Wasting time in boobless hypnotherapy

Anyone with the slightest glimmer of a brain cell, literally only the faintest twitch of a barely functioning intellect can see through pseudo scientific fuckery like astrology without having to think much beyond the startlingly obvious fact that people clearly can’t be boxed solidly into 12 neat categories that determines to a very specific level their personalities. It is just one more checked box in a long, long list that in its entirety reduces my opinion of humankind to somewhere between that you’d have of a paedophilic rapist knowingly carrying AIDS and a fleck of feces caught under the foreskin of a war criminal.

How in 2010 can this be a functioning, profitable and popular enough industry to be represented daily in the many national newspapers? I’m sure that in most cases it’s not the case that the people keeping this going are unaware of the fact that people conceived on the same day don’t all share the exact same destiny from the moment they are born, an apparently obvious fact that should, if the general public weren’t for the most part a retarded tribe of rampaging chimps, bring the whole charade crashing spectacularly into oblivion. But it doesn’t. Because they are. I think instead that the majority of those profiting, directly or indirectly, are well aware of the fact it’s about as credible as a politician a week before a general election telling you that he will make your girlfriend’s tits bigger if he gets your vote.

Astrology you could argue is a relatively harmless past time compared with say, people who take money off the recently bereaved by claiming to be able to communicate with their dead loved one. Which is basically, in a roundabout way, like saying that breaking into someone's house and taking their money from their wallet is ok, because you could have done it after slicing their throats and raping their spouse in front of them as they bled to death. In my eyes, it’s basically still theft by fraud.

I’m writing this not just because I’m a deeply bitter and angry person who needs to vent on a blog like a socially inept teenager with a barely concealed psychological disorder, but because recently I went to have hypnotherapy. This, I hasten to add, was done to aid my second serious attempt to quit smoking, as opposed to help with something weird, like repressed memories of a violent sexual assault by my scout master when I was 15. For instance.

As well as thinking that it might help, and I was willing to try pretty much anything after the full brutality and suddenness of finally understanding that my will power is not so much a power as a feeble, fleeting thought process that is immediately and overwhelming crushed by my desire for instant gratification, I was also curious about the whole hypnotherapy gig. I thought it might be interesting.

It was not. It was intensely and utterly boring. I would have rather been watching an England friendly, it was that bad.

My immediate feelings weren’t actively discouraged by the fact that the hypnotherapist was a not unattractive woman. In the long run I’m not sure if this actively went some way to preventing my fully immersing myself in the experience, things were onto a downer as soon as I realised I would not be asked to slip into a deep hypnotic slumber by staring at the rhythmic jiggling of her massive sweater puppies. Instead I was expected to listen to her talk, slowly, in a thick German accent trying to tell me I was feeling sleepy and my eyes were feeling heavy. I wasn’t, and they weren’t, but I closed my eyes out of politeness. I literally conned her into thinking that my hundred pounds for her work wasn’t being wasted. Idiot.

Things continued like this for a while. I lay there and she told me to believe I was on a field. What sort of field I thought? Immediately I thought of a park where we used to play football when we were young. Our generation, along with those before and after us in the area have consistently referred to this place as ‘Dog Shit Park’ and a less relaxing environment you could not imagine. Be it the massive motorway running alongside it, the psychotic local hooligans that frequented its benches to smoke and drink cheap cider, or the frankly illogical amounts of excreted dog food that blended seamlessly into the mud and bare patches of brown grass, it is not the place that one would wish to lie in and slip into a state of sleep. You’d be mugged in a second.

At first I blamed myself for my inability to be succumbed by the power of her suggestion. God that sounds dirty doesn’t it? I thought I was doing it wrong, or that I was over analysing things in my head. It was only afterwards that I thought to read up a bit about the subject. Which, on reflection, is a bit like a man who’s never seen a bicycle, reading up about them after spending a lot of money on two tennis balls connected by a lollipop stick.

As it turns out, there is absolutely fuck all evidence that hypnotherapy actually works, and by evidence, I mean real evidence, as opposed to the kind of evidence that religious people use to convince themselves that a virgin woman gave birth after being convinced to eat a piece of fruit from a magical tree by a talking snake. It seems that what is going on, as far as can be determined, is a mixture of exactly what I was feeling, namely an unwillingness to offend the hypnotist by standing up and telling them that jack shit is happening and that clearly they are either abject failures at their professions or the industry they have dedicated their lives to is as valuable to society as a sugar pill, and what is called ‘the dodo effect’. This refers to the placebo element of someone believing in the power of the ‘treatment’ they are receiving along with the person delivering the ‘treatment’. Under these conditions you could, in all seriousness, have someone spanked with the corpse of a heron while reciting the script of the second series of Cheers and they would be more likely to recover from whatever mental illness was being worked on, than if they did nothing.

In short, how fucking weird are we?