Quote from: suzifrommd on April 06, 2014, 08:34:09 AM
Professional hypnotists are an arrogant lot, second only to surgeons. You'd sort of have to be if your job is to put people asleep and then fix their minds.
Um... that's not really how hypnotherapy works. They don't fix anything. It's a tool for people to explore their own minds and attempt to deal with what they see there. The trance state isn't so much putting people to sleep, but deeply relaxing someone and allowing the conscious mind to be bypassed, thus talking to the subconscious directly, where a great deal of people's issues stem from. There's a lot of stigma around it, that's for sure, but it's a tool just like asking someone the right questions. A method of accessing a part of someone usually clouded by self-talk, shame, fear, a whole raft of defense mechanisms.
I've met some pretty good ones.
I know this might go against the grain somewhat but... it can be helpful for many things. Not in the way you're thinking of, though. Professional hypnotherapy is one thing... hypnosis as a tool to make you think or feel something different to what you actually feel... well, that's a bit of a thorny issue. For one thing it depends how susceptible you are. People have differing capacity to accept suggestion and the trance state in general. Some, very rational and analytical types, it doesn't work at all for. But some it works almost too well for. It depends on the kind of person.
That being said, suggestion is just that. Suggestion. It's a prompt, or idea, placed into the subconscious to affect a change. However, and this is very important, as a general rule it doesn't work by telling someone that they're suddenly going to do something entirely different to what they've been doing. Even though the conscious mind is in a diminished state, it still knows when it's being fed a line, and when something goes against what they would do. For many people, doing something like that breaks the whole process immediately.
Added to that, it isn't a permanent thing. Just telling someone they're no longer going to feel, think, or do something... well, it doesn't work. Not in the long term anyway. Maybe it does for an hour, a day, but it wears off. Kira sums it up pretty well. Changes in thought patterns, habits, compulsions... they
can be affected by gradual and prolonged hypnotic processes. Sometimes, and for some people. But a fundamental change in identity is something that's well beyond the scope of what the process is capable of.
