SMILE MONEY HYPNOSIS
Hypnosi$: How to Put a Smile on Your Face, and Money In Your Pocket – Shelley Stockwell
I reckon a fair test of any self-help book is whether its charm and character stand the test of time. And Shelley Stockwell’s 1998 offering, Hypnosi$: How to Put a Smile on Your Face, and Money In Your Pocket, still feels as full of “joy juice” – to quote her term for mesmeric powers! – as the day this US hypnotist put pen to paper.
We’ve met Shelley before in The Search for Cosmic Consciousness, a book she co-wrote with Ormond McGill. McGill (1913-2005) was an American stage hypnotist, magician, and educator whose presence continues to be felt among more magically minded vintage hypnosis enthusiasts. Shelley was, and remains, a hypnotherapist, trainer, speaker, and media personality in her own right, and perhaps some day she shall ‘spill the tea’ on McGill and all the gurus of the US self-help scene in a Cosmic Pancakes! interview… Hers is an eclectic philosophy and approach worth capturing simply because she escaped the samey dominance of NLP. I considered becoming a hypnotherapist at a low ebb after breaking my leg in 2018, and I read this book to free myself of feeling that I must always consider others first. It’s such a gift to free myself of other people’s life choices.
Shelley is often sharing ‘recipes’ for self-hypnosis based on varyingly in/credible hypnosis and psychology techniques/claims complemented by her own authentic convincers or frames. These idiosyncratic self-help hypnotism books are so subjective; the target reader wishes to emulate the author-guru, and what could be more aspirational than being The Woman in the otherwise very pale, stale, and male world of hypnosis?! No wonder Shelley saw fit to print one-hundred dollar bills with her face on them: Shelley’s star ascending is the ‘second-hand magic’ the book proffers.
The book covers in/credible aspects of hypnotism in women’s magazine-style ‘facty’ bite-sized but intriguing ways… “Perhaps that’s where the expression “mad as Hell” comes from,” she writes in a potted history of the key players of hypnotism’s history, including Father Hell. I used to write and edit beauty salon business magazines in my 20s and I wrote in a similar ‘jokey knowing aside to nobody’ style for only my own gratification. Shelley holds a PhD in psychology, but I suspect she’s savvy to the comfortably duplicitous ways of magicians in mashing up vague mentions of credible scientific concepts (eg, the inner-observer model) with feel-good pop-psychology servings. It’s like therapy by novelty fridge-magnets. I think she subscribes to the ‘if it works’ magical-ego-view of hypnotism that is particularly understandable in stage performance.
In that respect, it’s a pleasant jaunt through a late 1990s American self-help seminar that is worth the imaginative trip. Because Shelley seems genuinely into hypnotism. She was first hypnotised by Pat Collins (1935-1997), a Hollywood nightclub hypnotist who turned her troubled Detroit, Michigan, past into a $4,000 a week entertainment-meets-hypnotherapy career. Were her fans following her nuanced mentions of, say, John Milne Bramwell… or appreciating the fullness of her list of mesmeric Victorian novelists? (Hawthorne and Melville are alongside Dickens, du Maurier, and Poe; British and American authors making ‘friends’ in an ongoing challenge amidst the usual sordid embarrassments of males who like global travel and attract various sorts of paperwork signers.) I suspect the majority were there for the blast of feel-good, confidence-boosting, ‘girl boss’ feminism rather than her top tips from neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), Gestalt therapy, and all sorts of other philosophies, beliefs, cultures, and movements.
Laced with Shelley’s incantations poems, it is a blast to read of her roving approach to The Business We Call Hypnotherapy: past-life regressions, musings on legal and illegal drugs, summoning spirit guides to commune with the dead, and gaining pastoral counselling creds to appease religious doubters and worry-worts are all covered. It’s an infectiously fun book and, in the psychological and spiritual soup that was late 90s America, I can’t begrudge seekers learning simple tools like the power of positive self-talk in spite of the often spurious content.
Shelley’s stage hypnosis influences shine through. That’s the thing: showbiz is so much more compelling than just sitting in some small room persuading people to quit smoking for $80 a pop… Alas, I believe only in the viability of Shelley’s personal wealth scheme in reading this book; not in the viability of a ploddingly, meagrely realistic hypnotherapy business. It’s Shelley’s sparkle that appeals. Indeed, I like to imagine there is some of the magic of both Pat Collins and Ormond McGill in her suggestions for participants to enact in her prescription for a stage hypnosis show. (As if you’re likely to tread the boards to prove yourself before setting up in this entirely unregulated field!)
“You are watching the funniest movie you’ve ever seen.”
“A huge helium balloon is pulling your arm up, up, up, lifting you up off your chair, up, up, up.”
“It’s the hottest day of your life. Oops a blizzard just rolled into town.”
“You’re seven years old and you and your best friends sitting next to you have a case of the sillies.”
“You can speak moon talk. And this guy here next to you will translate for us.”
