Graphoanalysis and Graphotherapeutics

The Changing Role of A Student, part 6

I could have continued in the hypnosis school into a therapy role. I had no interest in doing therapy on anybody else, though, and am not much of a counselor by nature, I think. Too self-centered probably.

My score on the suggestibility scale +/- is dead center -- I'm such a high hypnotic it's ridiculous. If nothing else happened, it really saved me, just as a side effect. By forcing me to focus on constantly going in and out of hypnosis on command -- and I got pretty creative with that -- what I accidentally learned was how to be OUT of it. I hadn't understood that most of my life had been spent in a highly suggestible state, which explains the somewhat impulsive behavior at times and most memories seeming rather dreamlike. Getting OUT of it was well worth everything it cost.

The school was valuable as an education, although I had a good deal of background in it the other students didn't for the most part. There was new stuff on NLP that we had to wade through and practice that I hadn't been exposed to previously. The two things that made a real difference in me actually weren't primarily about hypnosis, though.

The first was that they required a study of handwriting analysis. I personally thought this was bogus. I understood they didn't. So I determined to study it so well, learn it so well, that I could then do a small layman's research project and demonstrate just how bogus it was. Hahaha.

Well you can guess the rest. I was astounded at it. I did a lot of it for awhile, and I just couldn't get over how fascinating it was, and how astonishingly insightful. I applied it to family members and was nearly aghast at its accuracy. To this day I'm completely neurotic about sharing my handwriting with strangers as a result (lest it reveal I am neurotic, ha ha).

My friends used to insist I do this at parties. I would be so irked, since I refused to do it without spending like an hour on it. ("You're just too serious!" they'd tell me. I just couldn't understand, if you weren't going to do it well, why do it at all?) People were often surprisingly moved by it, more than I realized.

Despite the assurance that things like sexuality are not revealed in writing, that isn't 100% true. A session with a man (a psychologist friend of a friend) whose writing I'd worked with, led to me quickly backpedaling over alternative explanations for him about some of the data suggesting a strong attraction to masculinity, which he immediately jumped on asking what it implied. It led eventually to him coming out of the closet. At which point I decided this wasn't something that should be done except in a therapeutic environment, and flatly refused to do it for fun anymore.

Thinking to find a few people who would have nothing vested in agreeing with me -- no money paid, and no wishful-thinking I hoped, either -- I went to the local college and looked up a few professors I didn't know, of varying disciplines, and told them how I was studying it, and asked them if they would be a guinea pig, let me get samples from them, write up a formal report for them, and then give me honest feedback about its accuracy and pertinence. I made it clear that they would not need to be detailed about where I was right or wrong -- as this stuff is highly personal -- just honest about whether it seemed like chance, generalization, or something that suggested the handwriting really was providing something of value.

A few agreed. And in the end, all of them said, to summarize, that they were actually really impressed and quite interested in the subject after that. So I decided I would accept it and move on to be skeptical about something else.

It wasn't long in coming. I was then introduced to graphotherapeutics. In over-simplistic short, this says: if you want your personality to be more like someone who would make their T's high and strong, then... make your T's high and strong.

Initially, this struck me as the stupidest thing I had ever heard. I laughed. HA HA! I scoff at you, grapho-therapeutics, and your sissy believers.

With the same fierce determination as the topic before, I dived into it. "Don't work on more than a few letters at a time," the authors warn about this. "No more than 3 at the most. Practice this for 5 minutes or so, a couple times per day."

Of course, being me, and having some time sitting in nearly-motionless traffic, school classes, and a desk job, I immediately changed nearly my entire alphabet, which I then practiced 5-10 minutes each about 10 times a day.

It took me about three weeks to figure out why I felt so profoundly traumatized.

And undergoing a staggering amount of personal change. Which was pretty exhausting. I really should get back to this... my writing shows me how far I've devolved. ;-) Suffice to say, I ended up an advocate for it.

No matter how far out it seemed, done consistently with good intent, it did seem to work. I figured this might be much more an issue of psychology than anything; feng shui for the page, you might call it; but it worked.

next up: part 7

Past-Life Regressions

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