There’s not quite enough food to go round, so when you put it down for the dogs, only 9 of them get fed, and one of them – a smaller, runtier, rather uglier looking dog, gets pushed to the back. Then you realise that you haven’t got time to walk them all either. Perhaps you can only walk nine out of ten of them. The other one – the smaller, runtier, uglier one – you just let run around the garden a bit. You kid yourself that this is okay, but it isn’t. That dog is getting frustrated by his lack of exercise, and he knows that you prefer the others.

What happens if this goes on? What happens if you continue to fail to provide for that tenth dog’s basic needs? If, because your resources are stretched, you don’t give him proper food, proper exercise, proper attention or proper affection? If instead, you leave him penned up on a council sink estate… I mean… in your back garden?

People aren’t dogs of course, but there’s a good bit of dog in them. You can’t deny any creature its basic needs and expect it to be happy. You can argue that a person should be better able to control their anger, frustration, isolation and hurt than a dog. The question is – is it right to put them in that position in the first place?

Is it right to dehumanise people into ‘chavs’, and thus justify leaving them with poor opportunities and poor services? With few jobs, bad housing and little education? To close down the Social Exclusion Task Force that would have tackled these issues, and leave it up to the ‘Big Society’ to deal with the problem?

I don’t think it is. I think we have to accept that as long as we allow some people in our society to be that tenth dog, we will increase the risk of some very angry and dangerous dogs getting loose from time to time.

It is reported that in parliament “parties are anxious that they cannot be portrayed as apologists for the rioting.” Am I an apologist for the people who rioted? No. I don’t like rioting, but I hope we can have an adult discussion of the factors that may have caused it. That means worrying less about your party’s image, and more about governing the country in a wise and just way. It means understanding that real issues are rarely black and white, but many shades of grey.

Apparently, the Prime Minister suggested yesterday that the riots are the result of “a complete lack of responsibility, a lack of proper parenting, a lack of proper upbringing, a lack of proper ethics, a lack of proper morals.”

That seems like a reasonable point, and I hope the Prime Minister will provide a subsequent good example of proper upbringing, ethics and morals. He might like to consider the four cardinal virtues:

1. Courage. It takes courage to tell those who believe that rioters’ benefits should be withdrawn that just because 100,000 people agree on a thing, it doesn’t make it right. I would suggest that sentencing every rioter to 200 hours improving their basic literacy, numeracy and employable skills might be more constructive.

2. Temperance, or self-control. It takes temperance to keep your head when all around you are baying for blood, and to mark out a middle way which holds people to account without punishing them excessively. It also takes temperance to avoid a hasty, simplistic removal of individual liberties and freedoms like social media.

3. Prudence, or rationality. Again, the recent events arouse strong passions. Lots of people are angry, and few can see the irrationality of demanding an eye for an eye. If you take away a person’s benefits, what do you expect them or their children to eat? Are you really happy to see people starving on Britain’s streets? Would you want to employ or be served by an angry, desperate ex-rioter? We complain that the rioters didn’t stop and think about the consequences of their actions, but are many of us any better?

4. Justice. The virtue of justice is a little to the concept of justice, being a golden mean between selfishness and selflessness. In other words, it means striking a balance between one’s own needs, feelings and rights, and those of others. That usually means the most constructive, humane and dignified response to the problem – which is rarely one that involves chopping anything off.

Morality doesn’t just mean refraining from arson and theft. It is much more complex and demanding than that, and includes mercy, forgiveness, compassion, and patience. As Jesus, were he alive today, would undoubtedly have said, let he who is without sin make the first tweet.

There have been many comments on the rioters and their motivations, including the suggestion that the rioters feel entitled to take by force what they should instead expect to obtain only by their own hard work and industry. Considering that he holds down a responsible full time job, I presume the man in question is capable of hard work and industry. His reward for this is £1,000 a month.

I would seriously question the notion that everyone in society can have all that they want if they just work hard enough for it. This is for two reasons.

Firstly, many people in society work as public servants. We need them to, for they work as doctors, nurses, teachers, policemen and civil servants. Yet their wages are not directly in line with their individual efforts, and many are facing pay freezes or job cuts in the next few years. Put simply, no matter how hard you work as a teacher or nurse in the next year, you probably aren’t going to see any more money.

Secondly, it seems to me that our expectations for our lives are raging out of control. As a society, we convey a simple message to each other through the media – unless you are exceptionally wealthy, materially successful or beautiful, you are inferior and irrelevant.

The Apprentice, the X-Factor, Britain’s Got Talent – all these shows and more convey the message that life consists of one winner and many losers. For a long time now, advertising has been designed to directly appeal to your sense of self. You no longer buy things for what they do, you buy them for what they say about you. After all, if you don’t have an iPhone, you don’t have an iPhone. The ‘loser‘ on the end of that sentence is silent.

In Dragon’s Den, we literally have a show in which aspiring hopefuls beseech the rich and powerful for their money. I personally would like to see a version of the show entitled Nanna’s Den in which five of Britain’s most kind, humorous and nurturing grandmothers give out advice and cake to young people trying to solve problems in their relationships and families. Wouldn’t it just be nice to promote some values other than wealth, youth and power?

You see, the danger of this message  is that it hurts people. It isn’t nice to get the message that you’re a loser – whether from Apple or anyone else. It hurts, and when you’re hurt, you’re angry. When you’re angry, you want to fight back – just like the Prime Minister is advising. You realise you can’t afford this thing you’ve been told will make you a complete human being, and that you have neither the education, the opportunities or the skills to get it anytime soon. So rather than suffer because you don’t have an iPhone, it starts to make sense to you to go and steal one.

Does this excuse anyone’s actions? No it doesn’t. But he who rattles a stick along a fence to annoy the dog next door should not be surprised when one day the dog gets free and bites him. Likewise, if you allow the media to constantly raise everyone’s material expectations to unrealistic levels, and to then imply that anyone who doesn’t achieve those levels is a loser, you can’t expect a positive result. Marketing doesn’t cause looting, but the kind of marketing which carries a message of personal inadequacy is a very corrosive force.

Of course, I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said before.

So what practical action can you take? How can you avoid being sucked into raised expectations?

Why not turn off your TV and try one of the following things?

1. Go to sleep. Really. You’re only lying in front of the TV because you’re too exhausted to do anything else, so why not relax completely rather than letting the body unwind while the mind is highly stimulated by sex and violence?
2. Learn to meditate. The fact that you think its boring is the precise reason it will help you. It is the anti-television, and it will make you happier and more content with yourself and your life.
3. Spend time with a real person, and if you don’t have one, go and look for one. Think of the least threatening person you know and go and ask them how their day has been.
4. Go outside, and if you can, walk around a bit. Honestly, you’ll feel better. You might even see a real person you can talk to.
5. Make something with your hands. If you can’t think of anything else, bake a loaf of bread. It will make the best toast you will ever eat.
6. Read a book made of paper. Anything will do.
7. Think about learning something new. Lots of resources exist to help you. The more you know, the more you have to offer and the more you can be given in exchange without needing to break into a shop and steal it. But you don’t have to learn something with commercial value – anything that you enjoy learning is good.

How does this happen? Why are normally calm and placid individuals suddenly calling for blood?

In my view, it concerns the dangerous psychology of separation – the process by which we all mentally divide the world into ‘them’ and ‘us’.

Consider the rioters. When was the last time you smashed up your own home, or stole from your friends? Would you set fire to your neighbour’s car or burn your cousin’s shop? I doubt it, and few human beings would. You can only really damage things and people you don’t care about, and that means things or people you see as separate or different from yourself. You won’t hurt ‘us’ but it’s fine to hurt ‘them’.

Leaders in wartime have always understood this, which is why during World War II the British weren’t at war with their fellow humans, or even the people of Germany. They were fighting the Huns, the Jerries, the Boche…

For those who are rioting, ‘they’ have names like “rich people”, “fat cats”, “bankers”, “capitalists”, “oppressors”. Those rioting don’t see human beings, they see stereotypes, and this happens because we all allow ourselves to casually label people according to what they do or what they have. If you hurt someone who works in banking, you feel bad because you’re hurting a person. If you bash a banker, that’s much easier, because you’re dealing with a stereotype, not a human being. Except that in reality, there are no bankers, there are only human beings who work in banks.

For the frightened onlookers, ‘they’ have names like ‘thugs’, ‘scum’, ‘hoodies’, ‘chavs’, ‘Jeremy Kyle guests’, ‘criminals’. Those calling for punishment don’t see human beings, they see stereotypes. If you hurt a 14-year-old boy who is rioting (or more likely, get a policeman to hurt him for you), you feel bad because you’re hurting a person. If you hang a hoodie, that’s much easier, because you’re dealing with a stereotype, not a human being. Except that in reality, there are no hoodies, there are only human beings who wear hoods.

This madness ends, in my view, when we all remember that to take away another person’s humanity by labelling them – either as ‘scum’ or as ‘fat cat’ – is a very dangerous thing.

Of course it is appropriate to prevent criminal behaviour, and to hold people to account for what they have done. The important thing is to do it without believing that the behaviour represents who the person is, or all that they are capable of. In short, without calling them names.

Labelling is dangerous because it destroys our ability to empathise with those whose behaviour we don’t like  as fellow human beings. That in turn allows us to justify acts of violence – either personal or carried out on our behalf by the state – which drive us even further apart. Yet unless we’re going to kill those people – and the decision to do that is the decision to destroy society and turn England into a battlefield – we have to live with them afterward, side by side yet separated by simmering resentment and brooding violence.

There is another way. The way in which we deal appropriately with behaviour while remembering that the ‘other’ is a human being just like us. Then we try to understand him or her a little better, and build some bridges, perhaps even a friendship.

Why do we do this?

Because no-one burns down his friend’s shop.

– Phil Mattingly

http://www.philmattingly.com/blog/

I would suggest that this is a subject it is well-worth reading up on. The statistics quoted in the review are shocking – 46% of adults diagnosed with a mental illness some time during their life, and 1 in 76 Americans so disabled by mental illnesses that they qualify for government disability benefits.

It is, however, not something to be frightened of. All of us live in a world with significant rates of cancer, heart disease and strokes. We accept that serious physical problems can arise, but there is a great deal we can do to help ourselves and minimise the risks. The same is true for mental health – except that no-one wants to talk about the problem, how to deal with it or what the risks are. Ignorance breeds fear, fear breeds avoidance, avoidance breeds ignorance.

I’m not going to get deeply into discussing the points of the article, except to say that what’s clear to me is that one of the best things for any person’s mental health is good old-fashioned personal responsibility. It strikes me that even if you know very little about what is going on with you physically, a good doctor can piece it together for themselves. What is going on with you mentally is another matter. The problems are much more subjective, and much more personal. The doctor or therapist needs your help to discover what’s really going on.

So what can you do? Lots of things, many of them discussed on this blog. Where I would start is to read a few books, namely:

“Emotions Revealed” by Paul Ekman. You probably don’t need the whole thing in detail, but enough of a skim to understand what humans feel and why they feel it will do you a world of good in understanding one of the most important forces at work inside you.

“Learned Optimism” by Martin Seligman. The other side of the internal coin is your thinking, and Seligman gives a robust and workable guide to beginning to understand and manage your own thoughts.

“Flourish” and “Authentic Happiness” by Martin Seligman. Two more by Seligman, who I admire greatly for first laying out an understanding of happiness in ‘Authentic Happiness’, and subsequently identifying it as incomplete and improving it in ‘Flourish’. These two will give you a lot of basic building blocks for the kind of preventative measures that can make mental illness less likely.

The bottom line is this. How much do you know about how to look after your physical health, and how much time, effort and attention do you devote to caring for it? How does this compare to your mental health? Do you even feel comfortable asking that question? If you’re seeing an imbalance, please understand that coming to understand yourself better can actually be interesting and fun. Start with the books, and you’ll soon be a whole lot healthier and happier.

Put simply, Harford’s proposal is that humans suffer from the god complex – the tendency to believe that we know in advance exactly how a complex system works, and therefore can design a perfect solution on paper.

Harford’s example is the Unilever detergent factory in Liverpool. In order to make the kind of washing powder we all buy to do our laundry, you take liquid detergent and spray it out through tiny nozzles to form a mist. As the mist sinks to the floors, the particles dry out and you then sweep the resulting powder into boxes and sell it.

It’s important to get the mist right, as it only turns to powder if sprayed through a hole of the correct size at the correct angle. Unilever spent a lot of time and money getting experts to design a perfect nozzle on paper. As it turned out, even something as simple as the spray from a nozzle is too complex to model accurately and none of the theoretical designs worked. The final result was achieved by simple trial and error – making a basic nozzle, adjusting it and testing the results.

I think this is important therapeutically, both for therapists and those seeking help.

Therapists, especially inexperienced ones it seems to me, want to believe desperately in the god complex. They want to believe that it is possible to know, in advance of the client’s arrival, exactly what is going on and exactly which specific technique they will use, step by step, to resolve the problem. One of the marks of a more experienced therapist, I find, is that they realise this is often just too difficult. They are much happier instead to use a little trial and error – adapting their behaviour to suit the client, rather than forcing the client to fit the model their god complex prescribes.

The term ‘god complex’ sounds a bit pejorative perhaps, and I don’t mean it to be. People are always doing their best, and as humans, we love the sense of certainty and security that comes from believing that we know it all and can control it all. That’s where we start to look at the client. How many people will arrive at a therapist’s office today because they feel they’re “not in control”? Having lost faith in themselves as the god, they seek out the therapist as a replacement, asking for help to be restored to their godhood.

The result is clients and therapists feeling under pressure to have all the answers when that expectation is neither realistic nor practical. Each can become terrified of making a ‘mistake’, or appearing less than perfect, but such fears are groundless and inhibit creativity and flexible problem solving in both parties.

So how can you use trial and error productively to solve your own problems, or those of another person? Here are some of my ideas:

1. Be clear about where you’re starting from. Whatever you’re trying to change, be it your mood or your finances, have some clear way of measuring where you’re at. That could be a bank statement, a daily graph of happiness or your weight on the scales.

2. Discover what model you’ve been using so far to try and solve the problem, and question everything about it. One example is weight control. 90% of the people I work with for weight are convinced that their problem is due to a lack of willpower. This assumption rarely stands up to questioning, not least because of them have children, families, careers and other achievements which demonstrate an abundance of willpower. Examine your thoughts and conceptions of the problem very carefully.

3. Make some kind of sensible variation to your model of the situation, based on the best evidence available.  Often this is as simple as being willing to let go of your sense of certainty about what will happen if you try something different, and your fear that you’ll look stupid if it doesn’t work out.

4. Be comfortable with making mistakes. Easier said than done perhaps, but again, it’s worth questioning your thinking. Does one mistake really make you an idiot? Have you really lost the love and approval of everyone you know because you didn’t get one thing quite how you wanted? Test it gently and find out. You may discover you don’t need to be as perfect as you think.

5. Learn from your results by taking good-quality measurements and reaching logical conclusions. To do this, you need to go back to the original measures you devised in step 1. Has the trial worked out? What can you meaningfully learn from it? It’s worth examining a good explanation of the scientific method for more detail about how to carry out this step.

I think it’s always valuable to ask, as a therapist, what problems have in common. What are the elements that recur time and again, no matter who you are dealing with? One thing I see is that all the problems I’m presented with by clients have a strong element of repetition.

For that to happen, the system (in this case, a person) has to stay the same, and for a person to stay the same, the way they think has to stay the same too. What makes that happen? Certainty, and the desire to be right rather than happy. The fear of ‘mistakes’ is often irrational, and once dispelled, opens up a powerful way to  solve complex problems.

Let’s be clear though. One should expect a therapist to have a good enough general understanding of human psychology to at least start somewhere close to a solution. But as Harford shows, real problems in real life sometimes cannot be solved without making a few ‘errors’. If the therapist can show the client there’s nothing dangerous or abnormal about that, they will reach a solution far quicker and also help the client develop a skill of lifelong value.

Interviewer: I’m really sorry about the result, give us your story of the match.

Nadal: Thank you. Well the story is he play better than me, he’s the champion, I congratulate him, that’s what I can do, for sure I have to analyse what I did but I think I did a few things.

There are several key elements here. First of all, Nadal strikes a balance in explaning his adversity. It’s partly his circumstances – his opponent played better than him – but it’s partly his own responsibility too – he did a few things. However, like all good optimists, his circumstances are temporary. It’s not that his opponent is better than him, it’s that he played better in this particular match. Next time, it might be different. Likewise, he admits responsibility, but he doesn’t judge himself. He didn’t ‘screw things up’, he’s not ‘an idiot’, he just ‘did a few things’ which he will analyse rationally and learn from.

Interviewer: When you won that third set, you must have thought “I’ve got a chance now”

Nadal: Well, for sure, always, I, even with two sets down I am there and I am fighting in every moment no, third set was an important set… the thing is, I didn’t play well during important moments during all the match… to win this kind of match, you have to play really well mentally and well tennis, all the important moments that’s something I didn’t.

I think it’s fascinating to watch Rafa’s face and tone at the start of his answer. He seems bemused by the idea that he wouldn’t think of himself as having a chance. It is clearly second nature to him to be hopeful, and to always focus on the present moment and what he can do to accomplish his goal. Again, a pessimist might have convinced himself that Djokovic was unbeatable before the final started – and with four losses already this year, Nadal would have good reason to believe that.

However, his optimism is realistic. He knows what it takes to achieve his goal of winning, and he knows that he didn’t do what he needed to do. But that’s it. He seems to be completely lacking in either anger or self-pity, because he’s not making his performance mean anything about himself.

Interviewer: And is that what makes the result so much more disappointing and annoying for you, because you know you didn’t play your best?

Nadal: No, no, that’s.. (snorts)..no.. you know… uh.. I accept that the sport.. you cannot win every time… I happy to be here enjoying these moments… enjoying the final… he play better than me… that’s what I can do… the thing that I can do is keep working hard… try to find the way to try to beat him next time… and… you know… be the second of Wimbledon is fantastic result for me too no? even if I didn’t win today.

There’s an important exchange again at the start of this section. The interviewer seems intent on getting some admission of distress from Nadal, presumably so they can create a dramatic contrast between the elated winner and the heartbroken loser. But Rafa refuses to play the role. He rejects the interviewer’s presupposition that he’s annoyed and disappointed, and seems almost to snort with amusement at the idea of reacting in that way.

He then goes on to lay out a very optimistic worldview. He doesn’t have unrealistic expectations of himself – he is at peace with the fact that he will lose Grand Slam finals and he accepts it. Instead, he enjoys the experience whether he wins or loses. The causes of his adversity are limited to one thing on one day… and Rafa is relentlessly focused on what he can do something about, rather than being angry or upset about things he can’t control. He also chooses to frame his experience as an achievement, albeit a slightly lesser achievement than he would have liked.

Interviewer: You’re still very young, only 25, could you even describe how you get over such a sporting disappointment? You’re playing in the biggest final in the world and yet you’ve lost. How long does it take you to recover from a disappointing result like this?

Nadal: (chuckles) You know… life is more important than game… and, you know, that’s a sport, it’s impossible to win every time, I was with trophy in Roland Garros a few weeks ago… today I lost, but I was there, I was in the final another time, and I am, a good competitor, I like to win, but I accept when someone plays better than myself and when somebody is doing a few things better than me. Today that’s what happened… tomorrow we at home enjoying the summer.

Still the interviewer is trying to get him to admit to being disappointed, so Rafa decides to just finish the debate off by walloping him with the Sleight of Mouth patterns: take the belief that losing the final is a disappointment, and applying Hierarchy of Criteria – “life is more important than game.”

Next come a barrage of optimistic thoughts. He adjusts his expectations, and then widens the frame, placing his loss in the context of two other achievements – winning the French Open and making the Wimbledon final at all. He then goes on to make two classic optimistic explanations – the causes of my adversity are limited, because one guy did a few things better than me on day, and they are temporary, because today I lost, but tomorrow I will be enjoying my summer.

Interviewer: You’re going to fly home to Majorca. To get over the defeat, do you go fishing, do you play golf, do you sit on the beach?

Nadal: I am lucky… I have a lot of people around… I have fantastic family around me… fantastic friends around… a lot of people supporting me and even today here when I lost, the crowd here was supporting me a lot and you know, that, that’s something that’s impossible to feel outside of this tournament.

Straightforward optimistic appreciation, but more importantly, look at his explanation of the permanence of the good and bad in his life. Adversity is temporary: ‘he did a few things better than me today’, but good things are permanent: ‘my family are fantastic, my friends are fantastic’ as opposed to ‘my family will do a few things to cheer me up today.’ And again, he sets his loss always in the context of something good.

Interviewer: And you’ll still think to yourself, I’ve won ten grand slams which is a wonderful achievement.

Nadal: Oh for sure, I am more than happy, but if I stopped my career today… I… what I won is more than I ever dreamed… I have got everything so I cannot be very disappointing that I lose today… for sure I wanna win but I already won a lot of times in the past.

And again, like many optimists, Nadal is full of appreciation for what he already has while maintaining a relaxed desire for more.

There are of course some questions to be answered here. The first one is: is Nadal just putting on a brave face for the interview? I don’t think so. If you look at his face and his expressions, and you listen to his tonality, they broadly match the words he is saying. If anything, he is politely concealing his bemusement at the relentlessly negative line of questioning.

The second question is: doesn’t everyone do this? The answer is no. You only have to look at Serena Williams, who refused to give a postmatch interview after her defeat, and was clearly hurt and angry when questioned during the press conference the following day. Nothing wrong with that, it’s a perfectly reasonable way to react, but I personally think that Nadal’s optimism and his achievements are not unrelated.

There’s been a lot of talk about ‘mental resilience’ during this year’s championships, with some commentators suggesting that it’s something that Andy Murray needs to work on. Regardless of that, I think it’s something that any person can benefit from working on. I have no idea if Rafa has worked on his optimism, or if it comes naturally to him, but I hope that by reading the transcript above you can see how he takes his experience and systematically uses the same few processes over and over to build an optimistic explanation. What’s great is that they are they same processes of optimism that psychologists have verified in so many other people and, even better, they are ones that anyone can learn to use and adopt.

I personally felt the Wimbledon fortnight was a beautiful showcase of human talent, achievement, sportsmanship and skill. It’s easy to watch the news and think that humanity spends most of its energy on war, conflict, aggression and destruction, but this simply isn’t true. That same energy is often channeled into activities that highlight the best of what we’re capable of.

As such, we need informed and sober judgement when reading these sorts of stories. In particular, it’s worth thinking clearly about this report, which details a school principal in Flordia who used hypnosis with his students.

From the various media reports, these appear to be the facts. Dr. George Kenney is the principal of a Florida high school, and also a certified hypnotherapist. He has permission from his school district to conduct hypnosis demonstrations in psychology classes, but they were unaware that he was also conducting individual sessions with students. He obtained the permission of each student’s parents and used hypnosis to help improve their academic and athletic performance.

He did this for dozens of students over a two year period, and some claim to have received significant benefit. He recently conducted a session with a 16-year-old student whom he had hypnotised three times before. The intention was to help improve his concentration. The next day, the boy was found dead in an abandoned house, apparently due to a drug overdose. The principal has been suspended as part of a routine investigative procedure into the circumstances of the boy’s death. A number of students and parents are campaigning for him to be reinstated.

Obviously, this is a very sad and unfortunate situation, and my thoughts are with the boy’s family and friends.

Naturally, everyone wants an explanation and it is vital to ensure that that explanation is an accurate one. Whenever we try to explain any sequence of events, it is easy to make errors. One of the most common is to confuse causation and correlation.

Correlation simply means that two things appear together, which causation means that one thing causes another. It is very easy to get them confused. For example, at every large demonstration I have ever seen, there have been policemen present. The larger the demonstration, the more policemen. This is a correlation – two things appearing together. Can I conclude that because larger demonstrations and greater numbers of policemen always appear together that policemen cause demonstrations? No. That conclusion is clearly absurd.

Likewise, you could look and say that you always see high levels of teenage pregnancy and street crime occurring together. Does crime cause pregnancy? Does pregnancy cause crime? At this stage, you don’t know. There’s always the possibility that a third, unobserved factor – poverty, lack of educational opportunities, family breakdown – causes both. And significantly, there’s always the chance the correlation is, quite straightforwardly, just a coincidence.

So in this case, there’s a correlation in which the boy having hypnosis and his death have occurred close together. Is that the same as being able to say that hypnosis caused his death? No. It could just be a coincidence. No-one knows yet and it will need to be investigated.

What’s interesting is why this is a news story at all. The story states that the boy died the day after being hypnotised. He also died the day after having breakfast, going to school, and brushing his teeth. Why is no-one suspending anyone for feeding him breakfast, educating him or supplying him with toothpaste?

The reason is that hypnosis is unusual. When something unusual happens, like someone dying, we have a tendency to look around and assume that the first unusual thing we see is somehow related. Common sense, right? Not really. If a man dressed as a giant banana turns up to a CND protest, and the protest turns unusually violent, that doesn’t mean giant bananas cause violence.

The problem is that causation is difficult to establish, because anything that happens could have a huge number of potential causes. It is difficult and demanding to try and think through them all, and we’re often left with the unsatisfying conclusion that we just don’t know what caused something to happen. That’s not a conclusion that many people are happy with, and they will latch on to any conclusion that gives them some sense of certainty, even if it’s completely false.

Thinking like this is valuable, because the quality of our conclusions affect our own lives very immediately. When a person suffers a setback – the loss of a job, the end of a relationship and so on – they will try to explain it. If that process goes well, they’ll learn something direct and useful from the experience that will help them in the future. If it doesn’t – because they make errors like confusing causation and correlation – the result can be limiting beliefs like “I’ll never find a loving relationship” or “All bosses are treacherous” that can keep them stuck in difficulties for a very long time.

In essence, he argues that describing people as evil doesn’t do anything to explain why they behave as they do. It also doesn’t offer us much in the way of a solution. So he suggests instead that we should think of ‘evil’ people as lacking in empathy. Their inability to empathise with others and consider their feelings means they do not comprehend the consequences of their ‘evil’ actions. They treat other people as objects, and are completely unaware of any pain those people may feel.

This is, for many people, unsettling stuff. Life is easier when things are simple – when all the good guys wear white hats and all the bad guys wear black. Where evil is a problem that can be solved by simply rounding up all the black hats and killing or imprisoning them. Accepting that actually there are many shades of grey, and that simple punishments are not working, leaves us facing a serious problem without a familiar solution. Many people would simply prefer to deny it.

This is so, I think, because it takes very little effort to condemn and a great deal of effort to understand. It can be tough enough just to make sense of our own feelings and beliefs, let alone trying to take those of others into consideration. Our own motivations and desires can be a baffling mystery, even before we try and factor in what other people might want or feel. It is so much simpler to define them as simple stereotypes, or even not as people at all.

But the truth is, it doesn’t have to be that hard. Some of us are good at empathy. Some of us have the capacity to tolerate different points of view and different feelings. To accept that life isn’t black and white, but ambiguous. In doing so, we can begin to understand the most problematic individuals in society, and begin to do appropriate things to help them.

It’s not easy, because our immediate, primeval reflex is to hate them. That’s how we think we’ll defend ourselves. We see people doing things that are harmful, and that frighten us. We fear that they’ll do the same to us, and so we prepare to defend ourselves by getting angry. We’re flooded with the primeval urge of fight or flight.

The problem is, if society is ever to advance beyond a constant state of conflict, we have to do better than that. If all we do is take ‘evil’ people and punish or destroy them, we’ll never discover how they get to be that way in the first place. Punishment has done nothing to stem the tide of violent and dangerous individuals in society – but perhaps learning what leads a person to ‘evil’ will. The idea that some people are born that way is both lacking in evidence and a complete dead-end for society. The idea that such individuals lack empathy – and that we can inoculate society against ‘evil’ by ensuring greater levels of empathy – at least has some hope.

On a small scale, this happens all the time in therapy. I deal regularly with clients who have difficult people in their lives. They might not describe their spouses, teenage kids, or bosses as ‘evil’, but sometimes it’s not far off. I would agree entirely with Simon Baron-Cohen’s observation that raising the empathy of everyone involved in that relationship helps to solve the problem. Problems are hard to solve when you know very little about them, and the more you empathise with another, the more you learn.

So I hope Baron-Cohen’s idea gains wide consideration. It’s easy to respond reflexively with hatred and condemnation to those whose harmful behaviour seems ‘evil’, but it serves only to pour fuel on the fire. We can defend ourselves quite effectively without needing to hate, and use the space to start understanding the problem rather than labeling it.

These are fairly common associations, and it’s useful to think about them. There are many factors that explain why hypnosis works, and one of the most important is expectation. As soon as you tell someone you are going to hypnotise them, they will immediately recall these sorts of associations from their memory. These in turn become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

You can see this kind of expectancy at work with the placebo effect too. If you give someone a sugar pill out of the packet of a well-known brand of painkillers, they get better results than if you give it to them out of a plain packet. Why? Because the name on the pack activates a network of associations that bring to mind ideas of power, effectiveness and speed. These in turn become self-fulfilling prophecies.

So as a hypnotist, I can use people’s pre-existing ideas about hypnosis to create self-fulfilling prophecies and make the experience more real and powerful. That’s great, and it’s a justification sometimes cited by some hypnotists for perpetuating the idea that hypnosis is a powerful form of direct mind control. The more that ideas and images of people being powerfully affected by the hypnotist are perpetuated, the greater people’s expectancy will be when they in turn come to be hypnotised.

That’s fine, and it certainly works well in many applications of hypnosis. My only concern, as always, is in how that affects the therapeutic use of hypnosis.

It’s a simple fact that many people come to therapy with issues of control. They may arrive with fears, anxieties and insecurities based on past relationships where they trusted someone, allowed that person significant control and influence over them, and were badly hurt as a result. For this, and many other reasons, a proportion of people have a significant fear of being ‘out of control.’

If the only association that these people have with hypnosis is being ‘out of control’, they are unlikely ever to seek the help of  a hypnotherapist, even if it would benefit them significantly. There is nothing wrong with the direct, authoritarian style of hypnosis, and for some people, that’s exactly what they need. However, I do feel that it would be beneficial to promote a more sophisticated and developed perception of hypnosis. Such a perception would include a wider range of associations than just ‘mind control’ and would thus be less threatening to those potential clients or patients who are afraid of losing control.

I am not convinced that this is best achieved, as some would suggest, by telling the client that hypnosis is the lesser of two evils – they are already out of control in their life, which is what causes the problem, and they are therefore best off surrendering control to the hypnotist in order to fix it. Even if the client accepts this, being out of control in their life is familiar, while being out of control in hypnosis is unknown. Given a choice, people, particularly those prone to anxiety, will prefer what is familiar.

The alternative is both simpler and more complex. It is perfectly possible to conduct hypnotherapy in a much more permissive way; one that is viewed as a joint venture between two complimentary equals, rather than the domination of the subject by the hypnotist. Such an approach is about inviting the person to respond to suggestion, rather than demanding that they do. It requires the belief that most people will want to take appropriate invitations to change and improve, but in my experience, if they feel safe, they will.

Much can be gained, I think, from developing a broader range of associations with ‘hypnosis’, such that all groups can find a meaning and an experience that is both helpful and appealing.

What fascinates me about a show like ‘Miracles For Sale’ is the sheer quantity of psychology involved. It’s a window into people’s needs, drives, motivations, hopes, fears and vulnerabilities, all at the same time. However, I do want to pick out one particular aspect – suggestion.

It was telling that Derren taught his potential faith healers hypnosis. Faith healing works in large part because the minister uses the power of suggestion to create healing effects. These are then exaggerated, and passed off as the work of the Holy Spirit. The effects are real – as shown by Derren’s numerous demonstrations on the streets of Dallas – but the source is not.

This example begins to draw us toward one of the more contentious topics in hypnosis research – can hypnosis be used to make people do things they don’t want to do?

It’s a question worth addressing, because fear of being ‘controlled’ is one of the most significant reasons why people avoid experiencing hypnotherapy. Unfortunately, that means they also miss out on all the benefits it can offer them – including greater happiness, less stress and so on.

So let’s examine the reality of the subject, which can be summed up fairly neatly in three main statements:

1.) Controlling another person’s behaviour completely is difficult, but influencing it is quite easy.

2.) Hypnosis is just one of many forms of influence.

3.) Influence is neutral – it is the intentions and ethics of the person influencing that make it good or bad.

Let’s start with the difference between influence and control.

People watch hypnosis stage shows, and it appears that the hypnotist has complete control over the participants. They appear to be his obedient slaves, doing whatever he bids them to do. That’s what we think of as control – being able to determine 100% of what another person does. Such control is rare and difficult to obtain. You can’t easily do it with hypnosis – look closely at the stage hypnotist and you’ll see that some on the stage don’t respond very well to his ‘commands’ – and you can’t easily do it with other forms of influence.

The main reason we know this is that people have tried. During the Korean War, a higher-than-usual percentage of American GIs defected while prisoners of the Chinese. Their captors were literally trying to control them through ‘brainwashing’ – the deliberate and systematic use of coercive persuasion to control a person’s behaviour. While it worked temporarily, when the GIs were released and returned to America, they tended to fairly rapidly give up their new-found Communism and revert to their previous values.

During this era, a great deal of research went into various methods of ‘mind control’, which was seen as an important weapon in the Cold War. There is no doubt that that research included hypnosis – but no lasting, easy, permanent method of controlling people appears to have been found.

Influence, on the other hand, is a different matter. If control means that I say something and you do it, influence just means that I say something and you are more likely to do it. There are a great many reliable methods of influence, of which hypnosis is just one. Other include rational argument, rhetoric, oratory or speech-making and advertising in all its various form. The effects of influence can range from the minimal to the very significant.

That leads us on to the second point – hypnosis is just one form of influence. You are actively influenced every day by everyone you speak to, all the media you consume – particularly television, the books and magazines you read and so on. While they don’t look as dramatic as hypnosis, the carefully crafted messages of politicians and marketers are shaping and influencing your thoughts and behaviour every day. I find it remarkable that people who admit to being frightened of placing themselves under the ‘control’ of a hypnotist will willing and uncritically watch three or four hours of television a day.

Isn’t this all a bit scary? Not really, because it all comes down to the last part – the ethics and intentions of the influencer. This can be simply summarised by the question – does the influencer care about the wellbeing of the influenced?

In the case of faith healing, Derren showed a good deal of evidence that the answer is no. The influencers in that business are quite willing to lie, deceive and manipulate those they come into contact with. The principles of suggestion unfortunately make them more effective.

In this sense, the power of suggestion is like any common tool – a hammer, a screwdriver or a wrench. We all accept that such tools can be used as weapons to actively harm others, or, more commonly, in a shoddy and careless way with little regard for the final result. We also accept that used constructively by people with integrity, they can build a children’s hospital.

What I liked about Derren’s show is that it ended with his fake Pastor giving the assembled flock a little lecture about being a bit more critical in who they allow to influence them. All of us accept that great good can come from trusting the right health professionals. We are perfectly happy to put ourselves in the position of allowing a surgeon to operate, even though it makes us vulnerable. We trust his motives and his concern for our wellbeing.

Likewise, there are many, many hypnotherapists working today who care deeply about the wellbeing of others and the ways in which it can be improved through the appropriate application of hypnosis. If you have read about the benefits, but are concerned, simply talk to a few and find out enough to make a good decision about whether they’re trustworthy or not.