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I am delighted to announce that my latest audio programme "The Hypnotic Wealth Mindset - Using Hypnosis To Be Wealthier" is now available and on general sale. 

You can read all about it and even hear the first audio of the programme at this page of our online store. 

I am incredibly proud of the programme and the way we have approached this subject matter - adhering to evidence and ethics as much as possible. 

I think everyone who buys it will derive great benefit from it.

I was discussing facets of the Wealth Mindset programme with a mentoring think tank group of leading peers who asked me about some of the content. They asked if I talked about influence of external forces in people's lives and how to deal with those - particular circumstances and problematic people, for example.

There are skills within the programme that equip people to be able to deal with anything relating to developing wealth. Our discussion went on and became very interesting because we got talking about friendships and I thought I'd share some of those discussions with you here this week. 

I remember starting out exploring the fields of success, achievement and personal development and whilst exploring many different authors and gurus in the area of wealth, I came across those guys in the US such as Brian Tracey and Jim Rohn. I can remember hearing Jim Rohn saying on a recording that your income would be the average of the five closest people around you... At that time in my life, I gulped heavily! Although that was not the sole reason, it was not much longer after listening to that recording, that I moved to a new area to live and sought out some other close friends. People that were more attuned to the kind of life I wanted to lead.   

There are those that also tend to believe the notion of the 5 people closest to you extends into other areas as well as wealth... Your health and relationships too, for example.

In this life, as we develop and mature and change, many people and things that no longer serve you tend to fall away... Then we simply replace them with people and things that suit who and how we are and want to be. I don't just choose my friendships based upon level of wealth of estimated income... rather, upon a wide variance of things that are good for me to be around and interact with, things that stimulate me, that I learn from, that I laugh about and get joy from... And I hope I reciprocate the same.

I'm not suggesting that we eject anyone who has yet to hit some dizzy heights, but just that we are aware of how those around us affect us... And we are also aware of how we move forward with our lives.

If you are one of those people that is a good listener, you may well have become aware of how some friends unload their issues and sorrows upon you whenever they get the chance, right? We all have a friend or two like that I think. 

Now it is not necessarily because they're looking for pity or are attempting to abuse your friendship. It may actually be because they know you listen, and talking about this stuff gives them some tempo­rary relief from the emotional pain they found themselves with.

Many of these people apply a sense of logic. Mr Spock style. And today, I wanted to share with you my thoughts on learning to use that very same logic to help change beliefs of those people whose friendship could do with some updating rather than just deleting!

When some of these people use logic to explain their hardship, they can firmly convince you how stuck they are because they are so convinced of it themselves. They can prove that their range of choices is limited. They may well re­fuse to listen to anything that con­tradicts their logic, and very often, they are pessimistic about the future. These are people that can end up affecting our own well-being and attitude, friends or not.

In an attempt to soften their stance, they may even express themselves as if their values and integrity are on the line, and their suffering is a result of them trying to stay moral and honest and gen­erous. They tend to believe that the world is doing these things to them, that they are a victim of circumstance and very often, they fail to see their own role or level of responsibility in the entire thing.

In my therapy rooms and in my personal life, I have encountered many of these kinds of people who leave you with the feel­ing that they're not really making any valiant attempt to change their situation. It may well suit them to be this way. 

Some of these people can even go on to develop some un­known and unexplained illness or physical weakness. Many arrive at my doors with their doctors unable to pinpoint anything actually wrong with them. That currently, they have no real idea what the reasons for the illness are.

These people are sometimes seeking attention or love. They may be seeking the caring look. They may be seeking an emo­tional punching bag. They may want to unload their emotional burden... Though in a few days time, it has all returned.. 

Am I painting a picture here?

But this person is your friend.... "And just because Adam has been reading years of wealth guru advice, discussing this with his professional peers and being told to let go of problematic friendships to enhance your own life, does not mean I have to, so there!" 

And that's ok. If you only have one of these kinds of friends, great. If you have more, it is surely a time for a different strategy to handle them, because eventually they may get better while you get worse... Or you may just get dragged into their place unwittingly.

The solution is simpler than you may think. Aristotle thought about it ages ago, but in a slightly different context.

Aristotle came up with the concept of Deduction. It's oppo­site, Abduction, is an integral part of this model of thought also.

Deduction is the common logic which depressed optimists use to confine themselves in their prob­lems. The logic is obvious but ab­surd if you dissect it objectively. A typical thought stream of these kinds of people would go like this:

A. "I am a foreigner"

B. "Foreigners find it very difficult to get a good job in this country"

C. "I will never get a good job here"

The equation of deduction is simple and as follows:

A = B ;

B = C ; therefore

A = C

And it is logical, because the minute you accept the B = C state­ment, the belief is set in motion. The challenging part here is to handle the fact that they are con­vinced already before they made this statement. So even if you try to negate B = C and claim that B = D and not C, it is not accepted and even ridiculed by the depressed optimist.

The "remedy" for this is using the oth­er process which is called Abduction. here is an example to respond to the above statements: 

A. "You are an educated and ex­perienced person"

B. "Foreigners in this country are not all exactly the same and also vary in terms of educa­tion and experience"

C. "As long as you are seen as more suitable, maybe even superior to other foreigners, it gives you a higher chance to get a better job in this country"

A = B ;

C < B ; therefore

(B > C) = A

If you run this formula thought­fully and design it to fit the de­pressed optimist you're dealing with, it gets them thinking. If they come up with another excuse, make a decision and choose if it is actually a valid ex­cuse or a miserable attempt to get you to think they're hopeless. If it's the second case, give them that non­believer doubting look! 

You can tinker with the way you apply logic, use this equation and help conversationally change the belief of someone that is hellbent on being the eternal pessimist and get their only slight good feelings from unloading upon you. 

Friends are there for each other, though some might need letting go of if they are really not allowing you to move forward with your own life. When someone behaves in a destructive way, it is also your responsibility (to yourself and to them) to offer up a healthy way of living, thinking and addressing the issue at hand. If it restricts your life and limits your own possibilities, you may need to step away from them. Sometimes perhaps even the fear of losing a good friend drives people into a major positive change.... ??

If you are perfectly happy in your life and with your friendships, then this may not even apply to you. However, sometimes we have friends that may be detrimental to our health, our way of life, our other relationships, our direction, and perhaps even our sense of wealth.... Just a few thoughts that came up in my group discussion this week, maybe it'll get you thinking too.

This weekend I will be lecturing at the University of East London at the 'Change Phenomena' conference. I will present material about the Cognitive Behavioural model of hypnosis, which I believe is the most evidence-based and scientifically sound approach to hypnosis. 

When I teach that model of hypnosis, the one that is at the centre of my recent 'Science of Self-Hypnosis' book, a lot of people ask me about Derren Brown. 

They often ask me that if my evidence-based model of hypnosis is true, then how do I explain what Derren Brown does - in particular the stuff he did for his show of a couple of years ago.... 'The Assassin' for his TV series The Experiments.

The Assassin attempted to show that an individual could be hypnotised to commit murder on another, famous individual.

I thought it was very entertaining - good TV is supposed to be so. Yet I also thought it misleading and ill-informing, and that is in no way meant to be derogatory to the viewers of such TV shows.

http://www.channel4.com/info/press/programme-information/derren-brown-the-experiments

Regardless of what I thought and rather than offering up pure opinion and cursory judgment, I thought I'd write about the evidence base in relation to that ever-so-hot debate that rears it's head in the hypnosis world on a regular basis, and which was opened once again with the Derren Brown TV show... Whether someone who is hypnotised can be made to commit criminal or immoral deeds that they would not usually do.

In coming weeks I'll be releasing a video clip about what hypnosis actually is. I do not believe hypnosis is something which is just 'done to' others. Rather, hypnosis is a collaborative process requiring the hypnotised individual to engage actively with their own imagination and cognitions and adopt a series of particular attitudes and expectancies. 

This debate about whether hypnosis can be used to make people do things against their will has been central to the field for many, many years before I came along. Theodore Barber discussed it back in the late 1960s in his work Hypnosis: A scientific approach (1969), for example.

Throughout the years, most of the claims that hypnosis made by people to suggest hypnosis can make people engage in immoral or criminal acts tend to have been refuted by authors and academics. One early rebuttal of this notion can be found in the 1972 work by Wolberg entitled Hypnosis: Is it for you? In which he states:

"... read widely through one hundred and fifty years of medical literature and case histories and found no proof of a single violent crime committed under hypnosis... each subject could have committed the crime of which he was accused without the formality of hypnosis." (p. 279)

There have actually been a couple of cases here and there which are exceptions to the thoughts of those sympathising with the above notion.

In the 1989 Old Bailey court case of R. v. Mohammed, Sarah Mohammed had been accused of involvement in a murder attempt. Expert evidence given by Dr Mottahedin and Professor Hayward at the trial suggested that Sarah Mohammed had become a slave to her husband as a result of being hypnotised and subsequently brainwashed by him.

Dr Mottahedin subsequently wrote about this in the Journal of Contemporary Hypnosis in 1992 in his work entitled "Was hypnosis involved in the Nelson case?" and suggests that it was because of the evidence he gave that Sarah Mohammed received a suspended sentence while her husband got 8 years in prison.

There have been other attempts made in a court of law to suggest hypnosis was used to aid the crime. For those interested in further investigation, please take a look at the Australian court cases of R. v. Palmer (New South Wales Supreme Court) in 1979 whereby the judge believed the accused hypnotised the victim of an alleged rape to make the crime easier, and the case of R. v. Davies (County Court of Melbourne) in 1986 where again, the accused was supposed to have used hypnosis to disable the alleged victims ability to resist the rape.

Despite hypnosis being used in these cases, there was no discernable or indisputable evidence to demonstrate that hypnosis actually was used to make these things happen; just that it was involved. Isolating hypnosis as the cause has been incredibly difficult and troublesome to prove. If you adopt the same definition to hypnosis as I do, you'll know that it is actually a non-discussion, because hypnosis is collaborative, a process, 'a verb' that the subject actively engages in - not something used to wield in the manner it is often portrayed by media and other myth-inducing, ill-informed sources.

Those academics defending the previous, skeptical position about hypnosis being able to make people commit criminal acts argue that in these cases, the same crime could have occurred without hypnosis and evidence did often demonstrate the criminals propensity for related behaviours and indicators of people who perpetrate such crimes.

In the case where Dr Mottahedin was the expert witness, the accused had actually been charged with various other sexual offences before this case, for example.  The case files and subsequent papers do present some fascinating reading, albeit all rather inconclusive.

As a result of the difficulty in real-life scenarios to isolate the so-called hypnotic effects of a crime from the other contributory factors, researchers have taken the issues to the laboratories to examine whether hypnosis can be used to make people commit crimes or immoral acts.

Soooo... If you look back at the research from the 1930s, 1940s and even the 1950s, some of the results would suggest that people can be made to do criminal and crazy acts as a result of being hypnotised: 

Rowland's 1939 paper Will hypnotized persons try to harm themselves or others? In the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology concluded that; 

"persons in deep hypnosis will allow themselves to be exposed to unreasonably dangerous situations. They also will perform acts unreasonably dangerous to others. A possible explanation, hinted at in two places in the account, is that confidence in the hypnotist causes the subject to forego his better judgment. If this be true, it follows that only professional psychologists should be permitted to make use of deep hypnosis. The author feels that the common belief that hypnotized persons will not perform acts that violate their ideals is badly in need of re-examination." 

I highlighted that bit at the end as I thought it made the authors point.

Brenman's 1942 study Experiments in the hypnotic production of antisocial and self-injurous behavior in the Psychiatry journal states:  

"Emphasizing that the subjects were not deceived but had a full understanding that the situation was purely experimental, the author found that hypnotized subjects could be induced to perform acts which under non-experimental personal and social conditions would be asocial in character."

Young's 1952 paper Antisocial uses of hypnosis in Experimental hypnosis states the following (I find this hilarious): 

"Rowland and Young found that hypnotized Ss were willing to carry out such apparently antisocial actions as grasping a dangerous reptile, plunging their hand into concentrated acid, and throwing the acid at an assistant."

How much fun they must have had putting this study together!

Following these studies though, subsequent researchers and academics have scrutinised them and explain the findings in terms of the research subjects wanting to please and aid the researcher and hypnotist, believing that what they were doing was actually perfectly safe, and assuming that someone else was ultimately responsible for any wrong-doing.

I think these arguments could be given to everything done within the Derren Brown TV show too, don't you?

Theodore Barber refuted much of the above research findings with those arguments in his 1961 paper Antisocial and criminal acts induced by 'hypnosis': A review of clinical and experimental findings in the Archives of General Psychiatry (1961). There are many similar arguments made by many other respected authors and academics in this field.

Graham Wagstaff (in Hypnosis, compliance and belief, 1981 and elsewhere) has written in much depth suggesting that whether they have been hypnotised or not, subjects are very motivated to fit in with the context of the research, including pleasing the person instructing the research. You only need to look at Milgrams infamous 1974 study whereby a set of people (all of whom were not hypnotised formally) knowingly administered what they believed to be lethal electric shocks to others because they were told to do so by the research leader.  

Many further studies since have gone on to show that non-hypnotised subjects will just as easily perform criminal, anti-social or immoral acts than anyone who does so as a result of hypnosis being used. A large number of studies in the 1970s support this. Here are a couple of examples for you to start from: 

Coe, Kobayashi and Howard (1972) An approach toward isolating factors that influence antisocial conduct in hypnosis. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis.

O'Brien and Rabuck (1976) Experimentally produced self-repugnant behavior as a function of hypnosis and waking suggestion. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis.

Therefore, with the addition to the large body of evidence and studies to support it, most professionals in the field of hypnosis (well, this is spurious, I should qualify this and state "most that I encounter" and recognise that this is not well evidenced) believe that hypnosis does not render individuals out of control of themselves so as they can be told to partake in criminal acts and they are no more likely than non-hypnotised individuals to do any such things.

To further add to this, in 1995 a study by Vingoe entitled Beliefs of British law and medical students compared to an expert criterion group on forensic hypnosis featured in Contemporary Hypnosis surveyed 10 prominent forensic hypnosis experts all of whom rejected the idea that the hypnotist has control over the individual when the individual is hypnotised. Thus not being able to make them commit crimes in the way depicted in the Derren Brown show.

It is a debate that won't stop with me, or with Derren Brown's elegant and dramatic depictions on TV... But I hope I have shed some light on what an evidence based hypnosis professional thinks of all the hullabaloo created by such TV shows.

Joke Of The Week

Three criminals are sentenced to exile in the desert and can only bring one personal item.

"I brought a loaf of bread, so when I get hungry, I'll have something to eat," said the first criminal.

"I brought a water skin, so that when I get thirsty, I'll have something to drink," said the second.

The third criminal looks proud of himself. "I brought a car door, so when it gets hot, I can roll down the window." 

Hahaha, I love that one.  Thank you to everybody who continues to contribute to the jokes in the Hub and those who email me jokes every week. I love getting them.

Articles Of The Week

Here are a selection of topical articles that I enjoyed reading this week, often related to the fields of hypnosis, hypnotherapy, psychotherapy and other forms of personal development. Some may have just amused me or made me smile. My personal comments about them are in brackets and just because we feature an article here, it does not mean they represent my own views - most often, they do not! If you ever come across any related articles that you think may feature well, then get in touch with me and we can share them here:

- Women try self-hypnosis for easy, comfortable childbirth:

- Woman has wisdom tooth extracted under self hypnosis:

- Past life TV shows leave prof sceptical:

- Meet the Sex Hypnotherapist Helping the GOP Retake the Senate:

- Finally, I thought I'd mention the Change Phenomena hypnosis conference for the final time as it is this very weekend. Many of those from my school are going this year and it is the best hypnosis conference around in my opinion, do come and join us:

More next time.

If you want to train to be a hypnotherapist, there has never been a better time, we are thriving in this economic climate! 

If you'd like to train, check out here for a course prospectus, dates and application form for this year's diploma, fully approved and accredited in several countries... 

The spaces are going at some pace right now though... 

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I'll be back next week ... I thank you for reading...  Goodbye for now.

Bulooo!