Guidelines

Follow suggestions with the Hypnotic Mindset - being optimistic, engaged, curious, anticipatory and motivated.

There are various strategies that can be used to engage with a suggestion. Check out the Carleton Skills Training Program and Automatic Imagination Model from the components of hypnosis page on ways to actively engage with the suggestion.

The first time that you follow a suggestion and actively hold a belief, it may feel natural, or it may feel like acting. This is common with all new activities, and as automaticity builds up following suggestions will feel more natural.

If you have active thoughts, put them to use. Start thinking about the suggestion and ways to make it even better. If you are given a suggestion with imagery that doesn’t work for you, provide the imagery that does work. If there’s language that’s confusing or contradictory, throw it out and find the spirit. Don’t be afraid to find your own strategies that work for you. The virtuosos do it, and so can you.

All perception involves the mind creating a projection from uncertain input. You can use this uncertainty to decide what you perceive. This is an age-old hypnosis technique called utilization.

Take mental perceptions, where the perception of our environment consists of the stories we have about ourselves and the world around us. When those stories are weak, we can change and reframe those stories or buy into someone else’s story. When those stories are strong, they can be weakened through uncertainty. You can question a story, challenge it, and look for different angles on it that get you closer to the suggestion.

For emotional perceptions, you can notice things in your body and in your past that match up with the feeling. Take the feeling of love. If you’re feeling lazy and languid, that could be how comfortable you feel around the one you love. If you’re feeling tense and antsy, that could be how excited your partner makes you. Take the things around you in your environment and put them to work for you.

There’s an unspoken assumption in hypnosis that the hypnotist speaks and the tranced hypnotee cannot speak or respond because they are in trance. Hypnotists are taught to read facial expressions and look for twitches or frowns when the hypnotee is not comfortable.

Instead, you can be clear in your communication, even if you’re deeply in trance. There are a couple of hand signals like tapping out and hand raising that you should have as safeties, but you can also indicate your general happiness with happy noises or thumbs up, that you are restless by wiggling your fingers, or that you want to bring the session to a close soon by pointing at an imaginary wristwatch. Make up your own shared language and be an active communicator.

If you really like something and you’re in trance, raise a hand and say so, then do it again. If you need five minutes, tap out and tell your partner when you’ll be ready to go again. If you really need more active suggestions and want to stretch and fiddle, tell your partner so they can steer in that direction.

What matters in hypnosis is being yourself and using your own language. You can start by using printed suggestions, but you should feel free to write them on 3x5 cards, and eventually just off the top off your head. Your partner will let you know what suggestions work and don’t work for them.

In some ways, giving good suggestions is like coaching. Your job is to help your partner acheive something by giving direction and feedback that helps them achieve their goals. Being consistent and reliable is a core part of giving good suggestions.

Your partner may not follow the suggestion exactly. Humans, even hypnotized humans, don’t remember everything perfectly, and the more complicated you make the suggestion the more likely it is that something may be missed or confused. Do not tell your partner they’re doing it wrong. Use the "yes, and" technique from improv if you want them to change behavior.

Your partner may even start laughing or drop the suggestion in the middle. That’s usually a sign that they’ve just had a new experience. Give them space to reflect and process what it was like for them, and they’ll let you know when they’re ready to keep going.

Do not poke at the suspension of disbelief involved in the suggestion. Questions like "Are you faking it?" or "Do you really believe this?" are not helpful, and besides the point. Your job is to lift your partner up and work on their successes.

When doing a session, it can be helpful to think of trance as a "back stage" where you give instructions and get feedback on suggestions. Then, when your parter comes out of trance, they move to the "front stage" to follow the suggestion.

There are many books on hypnosis that will dispense fancy hypnosis technique like pacing and leading, utilization, and double binds. These can be fun, but they can also miss the point in recreational hypnosis: these techniques by themselves will never be enough to make a hypnotic experience interesting,

Worse, focusing on these techniques as a newbie can actively make you a worse hypnotist because they distract you from your partner’s experience. You may be focused on mastering the technique while your partner is either confused or frustrated because your focus is not on them.

Being interesting is more important than being fancy.

The experience comes first. You should only be using a technique when it can add something to the experience. Your suggestions should provide a framework that your partner finds compelling and can work within. Always have something ready for your partner to do or think.

Antony Jacquin has a good example of how to keep the flow of suggestions moving.

Kev Sheldrake talks about scaling up in Developing Suggestions and Getting Phenomena. The general theory is that when you are working with someone new and unfamiliar, you work from very easy suggestions to suggestions that require more of a leap of faith.

In order of presentation:

For recreational hypnosis with an established partner, suggestions can fail because your partner just doesn’t have the energy for it. Attention and focus has a natural tempo and your partner may need time to recover and recoup after more energetic suggestions. Instead of trying to keep total unwavering concentration at all times, mix light suggestions with heavy ones, add fractionation, or even breaks.

If your partner is burnt out or has been in extended periods of high stress, this can interfere with suggestions. They won’t have the spoons for anything complicated, so keep it simple.

Tension — high physiological arousal — is tied to uncertain outcomes or ambiguous situations, and has emotions to match. Your partner may feel excitement or craving for a possible good outcome, or anxiety and anger over a possible bad outcome. Tension and release is a key part of managing a scene, and it shows up in far more places than you’d expect.

One common induction technique is to physically tense up a muscle, and then as that muscle begins to tire, relax it. By tensing the muscle first, the relaxation becomes more of an explicit action, and the feeling of letting go is enhanced.

Another common technique is to build up anticipation and resolve for a particular trigger, especially if it’s an action. Both physical and emotional tension can be raised by creating a space before the suggestion itself. If you want your partner to run around around the block, you can tell them to get into starting position and get ready to move as they can when you give them the word.

Once you start looking for examples of tension and release, you see how it’s threaded through almost every part of life.

It’s tempting to say that a good suggestion is one that your partner follows, but this is not always the case. There’s a saying in hypnosis that there is no failure, only feedback. My perspective is a bit different: failure can be feedback, but sometimes failure is just failure — and that’s okay.

There will be times when a suggestion fails and there’s something you can learn and improve from it.

There will be other times when a suggestion fails for no apparent reason, and neither you nor your partner can explain it.

Statistically speaking, an unexplainable failure is both expected and inevitable if you give enough suggestions. Don’t worry about it, and work on other suggestions that may lead to similar outcomes.

There’s a set of principles from the Handbook of Hypnotic Suggestion and Metaphors. I don’t recommend the book as it is quite dated, but that have served as a kind of folk wisdom for hypnotists over the years and you may hear references to various laws over the years. Here’s a very short summary.