In order to be able to make our own decisions, we need to understand how we might be under the indirect influence of others who may have programmed us in the past or who might even be programming us now. But we don’t have to allow the programming from our past to control our present and our future. We are also programmers of others, influencing them in terms of their focus, the meaning they give to experience, and what they can do to obtain what they want. Most of the time we program others unwittingly, but we can also do so deliberately.
We constantly try to preserve our inner world — our sense of identity — and we use certain defense mechanisms in order to do so. For example, denial: “I am not a drug addict. I use drugs occasionally.” Another defense is projection: “I’m not angry — you are.: The mechanism of regression: “I’m going to cry like a baby.” These are some of the operations we use to protect ourselves from others and to maintain the sense of who we think we are.
We also act on the inner worlds of others in order to preserve our own inner world. We do so by using what the British psychiatrist R.D. Laing called transpersonal defenses and we call indirect influence: the attempt to regulate the inner life of another person in order to preserve our own.
One way to get someone to do what one wants is to give an order. To get someone to be what one wants him to be is a different matter. The hypnotist doesn’t tell the subject what to be; he tells her what she is. Such attributions are often more powerful than orders, coercion or persuasion. It is possible that our earliest instructions are in the form of attributions. As a child, a man is told that he is a bad or a good boy, not instructed to be one. The mode for this type of communication is probably nonverbal.
Hypnosis is an experimental model of a naturally occurring phenomenon in families. The hypnotist instructs the subject, and part of the instruction is not to know that he has been instructed. The same happens in families. A mother instructs a child to feel sad, and part of the instruction is not to know that she has been instructed. A simple way to do this is to just tell the person what they feel, as in “You are angry.” Better yet is to tell a third party, in front of the person, what the person feels. For example, a mother, talking to another mother: “My son Tommy is shy,” and this is said in the presence of Tommy. How much of who we are is what we have been hypnotized to be?
The hypnotist doesn’t say, “I order you to feel cold.” He says, “It is cold.” The subject immediately feels cold. Many children begin life like this, experiencing what their parents experience, or what the parents want them to experience. Soon they learn to use the same operation on others. So a husband may say to his wife, “I know you are full of anger,” and he knows he is right even though anger may not be what she is experiencing. In ongoing relationships it soon becomes unnecessary to even say anything. A glance, a touch, a cough is an instruction.
When parents say of a child that he has attention deficit disorder, they are instructing the child to not pay attention. When a wife says that her husband is insensitive, she is instructing him to be insensitive. The difference with hypnosis is that the hypnotist knows what he is doing, family members usually don’t.
“I try to help him make friends, but he is so shy.” “She never stands still.” “He never listens.”
Statements made by parents about their children, no matter how apparently well meaning or supportive, can have pernicious effects and only reinforce unwanted behavior.Suppose I project my father onto my husband. Or I project my mother onto my wife. My husband becomes like my father to me. My wife becomes like my mother. I may or may not success in inducing him to be like my father. The act of inducing him to embody my projection of my father is what we call induction. Induction is one person projecting something onto the other’s experience. Through induction I can maneuver my husband into such a position that he begins to act and even to feel like my father. He can begin to feel and to act like my father without even having met him. Such inductions are going on all the time.
The conversation below, between a mother and her 14-year-old daughter illustrates the principle of induction.Mother: You are evil.
Daughter: No, I’m not.
Mother: Yes, you are.
Daughter: Uncle Jack doesn’t think so.
Mother: He doesn’t love you as I do. Only a mother knows the truth about her daughter, and only one who loves you as I do will ever tell you the truth about yourself, no matter what it is. If you don’t believe me, just look at yourself in the mirror carefully, and you will see that I’m telling the truth.Obviously, this is an extreme, even disturbing, example. But suppose we change one word, as Laing suggests: Replace “evil” with “pretty.”Mother: You are pretty.
Mother: He doesn’t love you as I do. Only a mother knows the truth about her daughter, and only one who loves you as I do will ever tell you the truth about yourself, no matter what it is. If you don’t believe me, just look at yourself in the mirror carefully, and you will see that I’m telling the truth.Whether the attribution is evil, pretty, ugly or good, the structure of the induction is identical. This induction is so common that we only notice it when it is disturbing. We all employ similar versions of this technique, and we may well justify them, but it is important to reflect on the structure of the induction, not only the content.
When we try to induce a child or lover to feel positively about himself, it is appropriate and good. When we induce someone to feel negative, it is disturbing and destructive.
Now please watch the film about Sukey & do the homework.
Click here to download the Sukey film transcript
Click here for Module 2 homework
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