Giving Up Smoking Part II (a) – A Brief Diversion To Rail At Hypnotism

If you’re reading this right now you may have noticed the ad links that Google has selected for this page. Let me say a few things about methods or aids to help one give up smoking.

First of all, as far as hypnotherapy is concerned JUST DON’T! Hypnosis is a scary thing. In some hands it can be truly dangerous. It is always counter-productive.

Think this through: a person requires hypnotism usually because he or she has some personality trait or emotional characteristic that is destructive in one way or another Say, for example, a bad temper. How did the person get the bad temper? Were they born with it? No, of course not.

Therefore a bad temper is not an innate and intrinsic part of their real, native personality. Or let’s say the person has an irrational fear of dogs. Born with it? No, ask them about it and they’ll be able to tell you of some past experience that involved dogs and pain or fear. Afraid of crowds? Same thing. These are called irrational fears because they don’t belong in your natural repertoire. They indicate that something has been ADDED to you.

Imagine you get a splinter in your hand. What’s the real problem? It doesn’t belong in your hand. It has been added to your flesh. Now if you cover it up, put on gloves and take a handful of painkillers does that get rid of the splinter? Of course not. All you’ve accomplished is adding something else to your hand and reducing your awareness with the painkillers. Sooner or later the hand will get infected but you won’t be capable of perceiving that.

Hypnotism does exactly the same thing. It cannot eliminate the real source of the problem – it can only camouflage or disguise it or make you no longer aware of it. The problem is still there but you don’t perceive it. Now if that was all hypnotism did that would be bad enough, but the other danger with hypnotism is what else gets added along with the command to stop smoking or be more cheerful, or whatever is being implanted into your mind.

And ‘implanted’ is the correct technical term for installing a mental command or concept. If you want to see a neat fictional depiction of implanting, rent and watch “The Manchurian Candidate”.

Fictional, riiiight. No, just wait a moment. If you think your average professional hypnotist – a psychologist or a psychiatrist – is just too humane and well-balanced to do anything as wild as that, you should realize that psychologists and psychiatrists have the highest suicide rates of any profession. These guys are worse off that you think you are, and they cannot even heal themselves or each other. And many psychiatrists still favor and practice Electro-Convulsive Therapy (the name says it all) which is only successful in turning patients into mindless, compliant automatons. So much for the humane aspect…

But I digress from the digression. Here’s a factual story about hypnotism that I saw one evening on Discovery, and it’s a shocker.

Do you remember about 15 years ago there were some alarming news stories of children suing their parents for sexual abuses? There were a rash of these in America. Psychologists were using regression therapy to locate ‘hidden memories’ of childhood abuse. This Discovery program was about one of those.

A psychologist had gone to a school in a small town and had started interviewing the children. By the end of one interview she had unearthed information that the child’s father had raped her and sexually molested her for some time. This was reported to the police who went to the school.

Meanwhile the psychologist interviewed the girl’s sister who had exactly the same story. The police arrested the father who confessed to the crime, although he couldn’t remember any details about the incidents. He was jailed for 9 years.

Meanwhile the psychologist kept interviewing other children at the school and finding more and more cases of parental sexual abuse. It was starting to look like this little town was a hotbed of child molesters and psychopaths.

All the victims gave dates and times and lurid details – and this was where it fell apart. One father was in the army and hadn’t been in the country at the times he was supposed to have molested his daughter and son. Other inaccuracies started showing up.

It was then discovered from tape recordings of the interviews that the psychologist had been using hypnotism, asking leading questions, and factually implanting the children with false memories. No more parents were charged and the whole thing died an embarrassed death.

But what about the father who confessed and was jailed?

Now this is where it really gets scary. A lawyer specializing in wrongful imprisonments took up the case. First, he had the daughters medically examined, which found no physical evidence of abuse. Then he worked with the father who was still in jail. The father had no memory of any of the events but still believed he was right to confess.

Here’s how the father got into this situation:

When he was a young boy in the 50s, at a time when hypnotism was all the rage, his father had decided to use hypnotism on his sons to make them better citizens. One of the helpful civic instructions he hypnotically implanted in his sons was this: Always cooperate and agree with the police.

That hypnotic suggestion sat there in the timelessness of the boy’s mind as he grew to manhood until the day the police hauled him into a hot room, put him under duress and stress and bing! It went into action. He agreed with everything the police said.

Isn’t that scary? A true, not a fictional, story.

Hypnotism IS scary. It’s not scary when it doesn’t work – not everyone can be hypnotized. But, when it does work it not only doesn’t solve the problem you were hoping to solve but the chances are it will give you some new ones. So don’t say you weren’t warned.

In any case, there are other ways to give up smoking.

Now back our movie…

Coming Up – Giving Up Smoking Part II – The Ogre Rears Its Ugly Head

Tags: Aids, Bad Temper, Crowds, Diversion, Fear Of Dogs, Flesh, Giving Up Smoking, Gloves, Google, Handful, Hypnosis, Hypnotism, Imagine, Irrational Fear, Irrational Fears, Painkillers, Personality Trait, Scary