chapters

Using Suggestion Intentionally

From our birth to our death we are all slaves of suggestions

 —  Emile Coue

Hypnotic Suggestion is a direct and powerful method to intentionally influence your subjective reality. The method is to take reification to its logical conclusion and act as if the suggested reality was actually true.

Stage hypnotist entertain their nightclub audiences by getting the subjects on stage to act as if the fictions suggested are true, for example: "There are heavy weights pulling your left arm down while helium balloons are lifting your right arm up." The audience will observe the subject's left arm lowering and right arm rising. The subject reports, "My left arm felt heavy and my right arm felt light."

How Stage Hypnosis Works:

Hypnotists often present suggestions accompanied by a challenge—for example: “Your leg is getting heavier and heavier/ you can try to lift your leg/ but it will be so heavy/ that you won’t be able to do it. Try to lift it and you will see that you cannot.” To the audience, this looks like a battle of wills between the hypnotist and the subject. In fact the hypnotist is just reciting a script. The mechanism of action is the subject's reification of the suggestion.

The demonstration can produce humorous or shocking consequences when the subject acts as if a bogus premise is true—for example, annoying flies are buzzing around your head. The subject's behavior appears absurd to the audience who are not asked to buy into the suggestion.

The procedure of Suggestion refers to a subject being asked—explicitly or implicitly— to regard a fiction as if it was fact—for example, "your leg is getting heavier and heavier." The phenomenon of Suggestion refers to the effect of the procedure: The subject experiences the suggested phenomenon—the leg feels heavy.

It feels different than it looks

Text descriptions of hypnotic suggestion does not do the phenomenon justice. Even being part of the audience watching a subject exhibiting the phenomenon does not give you the information you need to understand what is going on. The observer misses out on this experiential component of the demonstration, which is why they are amazed and entertained by what they witness.

The audience's experience of the phenomenon is qualitatively different than the subject's. The former observes the subject's response to the verbal suggestions, the latter experiences the phenomenon personally.

As is the case for optical illusions, the phenomenon of suggestion can only be experienced from the first-person perspective. The same is true for the symptoms of psychological disorders. In each of these cases, the subject's experience is not available to the observer. The difference between how a reaction looks and how it feels is a serious obstacle to understanding of subjective experience.

Working directly with subjective experience

You can experience the phenomenon of suggestion personally by suspending your judgment and attending to the Heavy Shoe audio file. The goal here is to intentionally reify an abstraction.

The script includes assertions such as: "Your shoe is getting heavier and heavier . . . like lead," "It is so heavy that you cannot lift it," etc. Needless to say, these are fictions. Your shoe is not made of lead, you can lift it. The purpose of inviting you to pretend that these suggestions are true is not to take control of your will but quite the opposite: To give you the power to intentionally manipulate your subjective reality.

This audio is analogous a workout video, only here you will be exercising your imagination to strengthen your will rather than exercising your muscles to strengthen your body. In both cases, the more you practice the easier it becomes to perform as you intend.

As the Personal Research Tool shows, you have already been using your faculty of imagination — but without your conscious direction. So, the fictions your mind invented when nearby stresses or temptations captured your attention have led you to bad outcomes. The objective of this exercise is to develop your ability to use reification in the service of your will.

Suggestion & Intent

Everything you experience is the creation of your nervous systems. Asking a subject to imagine, for example, "Your arm is heavy like lead," or "heavy weights are pulling your arm down"— will cause a cooperative subject's arm to actually feel heavy.

Suggestion does not require that someone else to give you the suggestion, nor does it require that the suggestion be delivered intentionally or even that its influence is in the stated direction. In fact, unintentional suggestions and negative suggestions are often quite potent.

Try not to let your nose itch.

Go ahead, see if you can prevent your nose from itching. If it's not itching yet, it probably will be soon. You might get some relief by rubbing it, but you have enough willpower to resist that temptation. . . . Don't you? You may wonder if you can resist the impulse to touch your face around your nose for the next minute. To find out, time it.

This ironic phenomenon— experiencing exactly what you tell yourself not to experience— is called an Ironic Process. In this example, the harder you try to not let your nose itch the more it tends to itch.

How it works: It is hard to imagine the absence of something. To make sure your nose is not itching requires that you compare the current sensations around your nose with what you would experience if your nose was itching. To do this comparison you have to imagine what an itchy nose would feel like, which delivers the suggestion: Imagine your nose itching. Ironic, isn't it? [See The Imp of the Perverse for more on counter-regulatory motivation ].

The show put on by stage hypnotists dramatically demonstrates the power of Hypnotic Suggestion to a nightclub audience seeking voyeuristic thrills. After watching subjects— presumably under the control of the hypnotist—acting absurdly, audience members are taken in by the popular misconception that hypnotic suggestion involves giving up control to another. Exactly the opposite is the case! Hypnotic suggestion used therapeutically is perhaps the most powerful way for you to exercise willful control over your subjective experience. To utilize suggestion in the service of your will, reify those premises and perspectives that promote your interests and principles and de-reify those that cause you to act counter to your interests.

Stage hypnotists and salesmen use suggestion in order to influence you to act in ways that are good for them, not necessarily whether doing so is good for you. The interests of the stage hypnotist are served when the subject performs in a way that is entertaining to the audience; the interests of the salesman are served when the customer buys. Your use of suggestion is good for you when doing so promotes actions that are in accord with your interests and principles.

The effectiveness of a suggestion does not depend on its veracity

Reification is an adaptive faculty without which we could not function—we have to act as if our map was accurate. The problem is that some of the premises we have reified are not only false but evoke excessive and counter-productive reactions. These familiar premises are hard to unlearn, even after we recognize that they are no longer valid (and perhaps never were).

Why do people accept suggestion?

Accepting a suggestion is wise or foolish depending on its effects. Acting as if you are a loser is self-sabotaging, but acting as if you are conscientious can be advantageous (whether or not it is historically accurate).

Affirmations

One way to conceptualize Barry's problem is that he will more readily accept efficacy deflating suggestions than efficacy enhancing ones —especially in the social skills domain. The recommendation to purposely attend to efficacy-enhancing suggestions, called Affirmations, is offered to level the playing field. If you are overly self-critical, try out the Affirmations Script.

Exercising will via intentional suggestions

The phenomenon of suggestion is the consequence of acting as if the suggested premise was true. As shown by your personal experience of the "Heavy Shoe" audio script or the ironic consequences of the suggestion to try not to let your nose itch, suggestions, like optical illusions, can influence your subjective experience even when the rational part of you knows that it is fiction. Moreover, as your probably discovered when using the Personal Research Tool, the space between stimulus and response is populated by shallow thinking and bogus assumptions. Nevertheless, the premises that cause you to interpret the antecedent event in ways that elicit your excessive or counter-productive reaction has a life of its own. It will continue to exert its influence on the course of your life until you intentionally change it.

Your ability to observe your experience and understand cause-and-effect gives you the power to influence the course of events. Now that you are an adult, you appreciate that your perspective is just one among many different ways to interpret the things that happen. The premises that determine your particular interpretations do not exist in the external world but are made up by you [from your childhood conditioning, social history, shallow thinking, etc.]. When these fictions repeatedly evoke reactions that take you to bad outcomes, you have the responsibility to change them so you can follow a more advantageous course.

 

 

 

Choosing the Fiction You Live By > >

^ Back to Top