From our birth to our death we are all slaves of suggestions— Emile Coue
Hypnotic Suggestion is a direct and powerful method to intentionally influence your subjective reality. The method is to take reification to its logical conclusion and act as if the suggested reality was literally true.
Stage Hypnosis
The method of hypnotic suggestion, theatrically demonstrated by stage hypnotists, is a powerful tool in the service of therapeutic change. But because the procedure is portrayed as comedy, many people have developed the wrong idea about how it works.
How Stage Hypnosis Works:
Hypnotists often present suggestions accompanied by a challenge—for example: “Your leg is getting heavier and heavier/ you can try to lift your leg/ but it will be so heavy/ that you won’t be able to do it. Try to lift it and you will see that you cannot.” Given this presentation, it looks, to observers, like there is a battle of wills between the hypnotist and the subject. In fact the hypnotist is just reciting a script. The mechanism of action is the subject’s reification of the suggestion.
The demonstration can produce humorous or shocking consequences when the subject acts as if objectively false suggestions were true—e.g., flies are buzzing around your head. The subject’s behavior appears absurd to the audience who are not asked to buy into the suggestion.
Suggestion can be a tool of manipulation
The stage hypnotist manipulates the subject’s experience and behavior, but the method of control is primarily social psychological techniques such as cognitive dissonance rather than suggestion per se. For our purposes, it is helpful to distinguish "suggestion" from the rest of the act: Suggestion, as used here, refers to a fiction presented as if it was fact—for example, "your leg is getting heavier and heavier." By using suggestion along with other methods of influence, stage hypnotists can manipulate the behavior of subjects to an astounding degree.
Typically, suggestion is designed to promote the interests of the one who offers the suggestion — unless, of course, the one who offers the suggestion is caught in a self-sabotaging trap.
Hypnotists and salesmen use suggestion in order to influence you to act in ways that are good for them, not necessarily whether doing so is good for you. The interests of the stage hypnotist are served when the subject performs in a way that makes the audience laugh; the interests of the salesman are served when the customer buys.
Your interests are served when you act in accord with your interests and principles. To follow the lead of professional influencers, choose suggestions intentionally. Specifically, to promote outcomes that are good for you.
Expectancies and labels are unintentional uses of suggestion
Suggestion has a powerful effect on you whether it comes from an you or someone else. Typically, when someone else gives you a suggestion they are doing so intentionally. When you give yourself a suggestion it is typically unintentional.
A stage hypnotist entertains the nightclub audience by getting the subjects on stage to act as if his suggestions were true, when they are in fact fictions — example: "There are heavy weights pulling your left arm down while helium balloons are lifting your right arm up."
Acting As If
Suggestion is the procedure of acting as if a particular premise is true. As was the case with optical illusions, reading text that describes the phenomenon is not the same as experiencing it personally. The reality and power of phenomena such as illusions and hypnotic suggestions can only be experienced from the first-person perspective.
Observing the phenomenon does not do it justice, which is why the audience is amazed and entertained.
You have to experience the phenomenon of suggestion personally
This audio presents one version of the classic Heavy Shoe Suggestion. On it I say: “Your shoe is getting heavier and heavier… like lead,” “It’s so heavy that you cannot lift it,” etc. Needless to say, these are fictions. Your shoe is not made of lead; you can lift it. The purpose of this and similar scripts is not to take control of your will, but quite the opposite! Developing your ability to intentional control your subjective experience enhances the power of your will. This is an exercise to strengthen your ability to utilize your faculty of imagination to intentionally influence your subjective reality.
Reification is an adaptive faculty without which we could not function—we have to act as if something was true. The problem is that some of our premises have been conditioned into us and they are hard to rid of, even with the help of cognitive therapy. A simple and straight-forward method to disarm self-fulfilling prophecies is to replace handicapping suggestions with more self-serving suggestions.
Rather than try to understand why you act as you do, identify the faulty logic that maintains the reaction pattern, and replace the thinking error with a more rational understanding of the things that happen, you simply act as if a helpful abstraction was true. If, for example, your social performance is impaired by the belief that the people at the meet-up group are not going to like me [Fortune Telling], you can use suggestion to imagine and act as if the people at the group want me to interact with them so they look and feel popular.
The talent to use Hypnotic Suggestion varies from person to person. However, everyone improves with practice. For those who develop this capability, Hypnotic Suggestion is the most direct and fast acting path to escaping self-sabotaging traps.
Affirmations:
Efficacy-enhancing suggestions, called Affirmations, are useful to counter negative creative fictions, including self-critical evaluations and predictions of failure. An audio example: Affirmations Script.
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