If you're really hypnotizing way that guilt, that emotional response, then I guess I am misunderstanding you. Is that the case?

Haha! YES!

...people still feel bad about it for a while.

Yep. They're doing it wrong.

You're focusing on the intellectual acceptance of "yes, I should drop the PhD"

No no no no no! I'm talking about the emotional acceptance. It is a very different thing than intellectual acceptance, but that does not mean they can't track each other. If your mind is organized well, they do track.

Have you read Kaj's post on overcoming suffering and suffering as attention allocation conflicts? This is basically what I'm talking about

I would say that, based on my personal experience, that is seriously dangerous territory

There is a very important distinction between suppressing emotion (perhaps successfully) and eliminating the cause of the emotion directly by coming up with a better way of handling the conflict. The latter is healthy and quite low risk compared to the null option. This is what I do - with or without "hypnosis".

Suppressing emotion is a recipe for disaster.