by b-poe-01 » May 9th, 2005, 4:45 pm
Hi,
Rookie here, please be gentle. :) First time posting here, though I have done hypnosis of all sorts for a while, both self-hypno and stuff with others, in email, Instant Messenger, and over the telephone.
Actually, I am in agreement with *most* of the material here so far. On the one hand, if you just *openly try* to suggest or trigger behavior that the person truly doesn't *want* or can't bear to do, you won't get jack done usually, and yes, some degree of trickery and/or attrition by repeated compromise can wear things down.
But. There is also abreaction to consider. An abreaction, to my best knowledge, is an emotional crisis that comes up when the trancer hits a *hard* limit, like being told out of the blue to kill someone. Normally, for casual or hobbyist 'tists like us, this is more trouble than what it is worth, and tends to end the trance right away, not to mention the trancer's willingness to go under again since *most* abreactions are about pent-up negative feelings (anger, terror, despair, and so on).
But...some folks on the more professional or therapeutic side are trained to *exploit* these same crises as a way to effect a change of mind that normally wouldn't be possible in a non-trance state. For instance, an abreaction might be used by an unethical hypnotist to "change" someone's sexual preference, say by associating any/all deviant and/or homosexual behavior with something the trancer finds "highly repugnant", pushing the issue, and then finally triggering the crisis that either permanently sends the "deviancy" into "remission" or de-sensitizes the person to one source of "repugnance". I have actually heard of "therapeutic" hypnotists of an evangelical bent who got paid good money to render teenagers "non-gay" or "less sexual."
Point is, hard limits can be exploited and/or abused by someone with a degree of professional training who knows how to keep a trance stable during an abreaction....the emotional release itself can be used as a tool, either to condition or to de-sensitize, either of which can wipe out moral or ethical or highly personal "hard limits" fairly quickly.
Has anyone actually *attempted* this? In my experience, I've only abreacted my online ladies *by accident* and had to abort the trance and ride out the ranting for *hours* afterward. It seems to me to be a powerful tool, one of the few in hypnosis that works quickly, and without abusing the trancer (with sleep deprivation, physical exhaustion, lack of food or other unhealthy crap that is more in line with classical torture or brainwashing).
Just my nickel (inflation, you know?)
Brad Poe