“As an example, there’s a very famous case of a lady in a show who was doing everything asked of her. She was like the star of the show. When it was time to be a chicken, she was a chicken; when she talked with aliens, she talked to aliens but with elaborate gestures, and deep insight.
Now, at the end of the show, when the hypnotist was wrapping things up, he decided to give everyone the chance to dance a little ‘hula’, to have a little party, to enjoy themselves up on stage, before he sent them back into the audience. And this woman refused to dance. No matter what the hypnotist did, this woman refused to dance.
So the show finally comes to a close, he de-hypnotises everyone, removes all the suggestions – an important thing by the way – and he can’t help himself: he goes up to this woman and says,
“Hey, listen, you were so good for the whole show, but when it came to dancing the hula, you just wouldn’t play. What happened there?”
The woman looked at the hypnotist and said, “Oh, no, no, no. We don’t dance. It’s against our religion!”
You see, the woman would not break her ethical code.
And actually, the research in hypnosis backs this all up. There’s all kinds of research trying to get people to do things which are an ethical violation – a violation of their own moral code. And the result is, it simply does not work.
As an example, Milton Erickson – the famous hypnotherapist – was working with one lady who he knew had an issue with another lady in the workplace. This was a hospital. So he knew that she really disliked another of the nurses. So in trance, he tried to implant the suggestion that when the trance was over she was going to get up, walk out of the room, find this other nurse, and, in a state of trance, slap this other nurse across the face.
Kind of amusing you’d think. The thing is, this nurse refused to do it. So the more that Erickson was building, if you like, the hypnotic pressure for her to conform, at one point, the lady just turned around and said, still in a trance, “Dr. Erickson, if you don’t cease this line of enquiry immediately, the only one who’ll be getting slapped around here will be you!”
You see, in that lady’s model of the world, you simply didn’t do that to someone who didn’t deserve it. Whether you wanted to do it or not was irrelevant.”
Excerpt from: The Power of Conversational Hypnosis
