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| Can you hypnotise a person to do things against their will? |
As many people have stated, all hypnosis is self hypnosis. That’s true. All hypnosis IS self hypnosis. Now ask yourself a question… Why do people need a hypnotist in the first place?
Because they are already doing something against their will.
- They “will” to be slim, but they eat food and avoid the gym.
That’s acting against their will. The truth is, people have very weak wills. If they didn’t then “will power” would be enough to elicit any positive change.
This is what gets me….
“Will power” is a conscious power. It’s really not that strong.
All hypnotists agree that the subconscious mind kinda works like a computer. It runs programs without critique. It runs good programs (positive habits) and bad programs (negative habits, addictions, etc)
When we have a battle of the subconscious belief and the conscious desire, the subconscious belief always wins. Which is why most diets fail until you can convince your subconscious mind to agree with you that being slim is better for you than being fat.
When you have a problem that you want to change, most therapists will tell you that your subconscious mind is causing the problem because it has a false belief. A belief that was probably put their by accident when you were a child. Maybe you overhead your mother saying “Money is the root of all evil” and that suggestion planted a seed in your subconscious mind. Now, as an adult, you find it hard to make money because your subconscious mind doesn’t want you to be evil.
So, we hypnotise the client and we replace this false belief with a positive one and they start making money.
This is the way most things work with hypnosis. We shut down the critical factor, and then replace the false belief that is causing the problem with a new belief that will correct it.
Let’s rewind a second…
A person is doing something against their will. They are doing something they don’t want to do. They are sabotaging their own success.
Why?
Because they overheard their mother say “Money is the root of all evil” about 40 years ago when they were mesmerised by some cartoons on telly.
So a mother can accidentally cause a person to do something against their will but a trained hypnotist can’t? I don’t think so. A trained hypnotist wouldn’t and shouldn't but most certainly could.
When most people are asked this question they say stuff like “If a hypnotist was to put you into trance and ask you to kill your mother you’d snap out of it and refuse”
But would a hypnotist do that? Even an evil one? No, of course not. But they could trick you by being clever.
I read a book once that suggested that if you were to say…
“You’re playing cowboys and Indians, your mother is the big chief Indian and you’re the cowboy. Go on, shoot her with your toy gun! Bang Bang!”
Then a person would have already committed the crime before they even realise what’s actually going on. The real gun would feel and look like a toy to them, and the entire scenario would play out like a child’s game.
Would it really happen? I don’t know, but I believe it would.
During a confidence routine a hypnotist once said to a client “You’re so confident you could do anything, you could even rob a bank!”
For weeks after the session the client couldn’t shake this idea of robbing a bank. Then he did. He followed though on the suggestion and actually committed the crime. Was that against his will? Probably.
Look at some of the experiments done by Derren Brown, where he tricked people into holding up a security van at gun point, or where he tricked a person into shooting Stephen Fry. Those two experiments raise some very interesting questions.
As do con men in the street that use confusing language patterns (that you’ll find in many hypnotic inductions) which overloads your conscious mind and then tricks you into giving up your wallet and phone. Derren brown also showed this too. Is it against a persons will to just hand over their wallet in the street to a total stranger?
Yes.
When people do this there is no force, no gun, no threat, just very clever language, which any experienced hypnotist would very easily be able to recognise.
Now let’s talk about non hypnotic persuasion to force a person to do something against their will.
Ever felt buyers remorse? That’s because a salesman forced you to do something you didn’t want to do. You bought something against your will.
- What about peer group pressure?
- Trying to fit in or impress somebody.
- Trying to look cool because you want to be accepted.
- Religious leaders
- Cults
- Army officers.
We have people that are willing to kill themselves for “the cause”.
You might say that this isn’t hypnosis, but it is. They were not born with a desire to strap on a bomb and run into a crowd of people as it explodes. Things that they were told created a belief system that has resulted in this action being something that they will now do.
Could a hypnotist have installed a set of beliefs in a person that matched those exact beliefs that could lead to a person becoming a suicide bomber? Yes. Because if it’s already happening without hypnosis, then you can bet that with hypnosis it’d be even easier!
When people ask the question “Can you be forced to do things against your will by hypnosis” I think what they are really asking is “Can a hypnotist force you to do things against your will” That’s not the same question.
I don’t know a single hypnotist that doesn’t also use NLP. As well as many other very powerful persuasion techniques. When you combine those techniques together they are very powerful.
I’ve been a hypnotist since 1992, back in the days when I used to mess around with stage hypnosis after work when I was 18 and foolish I told a friend that he was stuck to the floor and if anybody said diarrhoea then he’d instantly get diarrhoea and need the toilet. We all laughed as he grabbed his buttocks with a panic stricken look on his face, desperately trying to unstick his feet to get to the loo. I added the suggestion that he’d be release when I clapped my hands, which I did…. after about 30 seconds.
He ran to the toilet, but didn’t make it. He crapped himself, and also all over the changing room floor on the way to the toilet. It was a mess, and he was extremely embarrassed. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t his will to shit his own pants.
Hypnotists seem desperate to insist that you are in full control and that you can resist any suggestion you are given etc. etc. but they didn’t manage to resist the accidental suggestion that created the problem they need hypnosis to fix in the first place? Hmmm…. that just doesn’t add up.
Two very interesting books on this subject are
- “Open to Suggestion, The uses and abuses of hypnosis by Robert Temple”
- “Mind Control Hypnosis by Dantalion Jones (Dave Barron)”
If you really think that a hypnotist can’t make a person do something against their will then you should read both of these.
If you’d like to learn hypnosis, then you can learn for free with my online video course. But I don’t teach you how to use it for evil. So if you came here looking for that kind of stuff my course won’t help you. But go here if you want to check it out. My students seem to like it a lot.
I was almost going to say that maybe we have something built in, like a fail-safe that would stop us from doing anything really drastic. But no, we don’t. People have willingly committed suicide because they are part of a cult. So no, we really haven’t got a fail safe at all. We have varying levels of suggestibility, so what works for one might not work for another, but as for our “will” to resist a hypnotic suggestion? If our “will” was that strong then we simply wouldn’t need hypnotists at all.
The one thing that I hope people take away from this answer is that the stuff that you are already doing that is against your will is stuff that you are doing because a hypnotic suggestion put a false belief in your subconscious mind. Maybe that suggestion was an accident. Maybe it was the results of a lot of money being spent on a media campaign or some decent sales training. But whatever it was, it works exactly the same way that a hypnotist does, and a hypnotist could have put it there too.
A little off topic, but NLP can do some pretty dark things too, check out Little Albert and the experiments on anchoring fear. They are fascinating, and it’s a shame that his parents withdrew him from the experiment when they did!
Thanks for reading. Please share this, or leave a comment.
