Covert Hypnosis, Use and Abuse

As a person that specialises in Hypnotic Persuasion Techniques I have sometimes been asked about using covert hypnosis techniques to do things that would be against the wishes of the person being dealt with. This article explores some of the techniques that can be used to get what you want despite the wishes of others and the consequences involved.

Covert Hypnosis as the name implies is using hypnotic techniques in normal every day settings. Hypnosis is about the interaction between your conscious and unconscious mind. To understand how Hypnotic Techniques work it is useful to start with a quick overview of the interaction between your conscious and unconscious mind.

Your conscious mind is the part of you that thinks logically, rationally and is the bit of your mind that problem solves. Your unconscious mind controls all of your unconscious functions such as blinking, breathing, storing memories and emotions. An example of your mind working perfectly would be like when you decide to walk out of the room. That would be a conscious mind decision, after that point your unconscious mind will take over to move all the individual muscles involved in getting up, walking and opening the door. Whilst doing this your unconscious mind will also make sure that you stay pumping blood round your body, breathing and looking where you are going.   

Imagine the implications of being able to talk directly to someone’s unconscious mind give it direct instructions and bypass your critical, conscious mind facilities. This is the opportunity that hypnosis can give you. Using these ideas in a conversational or covert way would give you great power over others…or so it would seem. Obviously there are limits, for example your unconscious mind is geared for self preservation so it would reject a suggestion such as stop breathing. But what if it were possible to talk directly to your unconscious and suggest that it could get excited about this concept and delve more deeply in to it for example.

Your unconscious mind controls your all your muscle movements as well as your memories and emotions. What would happen if we could by pass your critical faculties, the domain of your conscious mind and make direct suggestions to your unconscious? What ever you do in life I think you might suddenly find yourself thinking of lots of applications for this and perhaps some scary thoughts about how this can be abused. Here are a few:

• Presenters getting an audience to warm to you and agree with your message
• Managers getting their teams to work harder, faster or with more commitment
• Sales staff convincing their prospects to buy
• Pick up artists seducing you with the thrill of the affair
• Writers and story tellers moving their audience with emotions
• Politicians convincing you of their cause 

The first point of observation here is that conversational hypnosis is happening to us all the time. Have you ever had a situation where you were drawn in to a conversation and been so absorbed that you lose track of time or even your surroundings? Have you ever got excited, motivated or even upset about something that was being said although it didn’t seem a particularly emotional conversation? How about meeting someone for the first time and for some irrational reason you took an instant liking to them or just knew you had a connection. These are all forms of hypnotic phenomena. Covert Hypnosis is a way of using naturally occurring language patterns and non verbal cues to create these effects. A good NLP Practitioner Course would train you to be able to create these effects and use them for your own ends.

The issue then becomes what happens if you use these very powerful techniques to the detriment of others? The reality is whilst you might be able to bypass someone’s conscious mind for a while you couldn’t do it for ever. That means in the long term people will notice and find out they have been manipulated, cheated or conned in to doing things against their will. The ultimate result is that you will lose their trust, respect and commitment very quickly.

If this is the case then is there any use for covert hypnosis? Yes there is because it gives you access to the deep structure of a person’s mind and allows you to create incredible win / win scenarios. For example whilst people work for money they go to work for a whole lot of other reasons as well. As a manager I always wanted my team to experience job satisfaction at a deep and personally level. Imagine how you feel when your job takes on a deep personal meaning. Linking those things that satisfy your values to how you do your role would make you job more interesting, exciting and meaningful to you. You would get more job satisfaction and I would get more commitment, motivation and results.

Another example might be using covert hypnosis for sales. True I could use these techniques to sell things that you don’t need, but eventually your conscious mind will notice and I will get an unhappy customer, returns and a poor reputation. On the other hand I could use these techniques to get you in touch with all the benefits you are getting from my services. You get to access all the excitement, joy and pleasure of knowing you are buying the right thing to suit your needs. I can get you to visualise the future to experience having the product or service to make sure you know it is the right purchase for you. The end result is that you have something that is genuinely useful to you and I have happy customers that want to refer you on to others and a great reputation.

In personal relationships I would rather have a good time with my friends and family. In which case how useful is it to have used covert hypnosis principles so both you and they feel happy with each other when you get together?

These are the sorts of things you can learn to do on a good NLP Practitioner Course. True you will, by default learn to be able to do some of the bizarre and strange things I have been asked of and have rejected, such as:

• Make my boyfriend sick whenever he thinks of anyone else but me
• Install nightmares in to my sister’s mind
• Control people to have no free will
• Make my children completely obedient and always do exactly what I tell them
• Be able to make people feel pain just by talking to them

Now not all these things are entirely possible, but ask yourselves if they were why anyone would want to have these sorts of powers when there is so much more you could have. What if you had the power to turn on your charisma so more people would respect you? Or you could make people happier in your company? You could get people to do things for you by making sure that they get something of greater value in return? All of this is much more possible and easier to achieve than the first list but they use they same covert hypnosis skills.

Whether you use your covert hypnosis skills for negative or positive intent you cannot turn people’s conscious minds off. As such, at some point, they will notice that you were the catalyst for what ever they were doing. If you use covert hypnosis to get people to do things that do not want to do then you will lose friends and alienate people. If people find themselves doing things that they enjoy and they link that to you perhaps you might turn in to the next Dale Carnegie.

A good NLP Practitioner course will show you can use covert hypnosis to get people to do what you want and thanking you for it because they also get what they want.