- What might the impact be?
- How to deal with other people's influence?
- How to protect yourself from hypnosis if you are approached on the street?
- Confronting specific methods of street “hypnotists”
- What to do if you fall into a trance?
Reading the latest news about how scammers hypnotized and defrauded respectable citizens, many people think - how to learn not to succumb to someone else’s suggestion? It's actually not that difficult. Of course, the ability to resist hypnosis is not a panacea. Fraudsters can deceive a person without resorting to a trance, but the ability to protect yourself from uninvited influence will also not be superfluous. In this article you will find tips on how to avoid falling for the most common attempts to influence you.
Taboo on contact
Most psychologists, psychiatrists and other specialists who themselves know the technique of hypnosis advise generally avoiding all contact with people who seem suspicious to them, or those who may have hypnotic abilities. This is what Nikolai Medyankin, the author of the book “50 Basic Psychological Traps and Ways to Avoid Them,” recommends doing. According to Medyankin, you should not stop on the street at the request of a random passer-by and talk on the phone with strangers. Medyankin insists that first of all you need to convince yourself that you don’t have to be overly polite and always have the right to say: “No!”, “I don’t want to!” etc.
Avoid your gaze
Meanwhile, most often hypnotists who have bad intentions use the effect of surprise, and victims, as a rule, do not manage to avoid communicating with them in time. In this case, according to the famous hypnotist Gennady Goncharov, author of the book “Suggestion: Theory and Practice. The Great Power of Hypnosis,” you should avoid making eye contact with the attacker, since one of the most common methods of putting a person into a trance is staring into the eyes. For example, in the textbook “Psychotherapy,” edited by B. D. Karvasarsky, it is indicated that medical specialists who use hypnosis to treat certain ailments ask their patients to look them straight in the eyes without blinking.
Dangerous touches
In order not to become a victim of a hypnotist, it is necessary to avoid not only visual, but also bodily contact. According to Natalya Epifanovskaya, author of “Secrets of the Human Brain,” a person who does not want to fall into a trance should under no circumstances allow an attacker to touch his body, much less take his hand. The fact is, says Alexander Filin (“Hypnosis. How to use and resist”), that the so-called kinesthetic methods (touching the hand or head, stroking, patting the shoulder, shaking hands, touching the fingers, putting brushes on the victim’s hands, taking the victim's hands in both hands) are most effective.
Control techniques
To resist hypnosis, you need to be aware of its presence. Learn to recognize signs of influence on you:
- there is a feeling of awkwardness, inability to refuse or stop the conversation;
- the person does not follow the rules of etiquette when speaking: he does not allow you to speak, he interrupts you;
- his eyes constantly dart;
- he gestures too much;
- He is characterized by fussiness and haste.
A person who wants to mislead and manipulate you is always in a hurry. There is a feeling of lack of time, because of which you find yourself obliged to the manipulator.
Confrontation
Another manipulation technique is creating a feeling of guilt in the interlocutor. In a particularly effective way, the hypnotist accuses you of violating the rules of behavior. In order not to fall for the bait, you need to remember that you do not owe anything to anyone. If you are asked a question, then no one forces you to answer it and pay attention to an unfamiliar person.
Sometimes manipulators use diminutive names. Having found out your name, they may call you Marinochka or Sashenka, but without knowing your name, they will use affectionate words: “Darling”, “Darling”. Don’t fall for the trick, call your interlocutor in the same affectionate and relaxed manner.
The main defense against hypnosis is to avoid communicating with manipulative individuals who put pressure on you and force you to adhere to a specific line of behavior. Filter information when speaking. If it is impossible to refuse, you can use the method of evading responsibility, citing bad hearing: “I didn’t hear,” “I didn’t understand what was being said.”
Changing your posture
The method of “joining” the body movements of their “client” is no less popular among hypnotists. Olesya Pukhova, in particular, mentions this in her book “Healers Who Kill Us.” As Pukhova writes, to establish contact, hypnosis specialists repeat the gestures and postures of the person they want to put into a trance. That is why, if you cannot escape from communication, it is necessary to change positions as often and unexpectedly as possible. The author of the book “How not to succumb to hypnosis,” Ilya Melnikov, agrees with this point of view, who believes that such behavior will complicate the process of “tuning” the scammer and will help you not fall into stupor.
Protection from hypnosis
How to recognize a hypnotist? To establish contact with you, he will take your position and breathe in the rhythm of your breathing: this is called “adjustment”. The hypnotist will speak as you exhale, imitating your inner speech, because we generally pronounce all words on the exhale. Communication with this person will give you pleasure. Beware! A common technique in hypnosis is information overload. If the interlocutor speeds up the pace of speech and you do not have time to understand him, you should be wary. The verbal stream rivets your entire consciousness, and everything you do not understand rushes past, straight into the subconscious. This is how they give you an instruction. A variation of this technique: two people start talking to you at the same time. For example, two people come into the manager’s office and unleash an avalanche of words. All information that is excessive for understanding flows into the subconscious of the owner of the office. A folder is opened in front of him, and he obediently signs an agreement that he had never wanted to hear about before. After the hypnotists leave, the leader will not even be able to explain to himself why he agreed. The attitude “it is not difficult for you to sign this document” was perceived by the subconscious while the conscious mind was trapped, distracted by simultaneous chatter. Then it is impossible to remember the setting.
Find out the meaning of your dream. The hypnotic state is somewhat similar to a state of mild drowsiness. In a hypnotic trance, a person’s assemblage point shifts, and consciousness thus finds itself in an altered state. How is it characterized? A companion to the first stage of hypnosis is sudden mild drowsiness. It’s not too late to dismiss this drowsiness as an obsession and not allow yourself to be brought into the second stage, when drowsiness is much more difficult to dismiss. Pay attention to whether others are becoming drowsy.
Another sign of trance: a person outwardly behaves like someone sleeping. The muscles of the face and the whole body relax, and the face becomes more symmetrical. The asymmetry of the face of a waking person is caused by differently tense muscles. Breathing becomes rare and deep, and the posture becomes motionless.
In a trance, the skin turns pink and moisturizes as the activity of the sweat glands increases. Blinking and swallowing of saliva almost stop. General relaxation is accompanied by involuntary movements - small, for example, shaking fingers or large, like shaking your head. Remember Kashpirovsky's sessions?
If you suspect that you are being subjected to forced hypnosis, try a proven remedy. Start humming to yourself (playing through your head) some catchy, catchy tune, and the hypnotist will immediately have a problem. His energy flow will break against such a simple block.
How can we explain this? To carry out a hypnotic procedure, the hypnotist must, roughly speaking, establish contact with your psychoenergy and attract your attention. This is why adjustments are made to posture and breathing. You, singing to yourself “there lived three cheerful geese with grandma,” are not making any contact. Just like everything ingenious.
A sleeping person is least protected from hypnosis. The hypnotist selects the REM (rapid eye movement) sleep phase, which occurs 0.75-1.5 hours after falling asleep and is repeated several times a night. The fact that REM sleep has been replaced by REM sleep is indicated each time by a change in the sleeper's posture.
The hypnotist sits down at the head of the bed an hour after falling asleep or an hour or two before waking up and makes slow passes with his hands. The direction of the passes is from head to feet at a distance of 1.5-2 centimeters above the surface of the sleeper’s body.
Then the hypnotist repeats for 2-3 minutes in a quiet whisper in the rhythm of sleepy breathing, “Sleep deeper, sleep deeper...” Assuming that the sleeper is not awake and is not pretending, the hypnotist changes the rhythm of the words: he pronounces them faster, then slower. If everything goes according to plan, the sleeper's breathing changes in the same rhythm. This indicates that contact has been established.
The hypnotist switches to intonations of suggestion and increases the volume: “You are sleeping very soundly, although you hear my voice perfectly. You continue to sleep, you are comfortable and warm. You are relaxed and fall asleep deeper and deeper... You want to answer my questions directly from the dream. You are fast asleep and talking to me. While continuing to sleep, tell me your name...”
If the sleeper has said his name and answered a few more primitive questions that are not related to the enemy’s subject of interest, the hypnotist proceeds to specific questions. At the same time, as the sleeper inhales, “along with the air”, the keyword is introduced - “deal”, “export”, “invention”... Then it remains to listen to everything that the sleeper tells. The man himself will not even suspect that he spoke in a dream and became a traitor.
Sometimes the sleeper is destined to become a carrier of secret information. It is suggested by repeating it 5 or 7 times with breaks of a few seconds, and there should also be 5 or 7 such series, and between them the hypnotist consolidates the effect with the words “Sleep deeply, sleep deeper, even deeper...” After the information is entered, the hypnotist turns off the memory of her - develops amnesia. To do this, the sleeper is told that he will wake up as soon as he sees a beautiful, colorful dream that he can remember.
The session takes about 20 minutes. Waking up in the morning, a person will remember a wonderful dream, but will not realize that he has become the carrier of a secret message. He will give this message when other people in another place put him back into a hypnotic trance in his sleep and give him the password keyword.
Hypnosis and a free mind Hypnosis and a free mind. Painting by an unknown artist. Another use of hypnosis is to suggest that a person was a witness or participant in some fictitious event. Coming out of the trance, the person will confidently talk about it. Such disinformation, under certain conditions, can greatly harm both the company, the party, and individuals.
During a very deep trance, a talented hypnotist manages to program a person to a certain behavior. In the future, for about a year, such a person will obey the hypnotist’s commands. Another, somewhat less effective method is programming with the help of drugs: a person is put into a drug trance, and when falling asleep or waking up, the program is sharply and categorically instilled.
Every normal person should take care to exclude night access for strangers to himself and his loved ones. This is not always easy, especially when traveling, in a hotel, or on vacation. Avoid sleeping in the presence of strangers and accumulate impeccability in yourself: only this will allow you to refuse to carry out the installation that they still manage to “plant” into your subconscious.
You can instill in a person, not to mention a zombie, anything you want, including any disease. You can suggest to a person that his nose is about to bleed - and it will. You can induce baldness, and hair will begin to fall out. You can cause real cancer and a real brain tumor. True, most often this kind of harm is caused to us not by villainous hypnotists, but by ourselves. We are talking about unconscious self-hypnosis.
After the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, millions of people showed signs of radiation sickness, but examinations confirmed this diagnosis in only 136 people. Mentally weakened individuals, with the help of newspapers and television, instilled in themselves the symptoms of radiation exposure.
Over the course of 12 years, surgeons at the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg identified 200 people who had given themselves various diseases. All the symptoms were present. The patients were placed on operating tables, cut and... no pathology was found.
...Those who have taken the path of the Warrior need to master the technique of Ericksonian hypnosis, but within the framework of this book we cannot dwell on the topic of hypnosis in more detail. Let us only note that the most famous hypnotist of all times is called Jesus Christ.
Two thousand years before Milton Erickson (1901-1980), this great Warrior realized that it was useless to directly call people to love one another. Jesus told an entertaining parable, and the listeners went into a trance. The twists and turns of the plot blocked the consciousness of the listeners, and the conclusion about the moral of the parable was implanted directly into their subconscious at this time. Subsequently, people appropriated this morality for themselves, that is, they began to live not by lies, to love their neighbor as themselves, and so on. This is what Jesus wanted!
Our contemporary, Siberian psychiatrist Sergei Gorin, illustrates this technique this way. A woman came to him, terrified of pain during childbirth. Gorin put the pregnant woman into a trance and began to tediously tell the story of a rubber hose: water flows through the hose, a pebble gets into the hose, the elastic walls of the hose stretch, expand, and the pressure of the water will gradually push the pebble out, the pebble will resist, but the water pressure is very high, and the walls of the hose will stretch even more... In the end, the hose, Gorin promised, will stretch so much that the pebble will move quite quickly and reach the outlet... When the pebble begins to overcome this last boundary, the walls of the hose will stretch even more, because the hose is rubber. What will the hose feel? Nothing. It simply and habitually stretches, stretches, stretches... And as soon as the pebble comes out, the walls of the hose will shrink and return to their original volume... What will the hose feel this time? Answer: only satisfaction from the fact that I managed to regain my previous form. The woman was left in great bewilderment after her meeting with the doctor. However, she experienced even greater bewilderment when she gave birth to a child without feeling pain!
