conveniently omitting the bit about how in bygone times broken or infected limbs were routinely sawn off without anesthetic).

Hypnotherapy is simply about making the subject feel better through the power of suggestion, but in a pure undiluted form. The results are subjective, the treatment is subjective, the success is subjective. So many issues that medical doctors have to treat are not so much medical conditions as merely indicators of personal or lifestyle problems, and this is where hypnotherapists are able to help, whilst acknowledging that if a client has a genuine medical problem they should see a doctor.

What has all this to do with quantum physics I hear you asking? Well, whenever I hear a hypnotist start talking about quantum physics I sigh inwardly. I personally, being a mechanical engineer by trade, like to think I have a good grounding in physics, significantly better than most hypnotists, but I will admit that even I don't really have a clue when it comes to quantum theory. Furthermore I have yet to meet or hear from a hypnotist who also happens to be a theoretical physicist. Even then physicists themselves have a saying: "If you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory"

Talking about quantum physics is just one example of how so many hypnotists fall into the trap of being pseudo-scientists and I find it really depressing when I hear some hypnotist making what I consider to be dubious and untested claims about what one can do with hypnosis.

Seriously. There is no need to drop to the same level as the crystal healers and the homeopaths with their made up science. I have heard of hypnotists who claim they can cure cancer through the power of suggestion, or that they know people who have been able to repair broken bones by going into a deep trance for a couple of days.

Hypnosis can undoubtedly be used to cure phobias and give up bad habits, it can do a lot for pain control and of course positive mindset is most certainly an aid to recovery in any medical patient. However I think hypnotherapists are rather well advised to leave treating the broken bodies to the medical experts.

The same goes for other claims relating to the highly objective world of science. Hypnotists can, and I think should, talk philosophy and consider theories of mind. These are interesting topics about which I and others have talked for hours, but we should also remember that hypnosis is not a science, it is an art. It is by its essence highly complicated, inconsistent and contradictory, and mostly because it involves peoples' minds, which are also highly complicated, inconsistent and contradictory.

I think quantum physics does have one thing that hypnotists can legitimately steal for their own purposes, and that's the following expression:

"If you think you understand hypnosis, you don't understand hypnosis."