Hypnosis incompatible with asperger?

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I've practiced self hypnosis before. It works but you have to re-do it periodically to have the effect renewed. I used self hypnosis for confidence and self-esteem boosting and depending on how far you fake it till you feel it, you will notice a huge difference in your self.

I used to practice hypnosis and I can say it works even if you're an aspie. Why it doesn't work with some people is because they've set their brains to that -- "It's not true, it's not real, not going to work on me". If that's your attitude, if that's how you see hypnosis most of your life, you'll develop a way to fight it. Thus, not working on you.

If you're the type of person that accepts most, if not everything, that you see and hear, you'll get hypnotized easily too. If you're the type of person that gets easily convinced (it doesn't matter if you're a skeptic - skeptics are easy to break :p ), you'll get affected by hypnotism easily too.

Relax, relax, you are not a suspect, we just want to know the story, just relax, breath… --- ahh! Be careful with that Because if the next words you will here are subjective questions, you'll get in trouble sooner or later. The more frequent they repeat it, the deeper it gets into you, if you're not aware of it, and if you're unlucky, you'll start believing you actually did the crime even though you really did not. Unknowingly, they're putting the person in a state that he shouldn't be in.

Finally, knowing how it works is the best defense. Because you know the signs, so you're prepared.

I guess I've never been in hypnosis. Even self-hypnosis didn't work for me, though I think the tape I had for this purpose was fairly good. I feel I'd lose the contact with the outside world somehow if I really was hypnotized. Listening to verbal instructions is not my strong point...

It's interesting how effectively I can suspend my suspicion toward any kind of quackery for a while (good practice if you really want to be 'open-minded'), so it would be the case with hypnosis too, whatever it is. This works with homeopathy and seeing auras so why it couldn't work with a simple and more rational thing like hypnosis?

that is NOT the way i saw hypnosis. i WANTED it to work for multiple reasons, but instead of being able to escape into the nice blue sky/white sand nude beach et al, i just kept falling asleep, or else my i was put off-track by various aches and pains which kept distracting me, or the noise from construction work across the street or the sound of people breathing would distract me. i have never been able to tune out distractions. but i dearly wanted to be on that beach. i've never been able to be both relaxed and alert at the same time, it is strictly either/or with me. i just wasn't wired for it, at least without drugs to put me in the proper relaxed yet alert mental state.

When I was in college a guy on our floor learned to be a hypnotist off the internet.

About 15 different times 2-7 of us got hypnotized. I could get hypnotized, but anything he suggested on me didn't work. It feels awesome to be hypnotized but if he told me the floor was lava I would just know it wasn't, so it wouldn't work. I was to analytical to be very deeply hypnotized.

There was someone else that you could have told him to do anything and it would work.

I understand.

However, as someone who used to practice it -- on myself and others, I'd say it's a blessing it isn't working on you. You can get addicted to it. It can do a wide range of things for you and it's too easy to lose control (even just by yourself). And falling asleep is one sign that your brain doesn't want to be hypnotized.

i suppose that is the same reason my subconscious/unconscious [or whatever] mind isn't allowing me to astrally project or lucid-dream, that i would become addicted to such and permanently tune-out mundane earthly reality.
btw, welcome to wrong planet

Yep, could be. Not to put in religion in here, for me, I believe that our spirit knows very well what is good and not good for us. Like that, yes, astral projection, I got addicted to it and some of my friends, who were far more skeptic than I was. I even got scared of what I did to them.

If one wants to or needs the "comfort" hypnotism provides, I suggest going to an expert. But then again, if our brain is blocking it already, then I guess there's nothing we can do about it. I admit, one major reason why I learned to lucid dream 'by choice' was because I learned to take control of my brain through hypnotism.

And I lost control of lucid dreaming. I now lucid dream far too often even though I don't want to - end result = I'm always tired when I wake up.

It's those things that are dangerous. First we'll learn to have control, then get used to it, then without knowing it, we already lost control - but we tell ourselves unknowingly that we still have control. Today, I have to tire myself out to the point of falling asleep in my keyboard, that's my cue that I'm ready to sleep and I won't lucid dream.

I wish I know a better way without taking sleeping pills - I don't want to get addicted to it either.

So yep, I'd say it's a blessing for you guys that it doesn't affect you

there is an old saying, "the grass is always greener on the other side."

Boring books is an excellent sleeping pill..

The author thanked the chemist for his excellent sleeping pills. But wondered how the chemist could fall asleep himself. The chemist said, I read your books..

mutual fund prospectii do it for me.

I don't think hypnosis is incompatible with AS.

I used to think of myself as unhypnotisable, but now I'm not so sure. Sometimes I've noticed myself going along with somebody else's ideas until later when I'm away from them and I reassess things, and wonder how the hell I could have swallowed their ideas so gullibly. Nonetheless, I doubt that advertising and media propaganda has any great subliminal effect on me......I'm always in "spot the BS" mode when I hear ads or political comments. It's more the face-to-face stuff that I'm at risk from, and even there, I don't notice myself being irrationally swayed very often.

Somebody I know, who has Aspie traits, told me that one or two people she had seriously fallen out with had the fault of "hypnotising people"........I'm sure she didn't mean actual mesmerism, so I guess she meant that they were rather slippery, manipulative people who managed to fool her for a while......I think Aspies often do fall for the more subtle kinds of manipulation, and then when they do work out that they've been conned, they're doubly angry because of the insecure feeling that their defenses didn't work more quickly. I've also noticed that this lady does seem unusually suggestible when I simply suggest she does this or that.......it's very rare that she shows any reluctance beyond a bit of foot-dragging, though I don't know whether that's real suggestibility or just poor verbal assertiveness skills (i.e. finding it hard to say "no" to people but not being unduly willing to do stuff she seriously doesn't want to do).

When I was about 8 years old, I was the only kid to win the game of "yes and no," where the adult compere would ask us questions and our task was to reply without saying yes or no. I couldn't understand why everybody else found it so hard. I guess there are many ways like that in which the general population can be manipulated. The problem of knowing for sure what's going on is that if I did get successfully manipulated, I would have no way of knowing it.

One propaganda trick is to hide a major assertion in a minor part of a sentence. I know that trick well, but I don't always spot it immediately. I'm sure that some of these mind-control devices take advantage of the same basic human psychology that would apply to Aspies as well as NTs. I think education in these matters is the main factor......if you've never read about how the media elite and politicians manipulate public opinion, abut how advertisers manipulate our will, you will probably have a lot of associations grafted into your mind without your knowing it.

Let's face it, we even hypnotise ourselves when our ego is in danger......frequently we will see somebody as a tosser when we'd be more honest to admit that they are simply an enemy who is in some respects stronger than we are, able to hurt us when we can't hurt them back. Who knows whether we'd be better off if we let our pride get hurt by such an admission?

A false impression can be given simply by focussing on one aspect of a person or thing too much. The material may look logical and consistent enough, but until the converse argument is aired equally, I think it's human nature to swallow the distortion, in the same way as a jury would probably find somebody guilty if they were only told the prosecution's side of the story.

So it depends on what you mean by hypnotising. If you mean true hypnosis, I've never seen a hypnotist trying to work on me or anybody else I know....I would like to think that I wouldn't be hypnotisable, but it's never been tested. If you mean the broader thing of being prone to sugggestion when presented in certain clever ways, I think the answer is complex, and I've seen evidence both ways with Aspies. I don't know if it's appropriate or not to broaden the definition of hypnosis here, so forgive me if you feel I've gone off topic.

What techniques have you found?

The subject I looked for in the thread start was on face-2-face hypnosis. Zooming out I get.. but, loosing control not a chance.

There are lots of Web pages if you're interested.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda#Techniques

I knew most of those already. One of my home-grown ideas that came from my studies was what I call "image linking" where something desirable (or abhorrent) is meshed in the communication with something that it has no real link with. That covers celebrity endorsement, evil-empire myths, happy smiling people enjoying the benefits of their product, inclusion of porn, feelgood product names, scaremongering.........I believe association of individual ideas is a fundamental function of the mind, it's a lot of what thinking is about, and with propaganda we are trained to associate the products, people and ideas they show us with pleasure or pain. But we can use our critical faculty to question the faulty associations and reject them if they don't ber up to scrutiny.

I was a bit carried away when I said a good grounding in the kind of stuff I've read is essential to avoid being brainwashed.......I guess it's quite possible for a person to be naturally aloof from the persuasion techniques......frankly a lot of modern ads fail on me because I've rountinely avoided ads for so long that I can't even work out what they want me to buy or what it's for.

There are many sources of news and "information" that I meticulously ignore except to see if I can spot the porkies.

Here's a non-academic way of learning the art of bias detection:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI[/youtube]

Questions I like to ask myself of material I suspect of bias are:

What is the source of the information?
How do they know that they are correct in their assertions?
Might their assertions be wrong or exagerrated? (check other sources)
Are their arguments logical?
Are their arguments emotive? (buzz words? scare words?)
Do they seem to be trying to persuade you of anything? What?
Who owns / funds the source? What social class are they?
What are their likely motives for presenting this "information?"

I realise this is an old thread, but it popped up while I was doing some research.

I'm both a hypnotherapist and an Aspie, and can tell you hypnotherapy is very effective, but as with all things of this nature, it has to be right for you.

Group hypnotherapy is less likely to be effective because it's in a group; it's not tailored in any way to you. It can still have some effects, though. One to one hypnotherapy is more likely to work because you have a treatment plan put together for you that works on how you think, how you experience the world, and uses the language that you want. This is, of course, if your hypnotherapist listens to you.

Like many of you, I am quite literal, find some trance work quite difficult as a result. If you explain to your therapist, a decent one will ask you the right questions, and find out what you need.

Also, not all beneficial "hypnotic" work needs to be done in trance. And for those of you who really think you're not hypnotisable, we do it to ourselves every day, so there's always a way around it, even if it's self hypnosis.

I've been to a Derren Brown event and found that some people were hypnotised and a minority, like myself weren't. (Or perhaps people feigned as they didn't want to be the odd ones out?)

In any case, I think the person who described the hyponotiser as a guide is correct.

I actually had quite severe dissociation, but I can't relax enough in those situations to be hypnotised. It took me ages not to panic when having consumed alcohol.