Twitter Thread: On Safety + "You Are Kept Safe By Your 'Unconscious'" And Etc | 9/14/20

Original thread: https://twitter.com/h_sleepingirl/status/1305517099067076609 

Hypnosis is not a magical state. We go through many different kinds of trances and patterns during our days and lives and there is nothing special about them beyond that we have different experiences for different things. Reading is a trance. Driving a car is a trance. Doing our jobs. We have different subjective experiences for different activities as well as different capabilities in those patterns.

We do not necessarily get more suggestible as we go deeper into hypnosis, it is not linear and simple; following suggestions is more about the suggestions themselves -- their framing, context, and verbiage -- than piling trance on, seen extensively by every subject who has ever had trouble experiencing some phenomena. 

We are naturally "suggestible" all the time -- the induction of trance is made of suggestions, and it would not work if we were not while awake. It is also a suggestion when a friend asks "Remember that time we went to the beach?" and for a moment you recall your emotions or experience with it, see the sights in your head, or hear the sounds, etc. Hypnosis is not a special phenomenon and it is not necessarily tied to a special altered state, and there is no such thing as the "hidden observer".

This is a term coined in 1977 by Ernest Hilgard, when a subject was hypnotically deafened but could obviously still hear to some degree because they responded automatically to suggestion. He got the idea that people have a "guardian angel" inside them, a literal separate being. This is the same guy who worked on the Stamford Susceptibility scales (bleh) and also wrote a paper glorifying several of Milton Erickson's cases where the hypnotherapist 1) cured a husband and wife of bedwetting by ordering the couple to drink water and kneel on the bed and deliberately urinate on it each night and 2) treated a pair of female patients with self esteem issues by making lewd comments about the conventionally attractive one and insulting the overweight one.

Clearly, Hilgard's models of "consent" and hypnosis are different from ours. He was a very well respected and prolific scientist and this idea became pervasive in hypnosis literature and thus the hypnokink community.

You may hear it referred to as "the unconscious mind." With a tiny bit of prodding, this falls apart. It is a personification. We do things we don't want to do all the time. We say yes to things we don't want to say yes to because we feel like we have to or any other number of reasons. This can be as innocuous as someone saying "don't think about a pink elephant" and us not being able to help it, or as malevolent as a guy at a bar pressuring us to accept a drink.

Our consent is not magical and immutable. How do you explain the many, many subjects who have had shitty experiences following suggestions they didn't want to follow? Including myself, I may add. I have heard a response to this as "it was consented to on some level" which is ethically crap but also logically useless. How useful is this idea of consent that leaves the person upset or in great discomfort afterwards? People behave according to patterns they've learned. If they haven't learned anything about how to keep themselves safe, how to reject suggestions, they may not be able to do so. Education is important, but not infallible.

Sometimes following suggestions happens unconsciously or preconsciously. It can be fast or surprising and can happen in a way that feels automatic. There is less conscious "choice" and less time for someone to discern whether or not something is appropriate, even if they are making that judgment unconsciously. Why on earth would anyone assume that is a process that happens without mistakes? We don't have a magical part of us that always knows what we do or don't want or find acceptable. Our desires shift and change all the time, and what we "want" vs what we find "acceptable" is often different.