Transgender Support Group
This community is here to support and help the large population of transgender people. If you or anyone you know identify as transgender, this is the place to share your feelings and experiences and speak with others who are going through similar things in their lives.
Has anyone dabbled with feminization hypnosis? The reason I ask is because I believe it is very important in the transition process and wonder what people's experiences are with it
Katie
Katie
What do you find it helps with, and why is it important to you Katie? I'm curious about it.
This CIA report on "The Operational Use of Subliminal Perception" was
written by Richard Gafford and appeared in the Spring 1958 issue of the
agency's classified journal Studies in Intelligence. Declassified in the
mid-1990s, the document may be the CIA's first serious assessment of
subliminal persuasion.
[document begins]
THE OPERATIONAL POTENTIAL
OF SUBLIMINAL PERCEPTION
Perception is demonstrated to have occurred below the threshold of
conscious sensory experience when a person responds to a stimulus too
weak in intensity or too short in duration for him to be aware of it.
Individual behavior without awareness of the stimulus, of which
subliminal perception is a subtype, has been a subject of study in
psychological laboratories for at least 70 years, and a great deal of
technical data has been collected on the subject. Recently it has been
associated with some theories of depth analysis and popularized for
possible commercial exploitation by the advertising world.
In the most sensational of these popularized experiments, an increase in
popcorn sales in a New Jersey movie theater is said to have been
stimulated by subliminal interruptions of the feature film with an
advertisement urging the patrons to buy popcorn. The exposure time used,
a small fraction of a second, was too brief for conscious discrimination
by an observer absorbed in the film story but presumably long enough to
have some stimulating effect. The advertising men who re currently
interested in this phenomenon as a sales technique argue that the
short-duration stimulus appeals to a positive motive, for example an
appetite for popcorn, without arousing the rational, conscious
sales-resistance of the individual, based perhaps on the desire to save
money or lose weight.
The argument becomes more complicated with respect to a product which
there is no specific preexisting positive motive to acquire. The appeal
is now said to be directed to a "deep" underlying motive presumed to be
always operating, never satiated, say the sex drive. The masked stimulus
arouses some aspect of this ubiquitous sex drive, a drive which can
hardly be directly satiated in polite society and one of which the
conscious recognition is more or less anxiety-producing. The vague
discomfort the individual feels as a result of subconscious stimulation
must be allayed by some associated gratification, and this gratification
-- the advertiser hopes -- is the socially acceptable acquisition of the
product which he is trying to promote.
It is evident that there are several mighty leaps in logic in the
advertising man's argument, and a great many places where his scheme can
go astray. He has taken several psychological phenomena which have been
demonstrated to a limited degree in controlled laboratory experiments
and strung them together into an appealing argument for a "technique."
Because part of what he is promoting is supported by laboratory data,
however, it has enough status to warrant serious attention.
The operational potential of other techniques for stimulating a person
to take a specific controlled action without his being aware of the
stimulus, or the source of stimulation, has in the past caught the
attention of imaginative intelligence officers. Interest in the
operational potential of subliminal perception has precedent in serious
consideration of the techniques of hypnosis, extrasensory perception,
and various forms of conditioning. By each of these techniques, it has
been demonstrated, certain individuals can at certain times and under
certain circumstances be influenced to act abnormally without awareness
of the influence or at least without antagonism.
After careful research on each of these methods, however, it has become
apparent that although they occasionally produce dramatic results, their
lack of reliability and their requirement for extremely precise controls
to obtain the desired effect have limited their operational utility to a
very few very specialized instances -- situations where just the right
persons can be put together at just the right moment under closely
controlled circumstances. The primary danger observed in connection with
this unreliability is that of a "flashback," of inadvertently producing
just the opposite effect to that desired. Subliminal perception as a
practical control or persuasion technique is prone to the same
difficulties.
There are four principal categories of behavior without awareness.
The individual may be unaware of:
a) his behavior itself.
He may be whispering without realizing he is whispering, or he may be
moving into a trap without knowing that the trap is there. A special case
here is abnormal behavior in which the individual fails to realize what he is
doing because his normal awareness and self-control have been interrupted by
disturbing agents such as fear, anxiety, illness, drugs, or hypnotic
suggestion.
b) the relation of his behavior to some stimulus.
The individual may be unaware of the fact that his interrogator is
influencing him by saying "Right" after certain statements and by
remaining noncommittal after others. The process called "operant
conditioning" falls into this category.
c) the stimulus itself, because of its slight impact.
The individual may be unaware of a very faint sound or a quick flash of
light, unaware in the sense that he lacks the usual visual sensations.
Subliminal perception falls into this category.
d) the precise nature of the stimulus, as well as its relation to his
behavior, because of inattention.
The individual may be aware of vague sensations, but he is not aware
either of the source or of the significant content of the stimulation,
although his behavior may change in accordance with changes in the
stimulus. This category includes a great deal of perceptual activity
affecting ordinary social behavior. A person is often unaware of the
specific cues and clues to which he is reacting not because the stimulus
is insufficient to reach the consciousness but because the effort to be
fully aware of all the cues all the time would create too great a
cognitive strain.
In persuading a person to do something he normally or rationally would
resist doing an intelligence operative can make use of any one of these
categories of psychological processes. Usually the purpose is to produce
behavior of which the individual is unaware. The use of subliminal
perception, on the other hand, is a device to keep him unaware of the
source of his stimulation. The desire here is not to keep him unaware of
what he is doing, but rather to keep him unaware of why he is doing it,
by masking the external cue or message with subliminal presentation and
so stimulating an unrecognized motive.
In order to develop the subliminal perception process for use as a
reliable operational technique, it would be necessary a) to
define the composition of a subliminal cue or message which will trigger
an appropriate preexisting motive, b) to determine the limits of
intensity between which this stimulus is effective but not consciously
perceived, c) to determine what preexisting motive will produce the
desired abnormal action and under what conditions it is operative, and
d) to overcome the defenses aroused by consciousness of the action
itself.
As to the composition of the subliminal cue, it cannot be supposed that
just any message presented close below the threshold of recognition will
be translated into appropriate action. The determination of the right
kind of message in terms of content, number and type of words or
symbols, grouping of symbols, and so forth has been the object of a
great deal of psychological experiment. There is a good deal of lore and
a few rather vague principles available, but generally they concern
rather trivial areas of action from the viewpoint of the intelligence
operative. Since the effectiveness of the procedure depends on not
arousing the person's defense mechanisms, and since defense mechanisms
are nor only peculiar to each individual but hard to discover, it is
difficult to specify even what is to be avoided in the composition of
the subliminal cue in order not to arouse the defenses.
Thresholds of recognition are variable and difficult to determine. If
the intensity of the stimulus is much below an individual's threshold it
doesn't get through to even the most automatic areas of his sensorium.
But recognition thresholds vary tremendously, not only among
individuals, but also in the same individual from one time or another,
in accordance with his physical situation, his physiological condition,
and above all the degree to which he is psychologically attuned to the
particular content of the message. A normal human being is an infinitely
more complex receiving instrument than any electronic gadget, and
adjusting a stimulus for such a variable receiver is difficult. In most
of the laboratory studies on which the current theory of subliminal per
ception is based (1) there has been a long pretrial period requiring the
subject's full cooperation to zero him in on the subliminal signal. Such
preparation is clearly not feasible for operational use. The message
must
____________________
1) For specifications and data see "Handbook of Experimental
Psychology," S.S. Stevens (ed).
therefore be transmitted on a much wider intensity band and may
frequently not get through or may on the other hand penetrate to the
subject's consciousness and arouse his defenses.
The message once received is presumed to trigger some sensitive
subconscious motivation to action. There are numerous psychological
theories about such inner functions, but little definitely known about
them. If a somewhat homogenous sample of people is tested a number of
times, most of them will be sensitive most of the time to the subliminal
cue; but some individuals, for a great variety of reasons we can little
more than guess at, will be insensitive. In this minority of instances
the individual may do nothing, may do something trivial and irrelevant,
or may do the exact opposite of what was intended.
If the subliminal cue is to work by tripping off an existing motive to
action, one must know what motives are positive and operant at the
moment. The obvious basic drives (e.g. hunger, sex) are sometimes
satiated and sometimes subordinated. With a great deal of knowledge
about the individual, some predictability can be attained, but it is
still a matter of probabilities. The percentage of instances will be
high where the opposite motive to that desired will be tripped off.
There appears thus to be such a myriad of factors that even the most
simplified empirical tests carried out with the best possible
cooperation of the subjects are rarely marked by really significant
reliability. Furthermore, with such a large number of variables and
relatively low reliability, it is difficult to determine whether the
controlled variable or uncontrolled artifacts are producing whatever
results one does observe.
Finally, the subliminal device to avoid alerting an individual's
defenses by masking the cue and the basic motive does not cover the
effect of awareness of the resultant abnormal action itself, with its
implications and consequences. Assuming that one could persuade to such
action by presenting a cue subliminally, there is no way of effecting
the action without awareness and without tripping off defenses and
rational resistance. It must be concluded that there are so many elusive
variables and so many sources of irregularity in the device of directing
subliminal messages to a target individual that its operational
feasibility is exceedingly limited.
[document ends]
He may be whispering without realizing he is whispering.
We make good targets for these experiments because we are transexual/transgender and most live alone isolated with few friends. If you live alone long enough you may begin talking outloud or to yourself.
Whispering secrets and not even realizing it!
(Dealing with pain)
"The pain is not important!"
"I feel no pain"
"My pain is getting better!"
Thats all grand if you are a US soldier or CIA Agent captured behind enemy lines. What if you smoke though? Your lungs are hurting you but "The pain is not important!" So you don't go to a hospital! You can die!!!!! What if you reach into the dish water and cut yourself with a sharp knive? "The pain is not important', "I am healing!", "I feel no pain!"
This is suppose to be America dad gum it!
Stop testing this garbage on civilians!
We are not your guinea pigs!
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Emma Lazarus, 1883
"Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"
Not were the CIA and we will prey on you because you are transgendered,weak and poor and isolated.