Myths About Hypnosis

People often fear that being hypnotized will make them lose control, surrender their will, and result in their being dominated, but a hypnotic state is not the same thing as gullibility or weakness. Many people base their assumptions about hypnotism on stage acts but fail to take into account that stage hypnotists screen their volunteers to select those who are cooperative, with possible exhibitionist tendencies, as well as responsive to hypnosis. Stage acts help create a myth about hypnosis which discourages people from seeking legitimate hypnotherapy.

Another myth about hypnosis is that people lose consciousness and have amnesia. A small percentage of subjects, who go into very deep levels of trance will fit this stereotype and have spontaneous amnesia. The majority of people remember everything that occurs in hypnosis. This is beneficial, because the most of what we want to accomplish in hypnosis may be done in a medium depth trance, where people tend to remember everything.

In hypnosis, the patient is not under the control of the hypnotist. Hypnosis is not something imposed on people, but something they do for themselves. A hypnotist simply serves as a facilitator to guide them.

~~American Society of Clinical Hypnosis~~

"Oh my god! You call that a dick! Man, you are really just a girly boy aren't you! Look guys, his dick is smaller than my little finger!"

Then the laughing would start.

Jeffrey had been home schooled. He had been taught by his parents all of his life. His mother and father were disabled. Not so much that they were confined to beds or anything like that. Both had disabilities that kept them from working regular jobs. With their disability payments, they could get by. They had decided early on that teaching their only son at home would be a pleasure, not a burden. They were both well-educated. It seemed an ideal way to spend their lives together as a family.

That had been Jeffrey's education for years and years. But finally, when he reached the age of seventeen his parents decided to send him to high school for the final year before college. He would be able to take at least three or four college preparatory courses that his parents felt unable to do justice to. It seemed ideal. And he would be getting a high school diploma from a real school at the same time. The supervisor of schools in the district had seen his work from home and knew he was fully qualified to graduate as a senior.

Unfortunately for Jeffrey this school required all students to take Physical Education each year of high school. Jeffrey would be exercising and showering with other young men for the first time in his life. His parents had no clue what a traumatic experience it would become for Jeffrey. And Jeffrey, being the loving young man that he was, refused to tell his parents, now declining with poor health, about the ongoing harassment he began to receive at every turn.

It never became physical. Jeffrey was not a small young man. He was over 6 feet tall. And his parents, aware of their own disabilities, had made sure that they followed the old axiom "sound mind in a sound body." So he was required to keep physically fit. Part of his training was to follow the Marine Corps physical training manual. So he had never been a weakling. Not in body. But his parents had done him a disservice. They had taught him to be a good person, a moral person. And in doing so, they had neglected to teach him that other people might, perhaps, not follow that value system.

During the year he passed in that high school Jeffrey was continually verbally bullied. He never retaliated. It was not in his nature nor his up-bringing. Most of the boys had passed on to the other students, including their girl-friends, that Jeffrey was not completely adequate in the penile department. For him it was one day of hell after another. He was barely able to complete all of his courses with decent grades. He finished and prepared to move on to his mother's alma mater in another state. He told his parents he preferred not to go to his graduation ceremony. They respected his wishes.

They never knew how debilitating that year had been. Jeffrey never told them. But even he did not know how traumatic it had truly had been. Not until he began dating a few girls in college, and discovered his fear of any kind of sexual contact with a woman, did he fully understand what the verbal abuse had done to his psyche.

Jeffrey was completely normal in most ways. He was straight, completely. He liked looking at pretty girls. He became aroused when he saw the pornography easily found on the internet. He wanted to enjoy sex with women. He wanted to be normal. But he wasn't. He tried. He tried several times to make love to perfectly willing young ladies. He was attractive. He was bright. Women wanted to get to know him. But when it came to actually allowing himself to become involved in physical contact beyond kissing and necking it was impossible. He had no excuses for the women who wanted more. He could only decline and watch them slowly fade out of his life.

This was not a question of common sense for Jeffrey. If it had been he could have simply looked on the internet and found that he was perfectly adequate when it came to the size of his penis. Granted, it was only about 2 inches long when soft, but it grew to about 4 inches when hard. And it did get hard. It got hard enough that he could masturbate. He did so often. But when he did, he would often cry as he did it, remembering the harassment he had gone through. It ate into his mind.

It is difficult to enter the minds of people who have been traumatized. We can never really understand what they have gone through. And Jeffrey was a bright, morally upright young man. He knew he had a problem, and he knew that other people had much greater ones than he. So he lived with it and tried to make his life a pleasure as it was. He made friends and studied hard and finally received his degree. His parents came to see him graduate this time. There had been no more harassment in college. Jeffrey was proud to share this moment with his mother and father.

Moving to a large west coast city Jeffrey found work and began living a solitary life, with just a few good friends he managed to make from work and the entertainment places he frequented. It was not a bad life. But one evening he was at a club where the entertainer happened to be a hypnotist. Watching the performance, Jeffrey saw the trances the volunteers went into as the hypnotist held a spinning pocket watch before their eyes, and they slowly closed them, as they followed the instructions they were given. Jeffrey didn't find the performance amusing, but he was fixated on the spinning watch, and his mind was working.

Perhaps this was what he needed. Perhaps he had found his saving grace. Perhaps.

~~~~

When Faith was born her mother was facing life without a partner. Her lover had left her at the first indication that she was pregnant. She was abandoned. She turned to the religion of her parents, becoming imbued in a peculiar sect that looked upon sex as an evil necessity, never to be relished, never to be pleasing. If one was pleased by it, it meant one was sinning. This was now her overriding religious philosophy, and she passed it on to her daughter, Faith.

The consequences for Faith were later devastating. When she left home at 18 years of age she was very poorly equipped to cope with the society she found herself in. All of her short life had been spent in a community of fanatical religious believers. She was only allowed to leave because her mother had died and there was a shortage of men in the group. They may have been religious, but they were not overly kind. Faith was evicted from the sect. She was allowed to take what little her mother still possessed. That included some clothing, some trinkets and souvenirs of the past, and a small sum of money.

Faith was not unintelligent. She found work in menial tasks at first. She was perfectly adequate as a maid to the wives of the rich and well-off in the coastal city she went to after leaving her religious "family." And she was able to save her money, what little she received. She did receive room and board, and her tastes did not run to flashy, gaudy, fancy clothing or jewelry. Her wants and her needs were simple. She worked for several years in this manner and finally saved enough to end her employment and go to a small community college.

While attending the college for the first time she was approached by young men. Having been sheltered all her life, first with her mother's religious group, then performing her duties as a maid, with little time off, and tending to stay in her own little world, Faith had no response to these advances except abrupt rejection. She felt that doing anything beyond talking to men was becoming close to sinning. She was therefore avoided by most of the men, and made only a few friends amongst the women.

There was one young woman named Deborah, the same age as Faith, who was now in her mid-20s, and she had been raised as a fundamentalist christian. Her religion was nowhere near as strict as Faith's, but she understood and tried to be a decent friend. Faith was quite likable once you knew her. She wore her hair long and conservatively bound up, but that could not detract from her essential beauty. She inherited that from her mother.

She had also inherited her mother's sexual desires, but she had no idea what they meant. She had never learned anything about sex. Her religious school had taught her nothing. She was learning a few things here at college just from being in a society that emphasized sex. But she thought it was all sinful. And, when her urges caused her to touch her lovely, small breasts, making her nipples hard and causing a tingle in her feminine area, she was fearful of what she was doing. Once or twice she even put her fingers on her vulva and felt stirrings that were physically appealing, but caused her to regret what she had done.

The men admired her looks, but had learned not to get too close.

But their exciting chatter about what they had experienced with young men was also compelling for Faith. Having been on campus now for months, she had learned that the world she was brought up in was nothing like the world she found herself in now. Faith was beginning to have doubts.

One of her courses was an introduction to psychology. It ranged over all of the areas that the science covered. Nearing the end of the course the instructor touched on hypnosis. She discussed the subject only during part of one class period. It was not a major component of the course. But she did attempt to hypnotize a volunteer. For historical purposes, rather than use the most modern technique to put a person under, she took out a pocket watch. Then, explaining how it was done so many years ago, and by stage performers even today, she set the watch spinning, and tried to put the young woman in a slight trance. She did appear to go under.

Faith gazed at the watch. Something about it spoke to her. Something told her she needed to pay close attention. Somehow, this was going to help her in her journey.

~~~~

Jeffrey was smart enough to know that what he needed was a trained hypnotherapist. It was the easiest thing now to just get online and find the nearest therapist. He was in a large enough city that there were several. He went online, googled each of them, and found one who seemed to have the knowledge and capabilities to help Jeffrey. He called and made an appointment.

It was both difficult and easy for Jeffrey to explain to the therapist what he needed. He was ashamed but at the same time hopeful that he would lose his debilitating obsession with the size of his penis. The problem he had was that he knew that he was actually rather normal. But that did not change his psychological fears and inhibitions. During the first session they simply discussed what he saw as his problem. The therapist never told him he could be cured, but merely talked of the possibility that Jeffrey could solve his own problem with the help of hypnosis. This was all Jeffrey really wanted, the chance to be like other men.

As Jeffrey left from his first session he passed by a lovely young woman with long auburn hair put up in braids. To Jeffrey, she immediately caused a certain physical reaction. He liked it. He smiled at her. But he lost sight of her as she passed into the therapist's office.

~~~~

Faith left the classroom after the hypnosis demonstration with a certain feeling of elation. From what she understood, hypnotherapy might be what she needed. She had no idea. All she knew was that she had feelings that she did not understand, and she wanted to be like other people, as long as they were good and harmed no one. Her doubts made her think perhaps she could have the kind of life other women had without being a sinner.

She looked in the phonebook under "Hypnotherapists" and picked one at random, letting God guide her. She made an appointment for a time when she would not be in class and then discussed it with Deborah. Her friend thought it was a great idea. Deborah had not told Faith yet, but she had always known that her beliefs were not really correct. In fact, Deborah had made out with several men she had dated during the past year, and even got so dissolute as to allow a young man to touch her breasts and her vagina on the outside of her clothes. Something had leaked out of her private parts and it had felt good.

But for Faith the thing she wanted was to simply be able to find a young man she could love and with whom she could make a family, and she had come to the conclusion that the only way to have a good marriage would be for the lovers to actually enjoy creating their children. This seemed closer to God's plan to her. Arriving at the therapist's office she checked in with the receptionist. The door to the therapist's office opened and a handsome young man came out and smiled at her. Faith blushed and quickly passed into the office.

~~~~

Whenever Jeffrey was with the therapist and he was putting himself under, he always visualized the spinning pocket watch. It helped him do what he needed to do to put himself in a hypnotic state. And after several sessions Jeffrey was feeling so good about himself that he was smiling at women all the time now, and even thinking of asking someone out on a date. Perhaps even giving her a kiss, and maybe even touching her body. And most boldly of all, letting her touch him.

He was forming a certain affection for the young lady who always followed him at the sessions. He had noticed over the weeks that her braids had come out, and her hair was falling around her shoulders in waves, emphasizing the loveliness of her face and drawing attention to the fact that her clothing choices were changing too. Instead of long dresses with sleeves to her wrists, she had started wearing simple blouses and skirts that came to the knee.

Jeffrey concluded that this lady was someone he wanted to meet. But it couldn't be at the office. Clients were not supposed to interact. It was not proper, or good for the therapeutic process. When he finished his therapy he vowed to meet her somehow.

~~~~

Whenever Faith was with the therapist she allowed herself to go into a light trance by thinking of her instructor spinning the pocket watch to put under the student volunteer. It was working. Over the weeks that passed she began to understand that her feelings about sex were slightly warped by her upbringing. She learned to understand what her mother had been going through when she was pregnant. She learned to understand what she herself had been put through by a fringe group of fanatics.

Yes, she came to the conclusion that her religious family was a group of fanatics. It was a breakthrough. And in the process she began to understand that her sexual feelings were a natural thing. That feeling pleasure in sex was perfectly natural. Something that God had given to us in his infinite wisdom. She started to look forward to the time when she would be able to enjoy those sexual feelings.

Her friend Deborah was her cheerleader. Faith had learned about Deborah's pleasures with men, and she had actually not judged her. She had accepted that perhaps Deborah's decisions about her own body were her own to make. Faith had her own feelings to think about. She still didn't know the name of the handsome young man who preceded her...