"Your mind makes it real"
So I was watching the new Folding Ideas video on meme stock and how a cult formed around a number of ideologies regarding financial systems and short selling.
I like watching videos like this. Dan Olsen does a number of good videos on different online conspiracies such as Flat Earth and NFTs and then you have HBomb doing the same thing with anything from Colecovision to the war on christmas and alt right grifts.
And whenever I research these sociological trends I become uncomfortably aware of the fact that I exist within one of these little closed circles. (Well, more than one given the communities and support groups around psychology and mental health, but I'm here to talk about Kink today)
Hypnosis, especially within our community, is entirely held up by a series of beliefs with an internal language that creates a massive divide between those in the know and those out of the know and it literally only works because we believe it works.
In many ways what we do is as much sociology as it is psychology.
And I kind of that it's okay for that to be true so long as we all occasionally remind ourselves of that fact and never abuse the power we each possess as authors of that shared narrative, because much like under hypnosis our hypnotees are suggestible and need to have care in what we provide to their open mind, educators within the community have an eager and open audience that stretches further than we know and regardless of intent, our beliefs and teachings will become their facts and reality as surely as had we have programmed a hypnotee to believe them as they wake on the count of 1--2--3!
Okay. Let me break this up a little.
Does this mean I think hypnosis is fake and we're all just going along with it?
One of my partners and I have had conversations about subjectivity in both hypnosis and mental health spaces before and we hate that one of the most approachable quotes comes from an author that leaves a bad taste in our mouths.
"Of course it's all happening in your head [...] why on Earth should that mean it's not real?"
One of the big differences between the online erotic hypnosis community and the NGH (National Guild of Hypnotists) who rue our existence is that we do not require legitimacy to function when they themselves exist in a half-truth state where when receiving both of my certifications it was impressed that we needed to perform an uneasy dance of providing services without practicing medicine because hypnotherapy is not licensed psychology in the same was that chiropractors are not performing medicine.
Within *certain portions* of hypnokink we are perfectly okay with the idea of being wrong and of sharing ideas.
Wiseguy said it best in his class "The best induction is the one that works" and what works works because it is effective in that moment between that particular hypnotist and that particular hypnotee.
Likewise, the more educated a person becomes, the more effective hypnosis becomes. Understanding trance is a tool to achieve it faster. Even a cold hypnotee who is being introduced for the first time receives an education via pre-talk which we tend to believe is more important than the induction itself.
You know what I mean when I talk about pretalk, right?
"We all go in and out of hypnosis multiple times a day" "Highway hypnosis" "Flow state"
These are all real and observable things and we can view hypnosis impacting a mind on an EKG.
Hell even Oh No Ross and Carrie (a podcast where they join insular communities with intent to learn if they are cults/grifts) did an episode on hypnosis and conceded that the principals of suggestibility, hypnotic state and conditioning are all just... how the brain works... and that you can't really dive into fact/fiction when it's essentially telling a person to do something and they either do it or they don't.
It's not mind control. It's suggestion and even within our circles we all agree that mind control is a fantasy.
So I guess... it's as real as we all agree it to be.
The issue is that group agreement of all the little elements is held up by The Community as a whole and... maybe we should talk about the vulnerabilities at play there.
What do I mean when I talk about insular communities?
Recently I read a REALLY good line on a quote on Twitter that speaks to what I mean here:
And this is what I mean when I talk about belief systems inside and outside of the community. It's a good post as I firmly agree with what it communicates.
The Online Hypnosis Community is a term with no specific borders. In my reality it's the orbit that happens to take place around those who are known, trusted and teach at the primary US erotic hypnosis convention circuit.
However I know that in reality the online hypnosis community contains multiple pools and factions that I either strictly ignore, such as ones surrounding dangerous figures like NeuralNets and Nimja or ones I am not close to, like local kink scenes for cities across the world including those where English is not a first language or mlm communities where I do not really have a place, to niche pockets such as the furry hypnosis community, dronekink and even the tiny little subniches such as Empty Spaces and HDG which have splintered off into entire little separate universes with their own language and core beliefs.
For the most part this is a beautiful thing. What I'm describing is no less a divide between interests as being a member of the "Video game horror" scene and not visiting the niches of Indie Game Horror, Japanese Horror, creepypasta mods and such.
Every community has pockets like this.
But the more specific and tight a community becomes, the more "insular" it is. Language and widely held beliefs begin to gather in tighter pressurized windows. One need only look at how brainwashing and conditioning are viewed collectively in darker corners to see the difference and this is to make nothing of things like political and social beliefs in certain corners.
In those dark corners "You can't be hypnotized to do anything you don't want to do" is an essential lie WITHIN their insular community so that they can maintain a degree of plausible deniability and power over their people.
That is the question, isn't it?
I guess the answer to that is... "always question what you believe, why you believe it and don't assume everyone around you does or should think the same thing."
When discussing red flags in the community on Discord and Twitter with other educators, I've always said the biggest red flag an educator can have is teaching that there is believing they have all the answers.
ALL OF US are working in this space from a belief system. An organic and living one which is impacted by our interactions with the kink, with one another and with the world around us.
No one individual in our community holds all the answers. Not me, not the authors of the manuals that we push, not Richard Nongard, Milton Erickson.
It also means we need not be defensive about our hobby and beliefs. Many will never accept what we do as actually having any basis in reality and that's okay. We're making spaces for play and some will just see us as overactive roleplayers who are tricking ourselves into believing things and to that I always say:
"You're dang right we are. That's the point."
It's not magic. It's not hard science. It's just belief, confidence and a willing to play along.
I could bust out the EKG studies or describe the altered states of consciousness and I will ALWAYS preach how suggestible a person is in and out of hypnosis and the dangers of what we do because those dangers are real and present. But at the end of the day, I want to take a moment and evaluate "what if I'm wrong?"
And the correct answer to that is "will I or someone else be hurt by my ignorance or misaction" and act accordingly.
But that's me. That's my belief system and I am aware of the fact that what we do is entirely built upon our belief that it works and that we are being safe and sane and fun.
That doesn't make me right. That doesn't mean I didn't learn some bad lessons.
It just means I want to keep doing better and I trust that the people around me are all doing the same. With hope of growing. Learning more about individuals and the community as a whole and trying to make this place better.
Because... if I stand in front of a room and teach a class that carries some bad ideas. They'll take seed.
And let me tell you something...
This community is FULL of bad ideas
I've been here since the early days. I was there when Warp My Mind and Wendi.com were the two sites that popped up when you went searching for files. I was there during the implosion of Inraptured and the transphobic meltdown of Isabella Valentine. I have witnessed hypnocon board after hypnocon board fall apart. I've seen scandals and dramas and chaos.
I was there when Bimbopolitic was outed as a CIA plant for fucks sake. Please don't ask follow-up questions. My head is still spinning from that saga of events.
and that inevitably means I have internalized some dumb shit in my day. I've been unlearning it as much as I can over the past 5-6 years. But it's there.
Likewise a lot of the books I read and grew up on are based on the beliefs of less than wonderful human beings. Milton Erickson is no rolemodel, but damned if his theories aren't worth looking at.
This is one thing I respect about sleepingirl's NLP Book. The conceit was to study what PUA instructors taught and see what could actually be used from an objective standpoint. Actually interrogate the beliefs of NLP from a "I don't know anything" standpoint.
If I have any point in my whole ramble of a post it's that. Approach learning things with the curiosity of someone who is willing to learn and doesn't know any better but with the wariness of someone who has been burned too many times and knows that there's bad actors all over and everything needs to be turned over a few times to examine.
At the end of the day I just want a safe community full of positive ideas and if there's one thing I've learned about hypnosis it is this "positive associations stick, negative suggestions are harder to ground"
Both in the good way and the bad. Unlearning things is hard.
Let's just be aware that we're all playing in the same sandbox. Share our tools and try to build something beautiful.
and never stop asking "...am I sure about this?"
*Shrug* Or don't. It's just a suggestion <3
