Dear Kenrick Cleveland

Kenrick Cleveland,

Thanks to an interested reader who sent me the mp3, I was able to listen to your intro webinar, The Dark Side of Covert Hypnosis – all 2+ hours of it. Now, I can offer a more informed opinion about the infamous “Kenrick Cleveland”.

After listening, there are some things I’d like to retract from my previous post.

Retractions:

1. I suggested that you might not actually deliver the product. That was wrong. You obviously have a product and are delivering.

2. I suggested you do not know how to do what you claim. While I think this is true for the average dark side, dating guru and success coach wanna-be who inflates his skills to appear impressive and get people’s money, I suspect you do have some NLP actual skills, although this was not evident in your presentation. So….I guess this isn’t a retraction after all.

FYI my offer still stands. I’ll sit with you so you can work your dark magic upon me, anytime. It won’t work, as I will not give my power to you – and you do not know how to overcome that.

Other feedback:

For me, the negatives for the Kenrick Cleveland dark side program are still insurmountable, but now more specific.

The most entertaining negative was your 15-minute tirade masked as a “welcome” to your detractors. You wanted to come off as above it all, I assume, by welcoming your critics, yet couldn’t seem to control your underhanded remarks about them.

I admit I was embarrassed for you during this part – I stopped counting how many times you used the word “idiots.” But, hey, at least you welcomed us.

This isn’t such a big deal in light of the other negatives. After all, I called you a slime ball and Satan, so I wasn’t expecting you to be nice. The fact that you couldn’t let it go throughout the seminar was boorish, that’s all. One guy even asked you to get off it and move on to the teaching material.

All in all, you sounded defensive and petty for two hours. It was tiring.

My real concern about your approach is in the approach itself. You stated that your intention for teaching dark side NLP and hypnosis tactics was to help people prevent being attacked and controlled. You were really clear about this and there were even people on the call who were there because they had suffered an attack and wanted to learn to prevent future attacks.

In other words, if people know how perpetrators operate, they can foil hypnotic attacks and keep themselves safe.

I think this by itself is reasonable. It’s like when law enforcement personnel study criminal tactics so they can better prevent crime. I was excited to hear this and almost ready to retract my entire criticism of you.

As I kept listening, however, you revealed a fatal flaw by rolling out the red carpet for slime balls to take your training. In fact, you admitted that people with bad intentions regularly get training from you and even acknowledged that some of them will be attending the course you are promoting. Then, you gave them indirect permission to use these tactics to take advantage of people.

You said: I am not your conscience, you are free to do what you want with these tools, I will preserve your anonymity, etc…these are paraphrases. Basically, you acted helpless to stop the abuse of the skills.

Worse, when you described what can be done to make others vulnerable to act against their will and be open to suggestion, your voice shifted into a seductive tone…and you can do whatever you want with them (or something to that effect). This kind of talk gives perpetrators a major erection and I think you know that.

The whole thing was a conscious message: “Hey, I am here to protect people and keep them safe” and an unconscious “Wink, wink….do whatever you want, I will look the other way.”

If you don’t understand this, Kenrick Cleveland, then you absolutely do not have the skills you claim.

Here’s a thought: by freely allowing perpetrators into your training, you shoot your stated intention in the foot. When the “bad guys” learn this stuff, they use it on hundreds of people. It only takes training a few of them to do a ton of damage and create thousands more victims over many years.

In fact, the place that innocent victims are most likely to encounter someone who wants to harm them is in your very own classroom. It’s their training camp. Have you considered that you are putting your good students at risk?

I’d NEVER send anyone in recovery from manipulation to your training.

I understand that your comeback might be, “Yeah, but I can’t help that. I can’t control what people choose to do. I don’t decide what is right or wrong for others and I am not their mother.” Fair enough. I agree.

What you CAN do, though, is determine who takes your class. If your intention is to put a stop to the use of dark side tactics that harm people and give people a way to defend themselves, then you could be making every effort to ensure that these strategies don’t get into the wrong hands. In fact, if these techniques are as potent as you suggest, then it is your responsibility to do so.

How?

1. State your intention up front in your sales copy, rather than writing sales copy that is a magnet for power seeking scumbags.

2. State who is eligible to take your course and who is not.

3. Screen people. If your course is for victims of hypnotic attack, then teach only victims or professionals. You could be interviewing every student as part of the application process. With your observation skills, I am confident you can tell who is a genuine candidate and who is interested in possessing the power to harm others.

Given all your resources, I am confident you could keep the “bad guys” out. This would only take you further in the direction of your stated intention, so I can’t imagine why you would not make this effort.

Actually, I can imagine a few reasons why.

1. Your stated intention is bullshit and you really get off on being the GURU of hypnotic badness.

2. You haven’t really thought this through, which is scary.

3. You don’t want to limit your market by excluding the scum, so you make the trade off in favor of higher enrollments. This blows your stated intention out of the water – total self-sabotage.

4. Your ego and level of self-absorption are so high that you don’t think it is possible for you to do anything stupid. Another scary thought.

Not that you care, but Kenrick Cleveland training still gets a major thumbs down from me, but not for all of the reasons I initially stated.

You aren’t doing anything to prevent this knowledge from getting into the wrong hands. In fact, you are making it very, very easy for perpetrators who want to manipulate people physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, and sexually to get the skills to become better at what they do.

This is deplorable, given that it is largely preventable.

In the big picture, this will only lead to further victimization of innocent and unsuspecting people who – as you view them – ‘do not have a clear will of their own’.