“Now, on a deeper level, the CIA had a very famous project you may have heard of – it was called MK Ultra. In it they tried – a long, long time ago now – to create what’s called a hypnotic assassin. Much like the book The Manchurian Candidate.
The hypnotist they chose for this was a man called George Estabrooks, a very famous man (you can still get some of his books). Now, this man was a great hypnotist. He was very, very skilled at what he did. And no matter what he tried, and this was going through years of research, he simply could not succeed.
Now, does that mean that you can’t do things with hypnosis?
Of course not. There’s a lot you can achieve with hypnosis; and some pretty crazy things too. For example, there’s the infamous ‘hypnotic messenger’.
Two hypnotherapists were having a bit of a friendly rivalry. One day, the second hypnotherapist – we’ll call him ‘Paul’ – was sitting in his office, and a client comes in. As soon as he hypnotized the client, however, something unusual happens. Before he gets to actually resolve the problem, the client starts speaking in the tone of voice of the first hypnotist – we’ll call him ‘Andrew’.
So Paul thinks, “Well, this is interesting”, and at the end of the session, he’s given the client the therapy, and thinks, “Hey, I think I should really answer Andrew’s point”. So, he re-hypnotizes the client, gives him some suggestions of a new message to send over to Andrew, and then sends him home.
A few weeks later the client walks into Andrew’s office. Andrew begins to hypnotise him to help him with whatever other problem this client has. And, just before he actually gets to do the therapy, again the client presents his message in Paul’s voice, using Paul’s mannerisms. Now, Andrew finds this quite amusing. So, again he does the therapy, at the end of which he puts another reply into the client to send back over to Paul.
Now this ‘backwards-and-forwards’ between the two hypnotherapists happens for quite some time. Now, you might think, “Okay, this is amusing,” and, “Why would the client want to play the role of this hypnotic messenger?”
When you think about it, what’s actually happening here is the client is getting free therapy. Every time he visits one of these therapists’ office they didn’t charge him. They were having far too much of a good time playing ‘hypnotic messenger’. So the client gets free therapy, they hypnotists got something interesting out of their interactions, and everyone wins. And that is where hypnosis works at its best.
If you have still been holding onto this idea of totally dominating someone else’s will, forget it. It won’t happen. If you want to become someone who takes over the world with your hypnotic skills, I advise you to forget it.
If that were possible I’d be sitting right now on my own private island, in the middle of the Bahamas, having EVERYTHING I could possible imagine. And whilst I’m well off, I’m not THAT well off.
So, as you go into the programme, I want you to now really understand what hypnosis IS. And always within this ethical mindset of
“How can this be a ‘win-win’ for both of us?”
Because, to the extent that you help the unconscious mind fulfil whatever mandate is there, whatever it thinks is important in life, it will do whatever it takes to work right along with you.”
Excerpt from: The Power of Conversational Hypnosis
