Diary of a Hypnotist: Confusion

If someone walked up to you and said, “I’m going to kick your ass just for fun,” and in response you looked at your watch and said, “Four thirteen,” you would be using a confusion induction to try to interrupt a pattern. Of course if you are a hypnotist you know that “try” is an instruction to fail. “Try to open your eyes” means make an unsuccessful attempt to open them, and the unconscious understands “trying” in a literal way. It knows you said try but don’t actually succeed and that’s what it will do. For the client this is what is called a convincer. “I could not open my eyes.”

Most of us know the feeling of somebody’s extending a hand and as our hand automatically reaches for the handshake their hand continues up to smooth the hair. We are left momentarily non functional, our right hand suspended in the air, the handshake pattern interrupted

Why do we shake with the right hand? It is called “right” because it does what is expected. It runs patterns. On the other hand, “left” in Latin is “sinestra,” from the same root as sinister. The word “sinestra” originated from “sinus,” which mean “pocket.” The Roman toga had one pocket and it was on the left side. This is a good beginning for a confusion induction.

Confusion works as an induction because you lose track of the line of logic, or have to work so hard on following that it is exhausting, and it is often intersected by other lines of logic to extend the confusion and provide a window through which suggestions can be easily passed to the unconscious while your pattern is momentarily hacked.

The confusion induction has variations, such as time distortion and stacked realities, but the key to using it is knowing that the normal response to confusion is to want to escape from it. Following the confusion with a simple and easily understood suggestion, such as, “Now close your eyes and take a deep breath, letting your body sink heavily down into the chair as you exhale,” or, “just vote for me and I’ll take care of everything,” will provide an alternative to the confusion. It is certain and unambiguous. A few more deepening suggestions and you can slip in a therapeutic suggestion or two, like, “You’ll win so much you’ll get tired of winning,” or, “The next cigarette you smoke will make you fall for a bearded woman.” The next day you see the client in a sidewalk cafe, in animated conversation with a bearded woman, who looks radiant. He is drinking red wine and smoking a Gauloise.

To use aversion therapy it helps to know that people cannot think in negatives. They can’t think about not doing something. Tell them to stop smoking and they will think about smoking and then mentally alter it to a negative, most likely by feeling guilty about doing it, which makes them want a cigarette.

One alternative is to establish a new habit with a greater reward. For example, the desire for the cigarette is reframed as desire for creative expression, including better sex, which has been hijacked by the tobacco habit. The desire becomes a positive, which smoking takes away. Smoking becomes the thief of Desire, which is reframed from a circular behavior which suppresses it, to Desire in the larger context, freed from where it is held captive by a program loop. If you put suggestions in the form of a story which slips past the conscious attention you don’t need any kind of formal induction. But you do need to understand how the unconscious works well enough that you can use symbols to directly communicate with it in its own language.

The image of the hypnotist as some kind of Svengali or Roger Ailes character is from an earlier era, when there was a formal structure of pre-talk, induction, deepening, suggestion, and aftertalk. That is still used by many hypnotists because without “convincers” an unsophisticated client doesn’t know you did anything, as you are, after all, casually moving the suggestions past the conscious mind.

One can study traditional hypnosis and learn how to put somebody “under,” but then what? Direct suggestion? “Imagine now that you are approaching the Cinnabon stand, and as you get closer your legs feel as if you are walking into quicksand. Your mouth becomes dry and you taste metal. Your heart begins to pound. You look at those sweet buttery buns in the case and as you look they transform into globs of body fat. The Filipino woman at the register flings one of the globs and hits you in the gut, where the glob becomes undifferentiated tissue capable of manifesting as anything. A pair of little orange hands on gesticulating stalks reach toward the display case, grasping for sugar and fat.”

It will be something to think about the next time you have a layover at LAX and have to walk past the Cinnabon kiosk.

Jill Bolte Tayor, who wrote “My Stroke of Insight” (there is a Ted talk), describes the pure bliss she experienced when her left hemisphere went on the blink as the result of a stroke. Buddhahood was instantly achieved. But she is a brain scientist and knew what was happening to her. She was in a state of bliss because her brain was damaged. She was dying of course, but she didn’t mind all that much. Her patterning brain worked just well enough to dial 911, which suggests you don’t really want to get rid of it. It saved her life.

How do you shift to that eternal present? It’s the mind that operates the body, all the parts that are real, manifested in matter. Spirit is not solid and so it can take off here and there. It can run patterns and imagine things, and it can get so many things processing at the same time the person feels claustrophobic and has panic attacks. “You’re not in your body,” someone observed, because the neck muscles are tight and the jaws are tight and the voice is coming from up in the head. But when you shift to the body you are in a timeless place. Matter has no alternatives. It is already manifested. The state is by comparison bliss, euphoric, being one with everything.

One of the ways you can let go of the conscious mind is to step on a banana peel and lose your balance. The unconscious will take over until you regain it, or not. Being hit with a confusion induction, time distortion, or stacked realities, is a bit like that. You lose your orientation and when you do, something else is there. It is always there but the words have been drowning it out. While life may not be “but a dream,” it is “also a dream.” When somebody tells you something that happened to them yesterday you can read it just like interpreting a dream.

The way a shift into trance is usually explained when you study hypnosis is that you move from inductive thinking (moving from the specific to the general) to deductive thinking (moving from the general to the specific). So the process of moving into a trance is moving back to the body, to the eternal present, where you have a place for your feet, as Kabir put it.

When you can shift back and forth between hemispheres you can work on balance. The ego moves to the border and relates the two sides together, so that they become one thing, just like Curly said.