This is a psychology blog site and is all about the interesting side of:

• Hypnosis & Suggestion
• Therapy & personal change
• Subconscious dynamics
• Irrationality
• Neuroscience
• ... and anything else that I want to throw in.

I also do Photo-mosaics, Portrait Sketches, Life Coach tutoring, Web Design and Marketing Consultancy.

There are permanent links to pages on the left, as well as smaller posts on various things below.

If you want to get involved (and I hope you do!) then please leave your own comments, anecdotes or thoughts by clicking on the 'add a comment' bit at the bottom of the relevant section. You can also contact me directly if you wish to. Enjoy the site!

For feedback, comments etc, please add a Comment »

I’m doing a talk this evening and making this post in preparation for anyone who wanted to ‘get stuff’. Thank you for attending, if you did attend that is, and you’re not actually some confused wife-beater in Arizona who found the site after your cat crawled all over the keyboard.

The quote I am going to use is from Awareness by Anthony De Mello, and it goes like this:
“What does it mean to love? It means to see a person, a situation, a thing as it really is, not as you imagine it to be. And to give it the response it deserves. You can hardly be said to love what you do not even see. And what prevents us from seeing? Our conditioning. Our concepts, our categories, our prejudices, our projections, the labels that we have drawn from our cultures and our past experiences. Seeing is the most arduous thing that a human can undertake, for it calls for a disciplined, alert mind. But most people would much rather lapse into mental laziness than take the trouble to see each person, each situation, each thing in its present moment of freshness.”

You can download a page about how language patterns reflect your inner beliefs and attitudes here, and you can download a free extract of my book, Self Help Hypnosis, here.

I really hope you enjoy the evening, that you don’t spot the gorilla, and that you make a horrendous fool of yourself by shouting “milk” when I try to trick you. I hope I remember what I’m doing, and that I don’t get distracted by your about-to-fall-asleep faces.

If you have any feedback or questions about the talk, would be great to hear from you, just click ‘add a comment’ below!

Thank you, Will

The world of therapy, self-help etc really is a massive mish-mash. For the most part, I think alot of it is total horseshit, mostly because the ultimate goal is often to make someone money, not to get someone better. So circular training courses evolve where the trainees pay a lot of money, get their heads packed with optimistic trash, then realise the only way to really use it is to train more people. Also, the therapy industry tends to attract alot of fragile egos who through their own misfortunes want to ‘help people’ but lack the awareness or discpline to achieve that in any lasting, constructive way.

I’ve recognised for a while that the therapy industry is frought with problems. The real tragedy of it is that the people who are exposed to it are at their most vulnerable, and could easily have their problems reinforced and leave feeling hopeless (thinking “well, I tried…”) Hope is the ultimate weapon of the self-help and therapy world, and its exploited far too much.

Since taking a break from hypnotherapy I have been studying and thinking about the patterns that make people get stuck, become free, and the most useful and efficient ways to achieving that. So far my learnings circulate around the ideas that:

- Tools, techniques, and fixes are not the answer, except to small trivial issues. They just delay the greater issue at hand, which is normally that people are living too much in the imagined world in their heads, and not reality.

- Peoples imagined worlds in their heads are full of false meanings, false associations, a need to control life rather than flow with it, anxiety. It prevents people from being able to truly appreciate and ’see’ reality for what it is, as well as other people. They only see what they expect to see, and its usually fear-ridden and negative.

- Becoming aware of yourself and reality is one of the most useful things you can do. Letting go of your expectations, and imagined world, is an essential part of that.

There are all sorts of implications of this. Peoples problems and barriers are actually incredible useful opportunities, because sometimes it takes a massive shock to reach the point of being ready for change, and having the confidence to let go of expectations (of life, self and others). Helping people in small ways to overcome problems but not face the bigger underlying barrier that caused it in the first place can actually be a disservice, because you’re ridding them of the opportunity for true growth. I’ve read lots of case studies of people who in what looks like really unfortunate circumstances, have actually found a new sense of personal freedom. They have let go of something that was previously blocking their perception of reality.

Its all interesting, and it feels right. That isn’t to say it is right, but it is for me right now, and is likely to form the focus of my future workshops.

I’ve just finished a new site for the Binaural Beat CDs, which I’ll add to as time goes on.

Any feedback or thoughts on the site would be most welcome, thanks.

I believe interpersonal relationships form our biggest reservoir of potential in terms of spiritual growth, mental health, and therefore physical wellbeing as a result… In a time of economic hardship, its relevant to remember that great relationships are free and far more useful and powerful than anything you could buy.

The rest of the new page is here

I have just finished work on a new site offering portrait sketches. This is following a recent creative outburst which has had me drawing a few actors on big A2 sheets. I love the peculiar sensation of recognising a portrait sketch – its not exactly a photo – but its enough to fire off your recognition neurons.

Since starting sketching again, I have come into touch with a few others who used to be creative, but then stopped. So if this includes you – get started again! You might be surprised at how much you enjoy it, once you get going.

I often think that the true masters of psychology (and certainly psychological persuasion) aren’t the psychologists, therapists or academics. They are the con artists (and not far behind, the magicians, salesmen, marketing gurus and advertisers).

Con routines are frightening in their vicious sense of shrewd exploitation, but equally fascinating in terms of the psychological dynamics. I was once conned out of $40 on a game on ‘Monty’ in New York, at the time it annoyed the hell out of me, but since has provided lots of food for thought.

Everyone else was a stooge. I was the mark. As I pass by, I am fascinated by the hands offering and taking wads of cash from the main guy, playing the cups and ball routine. People are winning every time, and he’s handing out cash, everyone’s enjoying themselves. As I watch, I am now unwittingly involved. Suddenly, no one is betting, yet to me its obvious that the ball is under a certain cup. The guy doesn’t seem to care about the money anymore – he asks for random guesses. With nothing to lose – I point out the cup I think its under. He nods yes! Well done! And suddenly – hes offering a handful of money! Wow, this guy really is a good guy, I haven’t even bet! I automatically reach out to take the money – but hold on – he remembers that I haven’t put anything up of my own. So he declines, and asks me to prove that I had the money to bet. I take out $40. He takes it, as if suggesting he is just about to offer me the money with his other hand – but then pulls both hands back, including my money. He lifts the cup – obviously I was wrong, I’m the mark, the sleight of hand escaped me. Everyone sighs “aw, bad luck!” someone slaps me on the back, all suggesting “there is nothing you can do now”. Confused, I walk away, going over in my head what just happened, and wondering how I lost $40 (which in hindsight I realise was minimal). I realised I was conned – but by the time I look back – they have all disappeared. I have met people who have a very similar story to tell of how the same thing happened to them. The routine was explained on “The Real Hustle” (pictured) with a detailed account of all the subtleties.

Do you have a story to share of how someone tried (successfully or not) to con you? If so – please provide all the details, it would be great to share the story.

Scent is relatively neglected in terms of how much research and attention the other senses receive. More recently, research has been showing up all sorts of interesting things about smell, such as how our noses adapt to chemicals in the air within twenty minutes (i.e., we can’t smell them anymore).

You have likely experienced the strange phenomenon of having a whole era of your life come flooding into memory when you pass someone with a particular perfume or whiff of hair shampoo. Scent is more entwined with our emotions and memories than we give it credit for, and it operates largely on a purely subconscious level. This is why scent is now becoming a hot area in marketing research.

The picture is for Tom Tykwers movie adaption of Patrick Suskind’s novel, Perfume: Story of a Murderer. More information about the research of scent can be found here.

IF YOU’VE SEEN THE SHOW then please leave your analysis, ideas, observations, reviews etc in the forum / blog bit below, ESPECIALLY if you were chosen for anything!!

If you HAVEN’T seen the show, just go and see it (its worth it) then come back and read the comments. The point here is that the comments may obviously contain spoilers!

My Review of the show:
Personally, Derren’s recent work has been a bit too tricksy for my liking – the frenetic running about with clipboards, envelopes, pens etc just screams ‘mentalism’ and doesn’t capture the psychological intrigue of his earlier work. In fact, I would go as far to say that Derren has broken the rule he spelled out in Pure Effect, the need to convince the audience of the ‘process’ you are pretending to use for that sense of wonder. E.g. the first stage show I saw felt full of wonder, as if the whole audience was together with it. Ever since Something Wicked This Way Comes, I don’t think “wow – he’s reading their body language!” I just think “oh – its a trick”. The first half of Enigma was tricksy, the usual running around reminding the audience of whats happening, frisbees, marker pens, and then gasps of delight as various things are turned around to reveal something. As well as the virtuoso showmanship (not just the usual charismatic presentation but the acting, deception etc) I love the humour of these shows, in fact they could be classed more accurately as comedy magic than psychological magic. Many moments had me laughing out loud. The tricksy-tricksy was redeemed in the second half, where Derren surprised the hell out of me by using genuine hypnosis (as opposed to the pseudo ‘bow your head, look hypnotised and write something on this clipboard that I can use as a trick’ hypnosis that hes used in stageshows before.) Surprising because he hasn’t done it on stage before (at least to this extent) and also because there are laws in Britain about public hypnosis acts that he somehow sidestepped. A spirit cabinet routine similar to seance was excellent as live entertainment, very visual and interesting, I still have no idea how it works. The problem here is that Derren’s rushing about strips it of the potential wonder and intrigue it could have had – had he framed it more patiently, it would have been a lot more eerie. On the whole though, although slightly flawed and annoyingly tricksy in places, its very funny and interesting enough to make it worthwhile.

Blessed are Fox Broadcasting for knocking out another belter of a show. Lie to Me stars Tim Roth (Mr Orange in Reservoir Dogs, an excellent British actor) and follows the endlessly interesting day job of an expert in body language and lie detection. Puzzles are solved in a format similar to CSI, your first impressions of a situation gradually evolve during an episode to reveal an unpredictable twist of events. Its based on the work of Paul Ekman, whose books Telling Lies and Emotions Revealed are recommended for anyone interested in observational psychology. I love this show – not quite as much as Dexter but its getting there.

In my Exeter Hypnotherapy practice I met a lot of clients with problems of anxiety, life confusion, panic attacks etc. Underneath the surface of confidence, contentment etc, most lives are anything but. I found this article quite interesting.