The fundamentals of hypnotising
One thing I’ve tended to notice is newbies tend to be pretty… I guess the word would be intimidated by the idea of trancing someone, often because it appears at first glance to be some huge and difficult and highly complex thing. Now there’s some truth to that, there’s a lot of info to learn, and you either have to delve into books, or learn scripts and go from there, and that makes it feel like there’s a lot of memorisation to be had.
On the other hand, I’ve never really felt that it’s that difficult myself. Now, caveat as always, I had the weird intro of only having books to learn from for years before I got to zonk someone, so I knew everything by the time I did get to use it. But, what I personally feel gets lost in all the ways that are available for a newbie to learn how to hypnotise someone are the core fundamentals behind the technique, essentially.
I found that as I read stuff initially, it seemed daunting until a few core concepts clicked in my head, and suddenly it was easy as pie. And those aren’t really explained well. Anywhere. So I’ll try to go through what I can think of as the core building blocks, including a few things that took actually doing it to figure out.
Everything you do has an effect: This is probably the biggest, most fundamental thing about anything to do with hypnosis and inductions, in my mind (…pun intended). Every little thing you can and will do, has an effect in your subject’s brain. Most other things I’ll talk about are essentially just this in different ways, but in terms of learning, once you grasp that you can start looking at scripts, or files, or whatever, and just take them apart piece by piece and figure out what each little bit is trying to do to the subject, and you can slowly break down things from being big complex scripts, to little bits of intent and understanding. This alone makes everything easier to understand.
Inductions can be broken down: Going from there, the best way to illustrate that is with inductions. When starting out, you look at an induction script as a big thing to learn wholesale, and it can be daunting. But as you start to break it down it stops being as much. You can generally identify sections of setup, sections that do things, how those sections do things, bits of fluff, and then finally where it pulls everything together. Or to describe it another way, if I look at an induction I’d generally identify the following things: Key components: These are what the induction is actually trying to do. Broadly, what is the induction doing on an overall level? For example, a lot of confusion inductions give the subject a task to do, to keep their mind busy, while the hypnotist then starts to slip things through and/or break that task/pattern. And then, what does each sub-section try to do? The Elman is the best example, where you have distinct sections that do completely different things, and so each have obvious aims and techniques you can figure out, but even in other inductions, you can figure out where things are being set up and so-forth. Pratter: A lot of inductions have pratter, i.e. bits where it’s basically “Fill this in with hypnotic sounding phrases.” Often omitted a bit in scripts, this is where you essentially just improvise and go off of what your heart tells you to zonk them with. Confusion inductions and the countdown section of the Elman feature this a bunch, where you’re almost just filling in space/giving them more things to focus on. Weaving it into a cohesive whole: For more narrative inductions mostly, but there’ll also tend to be parts where the stuff isn’t hypnotic, but it’s meant to pull everything together and make it interesting and engaging, or just for the purposes of making all the sub-sections of the induction flow into each other. I always found it far easier to learn inductions when I could figure out “Oh, it’s doing this, then this, then this, then this.” and then sort of just have the skeleton in my head to work around, rather than try to memorise an entire script. And once you get the hang of it, understanding it at a fundamental level lets you start building and splicing and creating your own stuff.
You’re often taking advantage of natural psychological/physiological processes: There’s parts of hypnosis where all you’re doing is inducing someone that happens in the brain or body naturally, and taking advantage of it, claiming you made it happen, and weaving it into whatever narrative you’re concocting. Eye fixations are the obvious example. People’s eyes get tired when focusing or following something for a long period of time. So naturally their eyes will get heavy and harder to keep open. Funny how that’s always a feature of fixation inductions, isn’t it? :P
The image you create, the confidence you bring, the expectations you create all matter: The atmosphere you create, and all the things you do outside any hypno-play, matter too, hugely. There’s a reason we always drone on and on about faking confidence no matter what, and being optimistic about things not working and such. Half the battle is having the subject feeling like it’ll work, and not being nervous or worried. So if they feel like you know what you’re doing, and if you’ve talked to them before and made them feel safe, are all big things that’ll help. I’ll go into this a touch more in a second, but this is also where pre-talks and negotiating things properly really make a difference.
Work with your subject: Hypnosis isn’t a crazy complex thing you have to get exactly right to work. Honestly, most of the work is done by the subject. My view, as a hypnotist, is I’m just giving them the environment, security, and some loose guidance, to go into trance. If you get all of that, you can flub your induction to some pretty surprising degrees, and stuff have a hypnotised puddle regardless. Really! (With most subjects, at least.) This goes doubly for people who are very good/easy/experienced subjects, and especially people already familiar with hypnosis and hypnokink. They’ll know what they’re after, and maybe know how to get there already, or will get there without much effort. Here’s where I’ll start going into more things I learnt through experience now. Let them fill in things for you, and work with what they give you. Be flexible. Imagery is the obvious example, but with suggestions too. You can give someone just a framework of how a suggestion or trigger will work, and you’d be amazed at how easily most minds will fill in the rest. You’ll get some cool results, and unexpected things too, and it’s where a lot of the fun in seeing how different people react comes from as well! And, get their input/ok on stuff. The more you get their mind on-board with what you’re doing, the easier it’ll be. I’ve seen people talk about idiomotor responses for this, but I’m blunt and direct, and I literally just take the approach of asking them “Is this ok?”, “Do you think you can do that?” and so-on. Especially with complex things, where me making them will probably involve confirming and checking in at every step.
Pratter: Ok, pratter and hypnotic language and phrasing and just speaking takes practice. No getting around it. You’ll find it takes practice to get your brain to keep up with your mouth, and to figure out what to say and when, and how to use language patterns and tricks like that. But not only that, here’s where it ties in with point #1. Your pacing of speech, your choice in words, your speech, your delivery, can all have subtle effects in-of-themselves, and understanding what you can do with that, along with non-verbal cues and such are important too. You can get away with not knowing that stuff, and stuff will still work, but you’ll notice it, and pick it up pretty quickly as you try stuff.
Ok that’s enough from me. :P
There’s a bit of stuff that’s maybe a touch more advanced than the fundamentals, but when I try to break down being a ‘tist to it’s absolute core, this is about what I get down to. Hope it helps!
For any potential newbie hypnotists out there, here are some good tips!
