Just in case: I'm not a "hypnotist" by any commonly accepted measure. It would be extremely Walter Mittyish of me to pretend otherwise.
But trance in myself and others is one of the most interesting, fun and helpful things I ever found. Which means I think about it a lot, and practice it when I can.
sfhole2stretch wrote:Absolutely in. Please help me by defining your goals and the path you envision to take us there.
My own goal was to learn how to think about hypnosis and NLP in a skeptical way. It's very difficult to do proper skepticism, at least for me. It's too easy to forget the difference between skepticism and denial. (Or, as I dubbed them, for these purposes, "critical thinking" and "critical conditioning." )
For me this whole thing started with a re-interpretation of an example from "Monsters and Magical Sticks," Do you really think 2+2=4 only because a teacher convinced you it is? Or are there other ways you can get there? It couldn't be teacher turtles all the way down, so someone somehow did it. S/he had a novel thought, and evaluated and accepted it (and rejected the thought that 2+2=3) without any suggestion from anyone. And that someone was a great skeptical philosopher. A naysayer who just said something along the lines of "Bah, I just don't trust that newfangled 'numbers' thing" was just a "not very suggestible guy." Possibly with "analytical mind" susceptible to confusion.
sfhole2stretch wrote:Speaking as a subject and aspiring hypnotist, it is interesting to read criticism of NLP as a technique. Why pray tell is it generally so effective?
Same reason any form of talk is effective. Because people let it to be.
Read that obligatory story of "how a 'non-suggestible' subject was hypnotized" that is in that book (it doesn't really matter which one, it's in every book on hypnosis, often several times, and it's generally the same story) and it's fairly obvious. Not being in trance when talking to someone is a skill that takes learning. ADD: Asch conformity experiments are a good example of how the majority of people would say, believe, or even actually hallucinate that the wrong answer to a simple question about a picture is correct, simple because they saw a lot of people (experimenter stooges) agreeing it is.
And people generally learn not to go in unwanted trances in two ways: The denial way is basically a post-hypnotic suggestion run backwards. This "critical conditioning" just skims what you see/hear/feel for simple "red flags" and when it finds them, it reclassifies the source of this input as "The Opponent" who cannot possibly be right or even worth listening to on any subject, with elaborate rationalizations if needed.
And once something makes it to the Red Flag List of enough people, it's worthless, whatever its inherent merits. The thought is simply suppressed before it has any chance. And, of course, since everything "bad" is denied uncritically the rest is accepted uncritically.
True critical thinking isn't like that, it can use methods like proof by contradiction or even think it through and decide that The Opponent has a point after all. Unlike critical conditioning it doesn't start with the premise that "your team" is always right. But, for most people, it takes years to develop it to any useful degree in a few very limited fields. Which is another problem with it, it's not just a mindset you can learn, it's not just some "data" you can memorize, it's a discipline one practices. Knowing it's not perfect, and it may fail you.
To illustrate, there was a test on the Internet some time ago that asked you to tell if what you saw was a piece of genuine abstract art or just some random nonsense. Anyone who knows anything about art can actually score pretty high on that test, even if they don't know the paintings in question, and even if the art they actually studied was photography, by just knowing some rules of composition and color theory. They won't score perfectly, but they will do better than random guess.
But it's much easier to dismiss all abstract art as nonsense, or wax lyrical about random doodles. It's psychologically safer.