“I hope you booked me in for the brainwashing package!” ― a client’s quip, from one who wanted to get in control of her eating habits.
We sometimes describe ourselves as ʹopen to suggestionʹ ― with respect to what kind of food to eat, which restaurant to go to, which film to see. And we think that our being open to suggestion stops there ― within the bounds of our control. The power of suggestion presses in upon us in every corner of our social life. Suggestion without any preliminary hypnotising is carried out on each and every one of us every day in differing ways and to differing degrees of depth.
Nick Collins, Science Correspondent with The Telegraph reported on Saturday 9thJune: “Just the thought of a glass of wine could be enough to help you relax because of the power of positive thinking, scientists have claimed. People are so susceptible that simply believing an alcoholic drink will make them feel better or make them socialise more easily. This is because of “response expectations”, or the way in which people predict how they will behave in different situations.
Because people expect alcohol will make them more relaxed they respond automatically by becoming more open in a subconscious attempt to meet expectations psychologists said.” In the journal Current Directions in Psychological Scienceresearchers from Victoria University, New Zealand, said: “The effects of suggestion are wider and often more surprising than many people might otherwise think.”
In contemporary society with such an avalanche of information, it can be difficult to have a mind of oneʹs own when one is surrounded and bombarded by many outside influences that suggest what we should say, think, do, eat, wear, and how we smell and even how we might feel about our smells.
Suggestion is packaged into the polemic of parents, teachers, politicians, spin doctors, advertisers and marketers, singers, rap artists, preachers, the medical profession and the legal profession, and reporters and newsreaders in sometimes similar and sometimes differing ways. Our consciousness is sucked into other peoplesʹ creations which condition and influence our thoughts and our ideas.
Nick Collins continued: “In one study cited by the authors [New Zealand Researchers], people who took a dummy drug which was supposed to make them feel more alert, began to pay closer attention in a monitoring test, because they expected the drug would help them to focus. The researchers wrote: ‘When we expect a particular outcome, we automatically set in motion a chain of cognitions and behaviours to produce that outcome – and misattribute its cause.’”
In my opinion this research does not reveal anything particularly new. Richard Mowbray, when discussing the authoritarian nature of cults and cultish developments in society wrote in his book, The Case Against Psychotherapy Registration (1995)
ʺ… so with hypnosis, suggestion, and subliminal influence. These are not techniques confined to the ʹtherapyʹ room. Our culture is awash with appeals deliberately aimed to bypass conscious awareness. Our media are full of subliminal cues and emotive inducements and our politics full of ʹfeel-good factorsʹ.ʺ
The analytical and therapeutic use of hypnosis can help us to roll back the web of subtle suggestions that surrounds us on all sides. It can do so in two ways. First, by enabling us to be aware of what external suggestions we have already adopted albeit unconsciously as ʹlife sentencesʹ. Second, by empowering us to set up internal suggestions of our own making to combat and transcend the ones that have come from sources outside ourselves.
So for those readers who think hypnosis is dangerous, wake up to the many clandestine influences in our modern-day society, a barrage of subtle suggestions that really do ‘mess’ with the mind day after day. Suggestions abound! And yes, unless we remain ‘conscious’ they may well go straight to the head!
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