Psychotherapy as Recovery from Conspiracy Theories

© Richard Bolstad 2022

How do we help people with Conspiracy Theories?

It’s pretty common for NLP Practitioners and other psychotherapists or coaches to ask me how they can possibly work with people who hold conspiracy theories. Of the 330 million people in USA, 12 million ( more than one in 27) believe that the leaders of the world are shape changing aliens. 22 million (one in 15) believe that the Apollo moon landings were faked. 66 million (one in 5) believe that aliens landed in Roswell in 1947 and the whole event has been covered up by every president since then (statistics from Oksman, 2016). I think that the chances are that if you work as a helper in the world today, you work with conspiracy theorists. The next thing people tell me is that they may be working with conspiracy theorists, but the people don’t tell them their conspiracy theories and don’t ask for help with those.

In a previous article I identified 6 characteristics of conspiracy theories as opposed to real conspiracies. For example, it is a real conspiracy that pharmaceutical companies are trying to sell you more drugs, and specifically more drugs that they produce. It is a conspiracy theory that they hide a 5G enabled chip in their vaccines.  The 6 characteristics of conspiracy theories are:

1. The person believing the theory shows ongoing signs of high anxiety, and physical agitation, such as inability to sleep or make decisions, but denies this anxiety or explains it as a physical effect of the conspiracy attacks.
2. The person feels a need to convert other people to their beliefs, and cannot distinguish contexts where that might be inappropriate (they are a “conspiracy evangelist”).
3. The delusions include superheroes who will save us from the conspiracy, often political figures, sometimes ones who are in fact dead, and often ones who simultaneously deny the conspiracy in words and deeds (a denial which is explained as their need to operate secretly for now).
4. The delusions include beliefs in the magic powers of the deluded person: they are immune to diseases, able to detect chemicals without testing, able to read other people’s minds, able to gather knowledge superior to all scientists, able to buy and sell without paying taxes etc.
5. The delusions include conspiracies which would require the ongoing cooperation and secrecy of millions of actors, often people with known antagonisms to each other, and often people who have extensive public personas (e.g. all nurses and doctors, all reporters in media companies globally, all heads of states)
6. The person shows attention/learning difficulties but remains convinced that they have special skills in obtaining information, or special intuitions.

OK, now let’s look at a fairly typical client. This is Mike, from Michael Yapko’s book “Treating Depression with Hypnosis”. When I teach clinical therapists to help others, I recommend the video of this one session resolution of a 30 year clinical depression, and the book has the full transcript too. In this article I aim to show you that Mike has what I’m calling a Conspiracy Theory, and Michael Yapko helps him let go of it. And not just any conspiracy theory: one of the most popular in the world….

Mike’s Presenting Problem

To begin, Mike explains “I’ve been like carrying a lot of emotional baggage for a long time and ah and it just seems to affect me you know like daily. You know I can’t seem to like break free of things you know, and mmm it just seems like there’re constant reminders of things that have happened in the past.” Now you might think you know what emotional baggage means, but Michael Yapko is not so easily fooled, so he asks what that means. Mike says “Well a lot of it you know is from like the last 34 years of my life, it just seems like one bad thing after another you know, a lot of it stemsfrom my father you know. Growing up was just seems like full of twists and turns you know, it was always a lot of hitting,kicking, slapping, throwing downstairs, hit with bats, belts, boots, umm verbally called probably every name you can think off umm you know past is probably you know running away, foster homes … its like [chuckles] that’s like the tip of it.” In response to Michael’s questions Mike then explains that the trigger is often when someone says something to him: “Somebody may say something whatever and for a long time after I get home I may just be in another world, you know, just thinking, you know… and I am always you know thinking maybe I should have done this better, different…. it seems like words can hurt, you know, worse than punches you know….I seem to take a lot of things seriously. It could be just joking or whatever but I would take it seriously.”

1. Mike has a lot of anxiety (he later says he never took even 5 minutes to just relax), and he blames it on what has been happening TO him.
2. He’s already started trying to prove to Michael Yapko that a lot of what happens is due to his father and the other people in his life.
3. He thinks that Michael Yapko can somehow save him from this, even though it is clear that Michael Yapko doesn’t even know his father, let alone have any influence over what his father did 30 years ago.
4. Mike believes he can work out whether someone else is angry at him, without them even saying so, even when they may claim to be just joking. (To be fair, he also thinks someone else can guess what he means by “emotional baggage” so he thinks mind-reading is a common skill)
5. He says this has happened throughout the entire 34 years of his life, and his whole experience has been one bad thing after another.
6. He kind of admits that he may be getting things wrong, but he continues to operate AS-IF he has special information about what others are thinking.

Those are the 6 indicators of a conspiracy theory. Basically, Mike has a conspiracy theory about his life. And in this article I want to show you how Michael Yapko helps him resolve that. Worth knowing, because basically EVERY client you see as a psychotherapist is caught in this conspiracy theory thinking. And frankly, a lot of what psychotherapists learn is caught there too.

The Simplest Way to Tell That Someone is Doing Conspiracy Thinking

Martin Seligman (Burns and Seligman, 1991) showed that depression can be understood as a kind of “Learned Helplessness” – a learned way of explaining events in life where the person has no sense of being able to control what happens to them: the world is “out to get them”. In fact, people who have this negative explanatory style actually experience more negative events in their life. In his recent research, Seligman (2018, pp 339-346) has shown that this cognitive difference can be identified in social media.

Bathina et alia (2021) summarised several years research on the correlation of word use on social media with depression diagnosis. “Specifically, it has been shown that individuals with depression more frequently use a variety of terms that describe negative emotions, first-person pronouns (FPPs), common symptoms, and linguistic inquiry and word count (LIWC) categories deemed to correspond to ‘absolutist’ language.” The researchers then looked for what Cognitive Behavioural Therapists would label as “cognitive distortions’ in their speech in naturalistic conversations. Here they identified the overriding power of emotional reasoning (believing something is true because it feels true rather than because it logically makes sense).

These cognitive indicators of depression are much the same as the cognitive indicators of conspiracy theory. In their research on cognitive factors involved in conspiracy theory acceptance, Dagnall et alia found that an intuitive-experiential thinking style (as opposed to a rational-analytical style) also was the most significant variable – more important than paranoia, schizotypy (mild schizophrenia-like responses), or a base conspiracy worldview and sense of disempowerment (all of which were also significant).  In a large study of correlates of conspiracy theory across 8 countries (De Coninck et alia, 2021 – the countries were Belgium, Canada, England, Philippines, Hong Kong, New Zealand, United States, and Switzerland) feelings of depression were more strongly associated with conspiracy or misinformation beliefs across countries.” There’s one key difference between the type of conspiracy theory that usually gets called “conspiracy theory”, and the type of situation that gets called “depression”. We’ll come back to that later.

Michael Yapko (2001) uses his hypnotherapeutic skills to apply this understanding of the cognitive basis of depression. In his interview with Mike, Yapko needs to challenge and transform this negative explanatory style, absolutist thinking, focus on self, and over-reliance on intuitive-experiential thinking. This begins, Yapko explains, with teaching Mike to be comfortable with the essential ambiguity of life (it doesn’t have one set meaning) and teaching him the ability to discriminate when to use a particular response and when not to (rather than thinking life is “always” better approached in a certain way).

A sample of the session: Michael Yapko and Mike

Mike’s Session

The 37 minute session has three sections of almost equal duration.

1. 00.00 – 12.00 Challenging Mike’s Old Strategy and Contracting
2. 12.00 – 27.00 “Focusing”, Relaxation, Hypnotherapy Session
3. 27.00 – 37.00 Assessing the Change and Planning for Future

The Opening

At the start of the session, Michael Yapko asks what Mike would like help with. Here is Mike’s initial definition of the situation: “I’ve been carrying like a lot of emotional baggage for a long time. And, um, you know it just seems to affect me, you know like daily. You know, I can’t seem to, like, break free of things, you know, and, uh, it just seems like I, you know, have constant reminders of things that have happened in the past.” Michael Yapko asks a series of powerful questions to help Mike unpack this model of the world, including:

1. Mike starts off by explaining that his problem is called “Emotional Baggage”. Michael Yapko asks “So, when you say “emotional baggage”, what do you mean?” In reply, Mike explains that he has had a lot of horrible things happen in his past.
2. Next, Michael Yapko asks “So, with that kind of pretty nasty background, how does it affect the choices that you’re making today?” … he asks this again later as “How do those kinds of past experiences become a basis for emotional distance in your own family?”
3. The first time Michael Yapko asks question (2), Mike explains that he is not sure which way to move and feels stuck. So Michael Yapko asks him: “Stuck in terms of your ability to do what?” The second time, Mike explains that he gets caught up in self-criticism.
4. Michael Yapko also checks “Do you always have that kind of running commentary going through your mind?” Mike says he does.
5. Michael Yapko repeatedly asks Mike how he discriminated between criticisms (external or internal) that are worth responding to, and criticisms that are irrelevant. “Okay. But if I criticize you, how do you know whether to pay attention to it, how do you know whether to listen to it, how do you know whether to take it seriously or whether to dismiss it?” … he asks this again later as “Have you ever had the experience of discovering that some of the things that run through your mind aren’t particularly helpful to you, and you don’t really need to focus on them?” … and again later as “Okay. But the question I’m really asking is how do you know whether you should take it seriously? You’re telling me that you do take it seriously, but I’m asking a question of how you know whether you should?”… and again later as “So have you ever evaluated the value of the things that you tell yourself? Has it ever been an option for you, in other words, not to pay attention to it?” Repeatedly, Mike says “No.”

These are five questions which we teach in NLP as “Metamodel questions”. Question 1) is a challenge to a “nominalization” (an abstract noun) – “Emotional Baggage”. The question helps Mike explain what actually happens in his head that he has given this label to. It means he thinks about bad past events.

Question 2) is a challenge to a cause and effect statement. These two claims by Mike say that bad events in the past can cause current effects (bad choices now, or emotional distance in his family). This is the “negative explanatory style” that Martin Seligman’s research found. In response to the questions, Mike explains that the missing piece in the centre is that he keeps thinking about the bad past events, and that is what makes him make bad choices now and stay distant from his family. He says that he keeps thinking about it because he is stuck and doesn’t know what to do. Michael Yapko’s question incorporates Mike’s claim inside it and simply asks him to explain it. This structure of question is called “pacing and leading”. He doesn’t just say “How do you limit your choices?”, he says “So, with that kind of pretty nasty background, how does it affect the choices that you’re making today?” The first part of the sentence “walks alongside” Mike or “paces” him, and the second part takes him to a new place. Actually Mike never even said he makes “choices”. He just said that “it just seems to affect me”. So Michael Yapko’s question starts by accepting Mike’s reality (that bad things happened to him) and ends up by presupposing the opposite reality (That he is choosing what to think about).

Question 3) is a challenge to the deleted information at the end of that explanation. If a person is stuck, it presupposes that they were trying to get somewhere and got caught on the way there. I stay in the same place through the night, but I don’t say I am “stuck” in bed unless I want to get somewhere else. If Mike knew where he wanted to get, he would be much more able to become “unstuck” obviously.

Question 4) is about the “universal quantifier” – always. Mike talks several times about how “I have constant reminders of things that have happened in the past”, “my life … just seems like one bad thing after another”, “I always [have a running commentary going through my mind]”, “it always comes back” These are what we call universal quantifiers, and what the researchers also call “absolutist thinking’. These words over-generalise and don’t allow for any exceptions.

Question 5) is a challenge to a basic presupposition of Mike’s story: the presupposition that if someone else or I myself criticize me, then that is important, that is serious, and I need to listen to that and think about it. This is not a necessary presupposition. It is possible to choose to listen to some criticisms and not to others. This requires discrimination, and a key element to the way Mike has been describing things (in those universal quantifiers, for example) is his lack of discrimination between different situations. It requires rational-analytical thinking, rather than the intuitive-experiential thinking which says that if something feels really bad then it is automatically important, serious and believable. Mike kind of understands that discrimination is possible, but the emotional power of the situations he is in fools him into believing what is said. He says “I seem to take a lot of things seriously. It could just be joking, whatever, but I do take it serious.” This, of course, is the basis of a kind of mild paranoia in his thinking. He feels bad, and he is operating as if “feelings = evidence”, so he treats the situation as if the person was criticizing him, rather than checking if they were just joking.

Michael Yapko follows up these questions by providing an educational explanation. He says that from his experience, people who have good self esteem also have critical internal comments sometimes, but they have a method for filtering the comments and letting them go if they are not useful. He gives examples of those methods: turning down the volume, thinking of the comments as a barking dog and walking by etc. These are standard NLP submodality and strategy changes. He then concludes this section by recommending that, since Mike is good at “going into his own little world” they could use that to help him both explore his positive experiences and learn how to filter out those things that are not helpful to pay attention to. He asks Mike twice if he would be willing to do such a session, and Mike agrees twice. This creates both an agreed outcome and a “contract” about what they are going to change and how they will change it.

The “Trance” Session

By inviting Mike to relax, Michael Yapko puts him in a state where he is able to consider these new possibilities without he constant internal critical chatter that he has acknowledged was “keeping him stuck”. On the video you can see that as he begins this relaxation, Michael Yapko sits back and crosses his leg so that his left ankle rests on top of his right knee. Mike copies by sitting back in exactly the same position, as synchronization that NLP calles “rapport”, and an indication that Mike is unconsciously aligning himself with Michael Yapko, and is likely to consider his suggestions favorably. Michael Yapko speaks in a soft, slow voice with many pauses, starting by saying “What I suggest that you do is let your eyes close, take in a few deep breaths, and just orient yourself for a couple of minutes to the notion of absorbing yourself in a different way of thinking about your own experience.” While in the first part of the session, he has been challenging Mike’s unhelpful use of language patterns that simplify his experience (by deleting certain aspects, generalizing others and distorting what happens in others), in the second part of the session, he uses the same language patterns in order to construct a more useful model of the world. Here are some examples of deliberate use of the patterns whose unhelpful uses were challenged before:

1. Nominalisation (abstract nouns that suggest the existence of a “thing” without explaining what the person does that is being referred to): “There are strengths that you have… that you have used to cope…” “You have goals … ways you want the future to be different than the past…”
2. Cause and Effect (claims that one thing will almost inevitably cause another are used this time to create positive expectations): “One of the things that’s potentially valuable … about taking a few minutes to sit quietly the way you are now … is that it gives you the freedom to explore… other parts of yourself…” “and of course, what I’m really saying is for you to use your past to predict the future… becomes more and more difficult … as you begin to fill your future… with more things that remind you… that you’re more than that…”
3. Deleted Information (this includes sentences that may explain that that something has changed, but not into what, for example): “You know that you’re much, much more than your past, Mike …” “and it’s for you to know that your internal experience is changeable…”
4. Universal Quantifier (overgeneralized claims are now made about positive events): “the things that have gone before… have increasingly less and less influence… on the choices that you make today… tomorrow… all of your tomorrows.” “and to slowly and steadily build a wall around what was … in order to create an endless array of possibilities… for what can be…”
5. Presuppositions (Assumptions about the way life is): “because there doesn’t have to be trust out in the world… or predictability out in the world… or even safety out in the world… there only has to be your internal awareness… that you can deal with it… as someone wise once said … that the best way to predict the future is to create it…” “and if you find yourself remembering.. that there are a lot of different ways of responding … to voices from the past…. or any options that you generate… that make it abundantly clear… you don’t have to listen…”

As you can see in these examples, Michael Yapko repeatedly draws Mike’s attention to his own inner ability to choose what he pays attention to, and to respond in new ways rather than using past patterns. However he never directly tells him exactly what to say or do internally when someone criticizes him, for example. He tells him that he has many choices. Finally, he suggests that he reorient himself to where he is sitting in the room. “Take whatever time you want Mike, to process your thoughts… feelings… reactions… Take a moment to consolidate… absorb the deeper implications… and then when you feel like you’re ready to and want to… you can start the process of reorienting yourself… reconnecting with this environment and me…”

Consolidating the Learnings

In the last part of the session, Michael Yapko speaks to Mike “consciously” again, and helps him plan how to use his new understandings in the real world. This involves again having him think again in sensory specific detail, rather than in the vague and generalized language he used during the relaxation process.

1. Nominalisations. When Mike says “I saw a lot of things. That I’m capable of feelings… that I’ve used talents that I thought I didn’t have, but I have.” Michael Yapko asks him “Were you thinking of specific examples?” and Mike gives some examples of his experiences at work and with his children.
2. Universal Quantifier. When Mike says “And I also realized I can be whoever I want to be or do whatever I want to do, you know.” Michael Yapko asks him “There will always be people who tell you, you can’t. What are you going to do?”
3. Cause and Effect. When Mike dismisses this by saying “I’m capable of making things happen on my own.” Michael Yapko explains that criticism doesn’t have to cause one set result. He says “Great. But my point about people are gonna tell you that you can’t do what you want? I’m hoping that your response will be some variation of “Thanks for sharing!” Your own individual response that way, but not to take it in, because exactly of what you were saying about you’re the one who makes it happen. So you get to choose.”
4. Deleted Information. When Mike says “The funny thing is, and this is what I can’t get over, it’s like I never took, not even five minutes to just … exhales slowly and deliberately) relax. I kind of walk around stressed.” Michael Yapko doesn’t just accept that as a nice discovery. He checks what that means in terms of what Mike will do in future. What specific plan does he have. He says “Which is great. Is that the kind of experience… uh, given that it was your first time with it and you did this well, um, something that you’d be interested in pursuing? …. Perhaps the counsellor that you’re working with can pick up and do these kinds of things with you. But certainly there are, there’s a world full of tapes, relaxation tapes, visualization tapes, guided imagery tapes.”
5. Presuppositions. One of the most powerful presuppositions that Mike began with was that his distress was due to his own specific past history. After Mike has reported how much better he feels now, Michael Yapko challenges that presupposition directly. “I mean your brain is capable of generating all kinds of junk. My brain is capable …. I mean the percentage of thoughts that I have that are actually worth paying attention to … I’d hate to put a number on it, but put it this way: there are a lot of things that go floating through my mind that just aren’t worth paying attention to… and that’s true for any human being.”

Five months after this session, Michael Yapko contacted Mike by email. In his reply, Mike said “Every day I’m thankful to just get up. I refuse to be defeated by the past. Instead I look forward to conquer the future. I really feel as though I have been given a new lease on life. I do not want to waste it. Thanks again for everything.” Essentially, this one 40 minute session had changed his life after 30 years of depression. He also made a decision, soon after this, to stop seeing his previous therapist, who kept wanting him to talk about his childhood abuse and said his new found happiness was “denial”. Michael Yapko encouraged him to discuss this with his therapist and reminded him that therapy was for his benefit, not to make his therapist feel good. Put in the terms I am using here, Mike’s former therapist had a therapy conspiracy theory about life.

The Key Difference Between “Depression” and “Conspiracy theory”

OK, it’s true that there are some differences between depression, as Mike experienced it, and conspiracy theory. Let me explain that now. You can see that one of the core parts of the construction of depression is to process the world in very general terms, using universal quantifiers. This type of thinking is called in NLP “Chunking up”. Not all people who are distressed do that. Some are obsessed with details, including people with certain types of anxiety or what are called personality disorders. That sort of thinking is called “Chunking down”.

The other important part of depression though is processing the world as if everything is happening inside the person themselves. Depression can be identified on social media by the use of negative emotional words, universal quantifiers and overuse of pronouns of self (“me”, “my”, “I”, “myself”). The person who is depressed is, in NLP terms “Associated into their problems”. They experience problems as happening inside them. Not all unhappy people do that. People who are constantly blaming others, and pleading with others to be nicer to them (as many people diagnosed with personality disorder do) are, in NLP terms “Dissociated from their problems”. That is also true of people who are diagnosed with paranoia and other delusions. The person with conspiracy theories, for example, often does not experience themselves as having a problem. They believe that the problems are outside them, in “the deep state”, in the “Rothschild Zionists”, in “The Illuminati”.

The dissociation of conspiracy theory means that it is necessary to begin psychotherapy in a different way. You cannot help someone who does not want help, by definition. You may have heard the story of the three little boy scouts. At the end of the day they reported to their troop leader. It is, of course, a boy scout tradition to try and do one good deed every day.

‘Well?’ the leader asked, ‘and what was your good deed for today, Johnny?’

‘Please sir,’ smiled Johnny, “I helped an old lady across the road.’

‘Very. good,’ the scout leader encouraged. ‘How about you, Timmy?’

‘Please sir,’ said Timmy, just a little less certainly, ‘I helped the same old lady across the road.’

‘Well,’ said the leader thoughtfully, ‘that was very good too.’ After all, he considered, some old ladies require a bit more assistance than others.

‘How about you Andy?’, he asked of the third little boy scout.

‘Please sir,’ said Andy, ‘I helped the same old lady across the road.’

‘Now hold on’, said the scout leader, suspecting some mistake here. ‘This can’t be right. How come it takes three little boy scouts to help one old lady across the road?’

‘Please sir,’ explained Andy, ‘You see sir, she didn’t want to go.’

This does not count, in my terms, as ‘helping’. Helping begins when the person being helped chooses to change. Notice that a key strategy that Michael Yapko uses with Mike is to start with what he is already experiencing, and show him how Michael Yapko’s proposed intervention would help him achieve his own aims in ways that would make sense to him. That process needs to have begun even before the session, when Michael Yapko “gets hired”. Michael Yapko said that he was offered several clients to work with on the day he did the session with Mike, but most of them were not really ready to “hire” him. They were convinced that they could not be helped by psychotherapy, or that others were to blame. Remember that even Mike explained that a lot of his problems could be traced back to the way his father behaved. That part of his initial comments is dissociated. However, Michael Yapko helped him focus on the fact that whatever the triggers were in the outside world, the part of the process he could change was his response to that. In the first part of the session, Michael Yapko noted “Because when are you ever going to escape all the triggers?  When are you going to escape the sounds, the smells, the images? You can be watching a television show, you can be watching a movie, you can, I mean the triggers are always going to be out there. We are not going to be able to change the external world. But what’s going on inside your mind is eminently negotiable.”

Getting hired to help someone who believes that they do not have a problem themselves is a little like being a consultant in a business setting. You need to show the person that you can help them reach their higher outcomes and values. To do that, you need to move beyond the conspiracy theory itself, which is all about what went wrong, and doesn’t actually tell you what they really value. Thinking about how to influence someone in a “values conflict” like this, while it has a great many similarities with what you have read from Michael Yapko (especially focusing on values and goals, telling stories, and sharing one’s own experiences) is the subject of another article.

Summary

What is similar in both depression and conspiracy theory therapy situations is the focus on cognitive distortions such as Presuppositions, Cause-Effect claims, Universal Quantifiers, Deletions, and Nominalisations. The process of therapy involves challenging these distortions in the person’s thinking and showing them where they are missing distinctions (ways in which they would benefit if they learn to chunk down, for example). It then involves “installing” a new set of distinctions and focus choices so that they can enjoy their life healthily. Finally it involves chunking down again and checking that they have specific real world plans to behave differently.

See also these other articles on 1) Conspirituality 2) NLP Language and Conspiracy Theory 3. Helping People with Conspiracy theories

References:

• Bathina, K., ten Thij, M., Lorenzo-Luaces, L., Rutter, L., & Bollen, J. (2021). Individuals with depression express more distorted thinking on social media. Nature Human Behaviour. 5. 1-9. 10.1038/s41562-021-01050-7.
• Bolstad, R. RESOLVE, A New Model of Therapy, Crown Publishing, Camarthon, 2003
• Burns, M.O. and Seligman, M.E.P. (1991).  “Explanatory style, helplessness, and depression”.  In C.R. Snyder and D.R. Forsyths (Eds.), Handbook of Social and Clinical Psychology. New York:  Pergamon Press,  267-284.
• De Coninck D., Frissen T., Matthijs K., d’Haenens L., Lits G., Champagne-Poirier O., Carignan M., David M.D., Pignard-Cheynel N., Salerno S., and Généreux M. 2021. “Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation About COVID-19: Comparative Perspectives on the Role of Anxiety, Depression and Exposure to and Trust in Information Sources “ Frontiers in Psychology , Vol 12, https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.646394  DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2021.646394   ISSN=1664-1078  
• Dagnall N., Drinkwater, K., Parker, A., Denovan, A., and Parton M. 2015, “Conspiracy theory and cognitive style: a worldview”  in Frontiers in Psychology Vol. 6, https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00206, DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00206, ISSN=1664-1078 
• Oksman, O. (2016), “Conspiracy craze: why 12 million Americans believe alien lizards rule us”, Guardian, 7 April, 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/apr/07/conspiracy-theory-paranoia-aliens-illuminati-beyonce-vaccines-cliven-bundy-jfk
• Seligman, M. (2018), The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism, Nicholas Brealey, London
• Yapko, M.D. (2001), Treating Depression With Hypnosis: Integrating Cognitive-Behavioural and Strategic Approaches, Routledge, New York