Do Hypnotists Have Special Powers?

Do hypnotists have a secret and special power that allows them to powerfully and magically influence others? There is a certain mystique surrounding the profession that seems to suggest that, however the truth is far different and really quite empowering.

Chances are you have heard about the many well documented cases where an ordinary person demonstrated what seems to be superhuman strength during an emergency situation.

For example, a man is working beneath his car when the jack slips, pinning him beneath thousands of pounds of steel.

Acting quickly, his mother rushes over and lifts the car, allowing him to escape and saving his life.

Now would it be accurate to say the emergency endowed her with abnormal strength? From a scientific viewpoint the answer is no. If her nerves, muscles, bones and connective tissue were not capable of generating sufficient force in the first place, her son would have remained trapped.

What happened was that the dire circumstance allowed her to bypass the belief, “there is no way I could ever lift a car!”

Now let’s imagine a stage hypnotist is putting on a show in a local comedy club.  One of his volunteers is a well-built young man. The suggestion is offered to him, “in a moment when I count to three and snap my fingers, your right foot will feel too heavy lift off the floor, the harder you try to lift it, the more stuck, the more glued town it becomes.”

1-2-3 SNAP! and in short order his friends in the audience have their  jaws hanging open. The strongest guy they know is now too weak to lift his own foot!

Now did the hypnotist actually remove someone’s strength in this case? No, the young man’s body still had the potential to carry out the easy act of lifting his foot. However his belief in his ability to do so had changed for the time being and his unconscious mind made the nervous and muscular adjustments needed to follow the suggestion and keep his foot stuck.

One more example. Half the volunteers in a clinical trial for a new pain killing drug are given a placebo, a pill that contains nothing more than powdered sugar. Yet a significant number of them report they feel much better.

What has been discovered is that the belief the placebo effect can actually result in a person to increase the manufacture of their bodies own pain-killing substances known as endorphins.

In all of these examples what we have seen is how changes in perception and perception can increase or decrease our ability to express our true potential.

So to answer the original question as to whether a professional hypnotist has special or magical powers, the answer is no. Rather he or she is more like a catalyst that enables you to more fully access your true inner potential-which I suspect is far greater than you may realize!