Hypnosis as a child

I was on my way to the food shelf this morning and was hit by an anxiety attack. It was too much for me to deal with, and I had to come back home empty-handed. I was inspired to write this post because these things that trigger my anxiety are not so much mine as they are remnants of fears caused by cognitive dissonance and early programming.

I started guided meditation and shamanic journeying in my teens. I was 15 when I had my first session at Upward Bound, and I found it easy enough to do on my own that I practiced for 30-45 minutes a day until 1994/95 when my spirituality ceased right up until four years ago. I was on a mission to understand everything I could, and just after my 16th birthday, I experienced a profound moment of spiritual wakefulness during a private session and it changed my life. The universe made sense to me as well as my place in it. I was happy. I was feeling safe and secure in my forward journey and gaining new insights with every meditative session I had. I met Danielle at the Halloween dance that year and fell in love the moment I saw her. I recognized her — more on that some other time — in a way that’s difficult to describe, and I was immediately hers. None of that is the point of this entry, but I needed to work up to what I’m trying to write and provide context for why it matters so much to me.

Later that year — the same year I had a spiritual awakening and fell profoundly in love — it came up that my mother hypnotized me nightly from about 2 years old to the age of 9 or 10 or so. Danielle and I were hosting a group guided meditation session at her house late that fall, and I encountered a strange being/sensation in my usually safe internal landscape. It was a dark, tall menacing figure that stayed just on the edge of my peripheral vision as I meditated. I couldn’t shake it like my usual thoughts or presences. Frankly, it was frightening.

I mentioned it to my mother — because I felt compelled to tell her everything — and she casually mentioned that she placed a “protector” inside of my mind when I was a child because she thought I was too violent and angry. She told me all about her methodology, what she planted and how she felt it was helping me. And as she talked, I began to remember… She described how she programmed my thinking and mental organization (as a “card catalog”) from very early on, taught me under a hypnotic state what and how to think, gave me the phrase “I don’t need to think about that” and suggested to me it be used whenever something was too complicated, painful, or didn’t fit in the schema she gave me. I could remember more the longer she went on about it: how she suggested new ideas to me to replace ones that she felt were bad, and how I was a better person because of it. In other words, I didn’t learn from my experiences, I was programmed based on my mother’s interpretion of them. Typing this out now is causing me to shake so much I can barely think, but at the time I happily agreed with her: I was under her command.

I don’t know how to communicate what it feels like to learn that your thoughts, behavioral tendencies, memories, feelings are not actually the ones developed through time and experience, but a series of hypnotic suggestions designed to control your life. And she wasn’t talking about a few times when I was traumatized, but every night she could while reading to me from “Peter Pan”. Right? How could I NOT have psychological and “mommy” issues? So anyhow … her key text was the Peter Pan novel, specifically the section where Wendy’s mother would turn on the nightlights. You know, the section that held such praise for the mother … She would read that and then start to count down using a combination of the Silva Mind Control Method and guided meditation techniques she had learned from a family friend — who I also spent weekends with and who had journal entries (I discovered two years ago) of how he also participated in several of these sessions — and then she would “ask me about my day”.

(reads some of the text… “breathe in and out slowly … deep breaths” … reads more of the text “nightlight for protection…. that’s right. easy breathing … I’d like to hear about your day” more of the text etc.)

And I told her everything. I couldn’t help it. Girls I liked, bullies I was afraid of, thoughts I had, fears, things that had happened. And as I talked, she would decide what thoughts stayed and what thoughts “I don’t need to think about” anymore and then she would give me other memories for the day that she felt were good ones to have, or she would tell me to hold on to certain things and let go of others, which friends I should like and not, etc.

I felt invaded in a way that I didn’t think was possible. Memories that I had of my childhood I suddenly realized were memories of my mother telling me what my childhood was like. I had very, very few actual memories of lived experiences. And those were sketchy and hazy on good days. And my mind worked exactly as her programming dictated: a card catalog-like structure of two-dimensionally associated arrays of information — a literal compartmentalization of my life with no possible nuances.

As I stood there listening to her tell me this story, as though she was a hero for doing it, I felt completely violated. I was a non-violent teenage Manchurian Candidate or a replicant. The only thing I could hold on to was the present moment because the past was violated. It was an important lesson for me about presence that I was’t strong enough to hold on to then, though have since begun to reclaim it. After that day, our relationship right up to the day of her death in 2001 was strained as I worked to free myself from the patterns of thought and behavior she programmed me with, a battle I eventually lost by 1994, though I am recovering now.

Even after she died, what she did to me was latched inside of me, had a hold over me that it’s almost impossible to fathom and even more difficult to notice. It turns out that — at least for me — once you get opened up ritualistically for hypnotic suggestion, you become highly suggestable as an individual… I did everything she told me to do or not do without question while I was in her presence, and acted on memories of those instructions when away from her. The cognitive dissonance didn’t matter, nor did it matter that none of her suggestions were beneficial to me as a soul, and I was subsumbed. Drop music as a profession and attend Johnson State College instead of Berklee? Check. Get a job as a newspaper reporter instead of find my own path as a performer with Danielle? Check. Tell my mother everything before I tell my wife? Check. It’s disgusting and embarassing. And after she died and the suggestions stopped, I still needed the command structure, so I fell apart and projected all of that on to Danielle … who is nothing like my mother (thankfully!), but was put in a position of being so by my grooming and pyschofantic, histrionic behavior so that I could keep living a programmed lie …

Maybe this explains some of it. Why did I put on so much weight and retreat into a dark, reedy world of confusion and madness? Why did I subjugate the only woman I’ve ever loved to the madness of projecting my mother’s wishes on our life? Why am I starting music as an erstwhile career so late? The answer is as easy as it is bizarre: I was hypnotized by my mother during my formative years to be exactly how she wanted me to be as a boy and a man.

I’ve come to forgive her for the hypnosis, and for the other things she subjected me to. She had her demons and they got the better of her. I can’t hold a grudge against anyone for their trauma or their behavior because of it, despite the impact it has had on me or others. I also have demons and they have had an impact. Some of them maybe on you. Forgiveness is the power to start again and learn from the past, and so I forgive her.

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My first vision on Ayahuasca was of a tiny room with a single glowing lightbulb, and in the center a destroyed card catalog cabinet, like from an old library. A massive mess that I had to somehow clean up, but I knew that once I did, I would be free of the stringent bonds and boundaries placed on me through hypnosis at a young age. I’m still working at it, and the music is the main engine.

That vision became the impetus for the cover of my first EP “it can be difficult sometimes”. Every song I’ve done is connected back to this notion of destroying the card catalog and replacing it with my own cognition, emotional reactions, soulful meanderings — everything that makes up the sense of self moving through the world. I have a few early memories available, and I’ve been able to reclaim more of them as the journey continues.

Thanks for reading. Hope to see you around.

🙏🏼🎶💜