Hypnosis online is a network of communities. There are erotic and recreational hypnosis fans, who are generally intrinsically motivated: they think hypnosis is cool and want to feel its power for themselves.
There are also people who are writing guides.
Guides to recreational and erotic hypnosis are a lot like guides to having more satisfying sex: while there are technical ways to improve, treating it as a primarily technical topic is a colossal failure of framing.
Yet a lot of people are promising hypnosis as a reliable technical skill. Here's a paragraph from a $5 feeder ebook by Jonathan Royle, who claims to be the fourth person ever inducted into the South African Hypnosis Hall of Fame:
> Now using Royle's approaches of "Mind Emotion Liberation Techniques" which is a hybrid of hypnotherapy and NLP methods, together with his approach of "Complete Mind Therapy" which is also taught within this package, you will be able to consistently perform real miracles of the mind for your audiences and clients.
>
> Within this instantly downloaded package, you will receive a 45-minute training video, a large format A4 size PDF training manual of 513 information-packed pages, and also secret links to access another 47 step-by-step training videos.
Royle has many other similar books and a similar $13 Udemy course. Consuming the content gets you his second-level course which costs $77, his third-level course which costs $177, his fourth-level course which costs $297, and that's as far as I cared to look.
Tommy Vee, a clinical hypnotherapist who likes making people think that they're Superman, has a sales funnel that goes up to $2700 for a three-day in-person course.
There are technical skills, but most are shallow enough that once I've told you what I'm going to teach you, you already know what I'm going to say. For instance, a lot of people will say that you should use the word "imagine" to put people into an imaginative frame of mind, and there's really nothing I can add to that.
So, when you need to produce a tower of ebooks that escalate in size, what's left? From what I can tell, deliberate branding and obfuscation. Do you have the tendency to disagree reflexively with people who are authoritatively telling you about your own experiences? Then you're a "polarity responder" -- a branded word for "disagreeable person."
In some cases, hypnosis itself is rebranded. Jonathan Royle doesn't teach "hypnosis," although he does teach hypnosis -- he teaches a specific form of NLP that he invented. It has a name and its own certifications.
Are these concepts useful? No. Someone can be a polarity responder for a multitude of reasons -- they do not like you, they do not trust you, they want to interact with the process of hypnosis, they feel powerful ambivalence about their own responses -- and all of these are more explanatory of the person's responses than the term "polarity responder."
I spent a while scrolling through r/hypnosis and was just kind of aghast at the amount of content that is (1) contentious (2) founded on absolutely nothing (3) linked to some guru.
There's something else that makes it very hard for me not to read this kind of thing as a scam against newbies.
The phase of hypnosis where a person goes from awake to hypnotized is called an "induction," and learning to do inductions is one of a handful of experiences you can have that will literally make you feel like a wizard in real life.
Any act between consenting adults can constitute "sex." What makes it sex is a function of the people involved: I have no love for feet and no act involving someone else's foot is likely to constitute "sex" for me. For many couples, it's not sex at all if everyone isn't barefoot.
Likewise, a dirty secret that every hypnotist will discover eventually is that you can do almost anything and call it an "induction." Hypnotic induction demands skill, but not technical skill, and it especially demands emotional fondness or at least a sense of understanding between the parties.
The induction is going to be the central point of focus for many new hypnotists and yet it's one of the least technical aspects of hypnotism.
Hypnosis resources for novices focus to a great extent on inductions, and the advice is highly technical: it encourages you to sort your subjects into a great number of categories and warns you that most categories of subject will not respond to most kinds of induction.
This creates a state of mind where before you've actually hypnotized anyone, you've learned a discipline and developed a dependence on a particular curriculum structured in a particular way, and it creates a state where if you encounter failure, you're meant to interpret that failure as a sign that you could have addressed the situation by buying more books.
I think this is a pretty grim situation for new hypnotists. It's not an uncommon situation, though. My actual opinion is that many communities, ultimately, become dominated by the exchange of branded myths. First by a group of first-order myth creators who benefit directly -- the master hypnotists and guru -- second by a group of people who have no chance of being sorted to the top of a community based on charisma, but who have a chance of making it to the top by demonstrating technical knowledge.
Third by people who have no choice but to find the mythical content compelling -- who have been told "believe this now and you can have all the things you want later." These are the true victims -- they're participants not because the myth serves a social function for them but because they actually believe the myth is true. And these are the ultimate bagholders of every self-help community -- crypto, the metaverse.
Hypnotism is actually incredibly satisfying, but my experience is that it's satisfying in a very tactile way. There's a lot of personal discovery involved: you're going to a place that's very intimate, and you're taking someone else, and you don't know what it will be like for both of you.
I believe that in a place where the most intimate content is seen as proprietary to a small number of people who actually participated, there's little room for sorting -- the vast majority of participants can be incomparably assessed as "adequate." I suppose I want to be in spaces that create the potential for that kind of intimacy.
(At the very least, my ideal community would have zero "master hypnotists" in it.)
@pyrex I feel like it gets branded with the same 'brain tax' some mental health products get. It's blocking knowledge because people are either desperate or curious enough to pay for it, or think they need it.