Has anybody here ever had hypnotherapy?

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What the hell is hypnotherapy?

^ It's a method used by hypnotherapists to convince you that you need more hypnotherapy.

Waste of time and waste of money!

It was tried, once upon a time, for something other than AS, but it turned out that I could not be hypnotized. It just didn't work. I ended up just staring the guy trying to do it and asking, finally, if he'd been at it long enough that I could have a glass of water, as I was a bit thirsty. He "just could not understand" why I wasn't hypnotized - accused me of fighting it. Which I was not, at all. I was just hyper-observant of him and his little gold watch. (No, really, he used a little gold watch on a string, like in the old movies.)

Seriously, a gold watch? As insubstantial as hypnotism is, most people with decent training are able to bring it about in seconds with no props. One classic NLP technique is to gesture as to shake hands with someone and then interrupt it by just grabbing the person's hand and moving it somewhere. Their (probably bogus) explanation is that hand-shaking is a pre-programmed process that's handled subconsciously, so interrupting it can confuse the subconscious (which is supposed to be more suggestible than the conscious mind) and get its attention. Supposedly there's a window of a few seconds there to catch the person's conscious attention and give them instructions. In reality, I guess it's really just confusing the person (consciously) and then doing the usual thing. The state of mind in hypnosis, after all, seems to be like "something odd is happening--I guess I'll just play along," and there's no indication of different brain activity that would suggest some subconscious activity.

And we don't play well with other people...interesting

I always wanted to try hypnosis for my anxieties related to razors, pain, and roaches. If I could get rid of those 3 pains I would be a much happier person I think

Yep. A gold watch. He was a psychiatrist, supposedly highly trained. He seemed kind of a doof, to me, actually, the more I talked with him.

I've heard that hypnosis creates memories and ideas rather than retrive them like in people who think they were abducted by aliens.

I'm very easily hypnotized. It's more like a deep, deep state of concentration than anything else. I am also highly suggestible, which is probably why I got D.I.D. w/ my PTSD. ...Suggestibility causes a whole bunch of stupid things.

It's not that the people are faking; it feels real. It's just not mind control, like some would have you believe.

A long time ago a therapist tried hypnotherapy with me, to see if it would help me remember childhood abuse better, but it didn't work. All that happened was that it felt like the chair I was sitting in was spinning very gently in one direction or the other. Wheee! It felt good, though. Never hurts to relax a bit from time to time.

It's good to be skeptical but denial and conspiracy theories are taking it too far.

As for there being "no indication of different brain activity" you should look again even Stanford University has published findings in the American Journal of Psychiatry that prove the opposite is true.

Also how can a person who doesn't know your trying to hypnotize them "play along"?

Your explanation is faulty anyways. No one is claiming to confuse the subconscious the principle behind conversational hypnosis which is what your talking about is to distract the conscious mind so you can trigger or program subconscious behaviors and autoresponses (the things you do automatically like driving halfway home down a very familiar route without thinking about it or even remembering doing it) without objection from the conscious mind.

Basically the conscious mind acts as a gatekeeper. A statement "You are a duck" is analyzed and determined to be true or false. Obviously since it's false you laugh and the statement "You are a human = true" that sits in your subconscious remains intact. If your conscious mind doesn't filter it out though "You are a duck" overrules the other statement and you believe it until your no longer hypnotized then your conscious mind kicks back in and says "Hey that's not true" and corrects it.

That's why hypnotism is so limited. You cannot make someone believe something is true that is readily verifiable as false after the hypnotic state ends.

For some reason though the techniques used on a normal mind don't work very well if at all on autistic individuals making them mostly immune to hypnotism.

That makes me wonder just how much of an autistics "weird behavior" is due to not being manipulated by the techniques people are exposed to on a daily basis through advertising and media. Maybe autistics are acting like mostly normal humans and everyone else has a head full of a lifetime of conflicting suggestions making them crazy?

False memory syndrome.




Excuse me, conspiracy theory? Which part? And what denial? I'm not denying that hypnosis is a real phenomenon. It's just not a psychological state. It's purely behavioral.


Different from ordinary relaxation or concentration? Show me the studies that say this exists.


You give them instructions. It's a basic feature of human psychology that most of us are pretty suggestible most of the time. If you confuse someone and then tell them to do something, you might just find that do it. Their memory afterward is of being fully aware of what was happening and doing what they were told because it just seemed like the thing to do at the time. People <em>like</em> being told what to do.


I've read multiple conflicting explanations from NLP sources. I just picked the one I've seen most commonly. In any case, the difference is a very minor one, don't you think? The explanation I gave did clearly include confusing the conscious mind and getting the attention of the subconscious. Either way the point was to interrupt and take control. But is their any real evidence that this is what's happening?



The "everybody else is crazy, not me" argument is a little tired. Besides, we all respond to advertisement in about the same way. We try to ignore it (or sometimes not) but tend to remember brand and product names we've heard over and over.

Save money, live better, Walmart.

Never tried it, but I'm almost certain that nobody would be able to do it. I've allways been afraid of loosing control. In my childhood I was attending many pentecoastal christian campaigns where people "was saved", although I searched for God back then, and wanted to let go, I was not able to do so.
Even when I attended my first Stones consert, I could not let go, like the others people around me. It's just not me. Only moments I get close to let go, is when I speak of something that lays on my mind, that is important to me. And that always happens when not apropriate.