Thread by @VastHypno

Sometimes Hypnosis fails under stress and you have to let it be ok:
An uncomfortably personal thread.

TW: gender dysphoria, body dysmorphia, and political PTSD. 1/

Most of you know that I am a subject of my own Hypnosis, and I have been very open about my #masculinization journey over the years.

If you are not familiar, catch up: vastcountry.blogspot.com/2018/07/perman… 2/

What I am often less open about is the fact that I straight up NEED this Hypnosis to be gender secure as a male.

At one point in my life I wondered if I was trans because though I had no desire to be a woman I absolutely hated my body and my gender expression. 3/

Becoming a Hypnotist and writing a careers worth of masculinity files completely transformed me: how I felt about my body, sexuality & especially my gender.

Masculine Conditioning made me not only gender secure but ecstatically happy to be male.

vastcountry.blogspot.com/2017/07/mascul… 4/

And I just discovered that the 12 hours crown jewel of my Hypnosis career has a failure mode that was, until now, completely unknown to me.

And this is what I rely on to feel gender secure... 👿👿👿 FUCK 5/

My conscious mind was joking here, but my subconscious meant it very literally.

Just because people really are looting the capitol does NOT mean that the abreaction isn't happening. 6/

https://twitter.com/VastHypno/status/1346913098150539264?s=19

SC had already intuited what my conscious mind spent days trying to avoid: the men of the insurrection dress like me.

Boots, beards, camo pants, black metal T-shirts for bands I recognize. Bleachers, Doc Martens, biker gear

7/

And I can tell you exactly the moment it happened, too. My old green dragon shirt got too raggedy to wear, so I went on amazon to replace it...

And looking for shirts in colors that match camo brings up endless patriot gear. 8/

And in the current context that makes me curious about whether amazon carries the tactical gear worn at the insurrection. (They do)

And then I found my mouse pointer hovering over "add to cart" 😱 9/

Being a longtime Masculine Conditioning user, I am well aware that MC-8 is defeatable by design so you don't buy stuff you can't wear, so I think "it's just a nudge, easily resisted" and I surf away to safer brands...
warpmymind.com/index.php?gadg… 10/

Or so I thought... I still needed a shirt. And it still needs to match my camo-heavy wardrobe, but now I want to be careful to avoid anyone who makes alt-right gear.

No such luck. Grunt Style, Lock and Load, even Alpha Industries make gear that has obvious politics 11/

And very quickly I got frustrated and ordered a custom shirt from Zazzle, but in the process I activated a cascade reaction in my masculinization Hypnosis.

And since I designed the system, I can actually describe in detail what happened 12/

My thread on how Masculine Conditioning works might be helpful for understanding the next part

https://twitter.com/VastHypno/status/1332741879633387522?s=19

13/

When user rejects a nudge, the ecology engine engages and the user's personal conception of masculinity is updated to reflect the newly discovered preference.

So, my ecology engine notes that it's banning something longstanding and refers back to other code to find out why 14/

And in this case, what engaged was the role model safety from MC-3: Peer Pressure Masculinity that says to reject the influence of people who you regard as behaving in "unmanly, immoral, or toxic" ways.

Armed insurrection in support of a fascist definitely qualifies. 15/

So, having the green light from the safety, my subconscious mind actively purges my personal conception of masculinity of the influence of such people.

And I feel in the moment "something is desperately wrong" but the next thought is "yeah, there's a revolution brewing" 16/

You see, Masculine Conditioning is DESIGNED to be transparent to the conscious mind and it works hard in the background to hide itself, so at this point it goes wrong and winds up using it's rationalization mechanic to hide its own warning signal. 17/

So first thing this morning I wake up pleased with my morning wood and happy AF to be a male.

And then I looked at the clothes I had laid out, and my erection instantly went limp as I feel a massive wave of not ok hit me.
18/

Gender dysphoria? Body dysmorphia? Big, complicated words for someone who hasn't made coffee yet...

Put on loose comfy sweats, feel agender and unhappy, go pee... 19/

After coffee, I stand before my full closet going "I have nothing to wear" which I recognize as MC-8 and I start to debug why I am suddenly rejecting the wardrobe that exact Hypnosis spent years building. Strange 20/

I distracted myself on Twitter for a while, and at least I still love having a big manly dick that gets hard for porn. Good sign.

I strip naked and pose in the mirror: pudgy from quarantine and body dysmorphia about my chest, but I feel fine about the maleness of my nude 21/

Being stressed, I thought it wise to risk a (masked and socially distanced) outdoor face to face NA meeting, where I got honest about my anxieties.

I got back on the 27th, and quarantine after traveling is 14 days, but fuck it... I needed a meeting. 22/

And this one happens to be 3 miles away on foot, which gave me a long time to think about the problem and work out the explanation in this thread.

The whole time I could feel SC trying desperately to nudge me into conscious decision on something without knowing what...
23/

So I meditate on the street and look in the Magic Mirror of #Masculinity
soundcloud.com/jack-durst-1/m… (listen on #SoundCloud )

The figure is NUDE except for boots and a Jockstrap. That's not normally what this #SelfHypnosis shows for me.
24/

So I examine the figure in detail: ripped muscular, has my tattoos plus a few I've planned, trimmed goatee, long hair, a bit grayer than me.

My ideal grooming and body image seem to be intact. His mannerisms look like mine and I feel good about what I see. 25/

But the moment I tried to imagine him clothed beyond the Jockstrap and boots, the mirror fogged with uncertainty.

I've used Magic Mirror as a diagnostic tool on my subjects enough to know what that means: the users' conception of masculinity is blank in that respect 26/

And in that moment I could feel myself panic out of Trance with my heart pounding as I realized what happened: the "ecology adjustment" went wrong and deleted the whole clothing part of my Personal Conception of Masculinity! 27/

Being a Hypnotist I then consciously walk my mind through the events of tweets 15-20 in the thread from the perspective of debugging the code on the theory that it's working wrong for some unidentified reason.

Standard practice whenever something goes wrong. 28/

And as I step through the code my heart sinks as I realized that it works EXACTLY the way that I designed it to.

My look was rendered unacceptable to me by outside forces and my mind *rightly* redacted the suggestions causing distress. 29/

I simply failed to realize how extreme redaction might be on the subject side if the external situation got extreme enough.

I forgive myself that as a Hypnotist and rage at the alt-right for taking away the only look that ever made me feel good instead
#NazisRuinEverything 30/

But, unfortunately that leaves me in the very uncomfortable position of being without the protection of my usual masculinity coding.

I can't restore the old PCM, but it's going to take a month or more to evolve into a new direction via the system. 31/

In the meantime I can study the fashion of the fascists and see if I can tease out their signs as a way of un-corrupting my personal conception of masculinity and thereby restoring whatever part of the database got wrongfully nuked. 32/

Mostly just sharing this in case anyone else finds their established notions of manliness challenged by recent events.

If you have used Masculine Conditioning in the past and are suddenly feeling off, something like this might be why. 33/33

@threadreaderapp unroll please