Stealth Tactics in Hypnosis: What Are Stealth Tactics

Conversational Hypnosis is an art of communicating suggestions to other while they are in a state of trance.  The suggestions you are giving to audience should be ones that will help them to live happier, healthier and more fulfilling lives.  The question becomes how to get the very suggestions in to a persons mind when they reject them.

Everyone has what we refer to as a critical filter.  This is the mechanism inside your mind that analyzes and criticizes information coming in from outside sources.  The critical filters decide what is safe to allow inside our minds.  They are also responsible for creating resistance for hypnotists.  They look at all the messages being sent to the mind and either reject or accept them. 

There are times when a person’s critical filter has become overactive and will start to reject even the good and wise suggestions coming from anyone.  A good example of this is when a friend, someone you would normally trust, gives you a great piece of advice and you just outright reject and discard it with no thought.  The critical filter has come to a point where it is simply not allowing any information in.

Stealth Tactics are the tool hypnotists and you will use to get past the critical factor.  They were created in a way to assist in helping to influence people in a positive way that still bypasses the critical factor inside the mind.  There are other ways to get past the critical factor although they are largely damaging and can cause emotional and mental hardship which should not be your goal in hypnosis.  In fact quite the opposite. 

Stealth Tactics are a secretive way of getting past the critical factor that doesn’t resort to bullying.  These concepts are based on a set of principals that will allow you to use people’s strengths against them in ways that will help them to improve their lives in the ways they want.  True they are a bit sneaky, as you will see, but all intentions with Stealth Tactics are truly good intentions.  It is simply an alternative way to get inside the mind so you can begin your work as a hypnotist.

There are five Stealth Tactics that we will give a brief explanation of here and then dive further into in future articles.

The first Stealth Tactic is the Law of Reversed Effect.  This principal is very powerful like most of the Stealth Tactics.  In the Law of Reversed Effect the concept is that the harder you try to do something the more likely it is you will fail.  

This happens mainly because a person that is consciously trying to do something that should be taking place unconsciously.  The effect of the conscious mind interfering with the fluid movements of the unconscious mind is confusion and failure. 

The reason the Law of Reversed Effect works for Conversational Hypnotists is that when put into action it causes a person to fail at something, you cause a person to fail at a requested task.  That failure will cause the person to step away from their resistance and allow your suggestions in.

The second Stealth Tactic is to Redirect Resistance.  Redirecting Resistance is the art of giving a person something they can resist you over so they feel validated and powerful in their abilities to control their own mind. 

Now the beauty here is that while they are busy resisting you over an idea that you are really not concerned with you have the opportunity to give your suggestions to them.  Many times they will be so busy consciously resisting the one aspect that the important suggestion is never even noticed going in.

Refocusing Attention is the third Stealth Tactic and it can be used right along with Redirecting Resistance.  We will cover that aspect in a future article.  The importance here is that you have a brief summary of Refocusing Attention.

Refocusing Attention is when you subtly place the suggestion you want to get across in conversation and then distract or refocus the listener’s attention elsewhere.   This is a simple and easy process once you get the hang of it but can be very powerful when put to full use.

The fourth Stealth Tactic is Implication.  Implication is the power of how to use body language, facial expressions and tone of voice in order to imply a thing.  This is considered a Stealth Tactic because when you imply something to someone it usually bypasses the critical filter simply because we assume implications are true. 

People don’t typically stop to analyze them because this is a lot of hard work and effort to put in to an implied idea.  This tactic is used everyday in the natural ways we speak and can be a great tool in hypnosis.

Presuppositions are the fifth Stealth Tactic we will eventually cover in depth.  As for a quick introduction, presuppositions are simply linguistic assumptions.  These are the things that are automatically assumed to be true based solely on the language we use to convey them. 

This may sound complicated at first but once you get into the habit of using presuppositions they are very easy to use and you in fact use them everyday.  Presuppositions have a lot in common with implications simply because they are assumptions.  Again this Stealth Tactic is very powerful and can be like all the Stealth Tactics layered with the others to make a more powerful affect than when used alone.

Finally the sixth Stealth Tactic is called Binds and Double Binds.  Binds and Double Binds are a strategic way of phrasing a statement or question that gives the illustration of a choice but that choice really does not exist.  It was thought in the 1970’s that binds and double binds were the cause of schizophrenic symptoms resulting from childhood. 

A bind or double bind is a sneaky way of redirecting the resistance of a person because they simply do not have a choice in the matter.  You sound as if you are asking a question or giving a choice but you are really getting a much bigger question answered in the process. 

A famous Marx Brothers line that is a double bind is when a man asks the hotel manager, “So are you still beating your wife, yes or no?”  The bind is in that no matter how he answered the question he would be admitting guilt of beating his wife.

Binds and double binds are a very powerful way to bypass the critical factor as are all the other Stealth Tactics.  You will learn much more about these and how to use them as you progress through the next five articles.  Until then the main concept you need to know is that these are principals that can be combined with one another and the other language skills you have been learning in order to really know how to begin to communicate hypnotically.

For more information please visit http://www.conversational-hypnosis.com