A METAPHORICAL INTERVENTION
Monsters And Magical Sticks: There’s No Such Thing As Hypnosis? – Steven Heller and Terry Steele
I do apologise for my husband, hypno-peeps.
Yes, you read that right. Kev and I are newlyweds! Gratuitous photo of our Gretna Green elopement below left for your viewing pleasure. (Note my commitment to subliminal persuasion experiments even plays out in my non-conventional outfit choice.)
But, much as I love and adore Kev, his tyranny of maths and studiousness must be stopped in order to restore the Cosmic Pancakes! universe to its correct levels of retro-hypno-absurdity.
This was a challenge for me because I was scheduled to reflect upon The Structure of Magic II, the second NLP source book. But I realised I couldn’t subject you to such dullness so soon after Kev’s statistical assault, and so reached for something suitably quirky...
Monsters And Magical Sticks: There’s No Such Thing As Hypnosis? is, IMO, a must-read hypnosis classic first published in 1987.
Its lead author is Steven Heller, a US psychologist who was renowned for his own-brand hypnotherapy as both a therapist and trainer. His co-author, Terry Steele, is described as his student, colleague and friend, though the philosophy and approach are very much Heller’s.
The book is a mind-bending, paradoxical, mad, roving and occasionally grating read. Here’s Heller’s opening quote:
“It is my belief that all presenting problems and symptoms are really metaphors that contain a story about what the problem really is. It is, therefore, the responsibility of the therapist to create metaphors that contain a story that contains the (possible) solutions. The metaphor is the message… Hypnosis is, in and of itself, a metaphor within a metaphor…”
This is my kind of book – metaphors within metaphors!. But Heller provides a useful metaphor later on for me to illustrate the challenges of loosening readers’ grips on their realities:
“Once one individual discovers 31 flavors of ice cream, he will find it difficult to insist that there is only vanilla. I hope to point out throughout this book that hypnosis is, itself, a very powerful metaphoric state; that the problem itself is a metaphor based on old belief systems that were produced by conditions that could be labelled hypnosis. It would seem logical, therefore, to grasp and use this powerful tool called hypnosis to help build new, graceful and efficacious metaphors. These new metaphors will then be directed toward new choices and responses to the “real” world.”
Much of this book, therefore, is about the 30 new flavours of ice cream to add to your vanilla world. Heller uses stories, anecdotes and case studies to open us up to these flavours. Indeed, the title – Monsters And Magical Sticks – is about a child who is given a physical magical stick to ward off the imaginary monsters that plague him at night.
But a key ingredient is a lot of NLP as well as Heller’s own techniques and trainings. I guess it’s clear by now I’m neither a fan of NLP nor of people making therapy up as they go along. The authors are complementary of Richard Bandler and John Grinder, and, while they’re at pains to say they aren’t “NLP’ers”, much of it does just feel like a psychonautics riff off it.
That said, there is plenty of Heller’s own-brand inspiration in here – ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’ and ‘out of consciousness system’ stayed with me since my first read a few years back.
And as for the psychonautics! Now, I have a high threshold for separating out metaphors and concepts from the rumours, lies and misinformation that pass for ‘reality’, but the book is packed with rhetorical, provoking and paradoxical questions. The purposely provocative question mark in the subtitle is, I think, very effective, but this what I came to find grating…
And that’s the challenge of convincing a vanilla world there are 30 more flavours, isn’t it? Or maybe there is only vanilla..? Your mother was your first hypnotist and everything you believe is probably a lie. Here, eat your vanilla ice cream, sheeple. Etc, etc, etc.
Heller is drawing upon the reality-shaking writing and work of Robert Anton Wilson, who introduces the book. Wilson’s book Illuminatus! changed my life and so I’m probably a harsher judge than most in finding Heller’s written deployment of suggestion a bit crude.
Wilson’s intro was a major draw for me in reading this book. I’d heard he taught hypnosis in early NLP workshops with Bandler, which he references here, and was curious to learn more. However, Wilson – true to form – opens our mind rather than fills it; hypnosis is both nothing and everything, does and doesn’t exist, and spans meditation, Christian Science, science-science and mysticism.
As he sums up: “It is hard to believe that there is no such thing as hypnosis although we are hypnotizing ourselves and one another all the time.”
