by jimmyh » Tue Aug 08, 2017 5:08 pm
Don't worry about Richard. He get's that way sometimes.
So the basic issue, if I understand it right, is that someone whom you have trusted says that he used "Ericksonian hypnotic techniques" on you, and you feel like he violated your trust by doing this without first asking for consent. You feel like you have "gaps in your memory", so it doesn't seem so easy to write off as "not real" and you want to know what to do about it.
While it’s *possible* to mess with people in this way and you’re right to take it seriously, the good news is that from a hypnotist’s perspective, it seems unlikely from what you’ve said.
If he told you about it without being forced to, he probably didn’t see it as something you would have a problem with. Since he wasn’t trying to hide it from you, and since he’s someone you trusted going into this, there’s a good chance that he’ll care that he made you uncomfortable and will stop once you express your concerns to him.
While it’s technically possible that he was trying to do things like “create gaps in your memory” and just didn’t see the problem with it, it’s also possible that he never intended to mess with your memories in the first place. Suggestion is a powerful thing, and it’s not uncommon for suggestions to be inferred where not intended. In this case, for example, it’s quite possible that upon hearing “hypnotic techniques”, your brain was concerned enough that it wanted to make *really sure* that you weren’t having your memory messed with (because that’s one of the obvious bad things that someone can use hypnosis for) and so your brain looked *really hard* for cases where you might expect to have more memory than you do. Because we don’t have a perfect map of what we remember and what we don’t, it’s not at all unusual to find examples of that, even when we generally are pretty good at knowing what we’d expect to remember and what we wouldn’t. Basically, fear increases suggestibility by making increasingly unlikely things feel relevant. In these cases, if you ask yourself “okay, so I know I can’t *rule it out*, but is it also possible that it’s something else?”, usually the answer will be “yeah, it’s possible, but I just want to take this seriously”.
The most likely case, as I see it is that he just means something very different and much more benign by “hypnotic techniques”. Not all hypnotic techniques fit the pattern of “mind control” very well. Some of them, especially of the “Ericksonian” variety, would be better described as “effective communication”. For example, saying “it’s okay to relax now” can be seen through a hypnotic lens as “indirectly” giving the “embedded command” to “relax now” - spooky, right? Only all you’re really doing is letting them know that its *okay* to relax now *if they want*. They don’t have to, and so simply giving the order to “relax now” would be oddly bossy, and saying “you should relax now” might make someone more anxious if they feel it’s something they “should” be doing and that they’re doing something wrong by not yet being relaxed.
I’d guess that this is what the guy was going for, and that he’d be willing to be completely upfront with you about what he’s doing/why he’s doing it, but the other good news is that even if he *is* trying to do things that are really creepy, you can’t really “force” anyone to find your magical “hypnotic suggestions” compelling. It’s possible to abuse people’s trust, and sometime’s it’s possible to trick people into thinking that they have no choice, but in the end it’s still just trickery. You can always say “nah, I think I won’t relax now” and “nah, I think I will remember that, thank you very much”.
Let us know how it turns out!