Tension Inductions

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

— George Orwell
1984

This page is NSFW: it involves roleplaying and kink activities.

Most inductions focus on relaxation and pleasant imagery. However, inductions are designed around focused attention and engagement in the hypnotic ritual — they don’t actually need to be pleasant. In fact, inductions based around stress and tension can be very effective.

It may sound counterintuitive, but physiological arousal can actually facilitate hypnosis:

  • Attention capture - Arousal creates hypervigilance and narrows focus. When your partner is scared/aroused, their attention is intensely focused and easier to direct.

  • Cognitive overload - High arousal floods the brain with sensory input and emotion. When overwhelmed, people look for direction/authority to resolve the confusion.

  • Physiological intensity - Increased heart rate, adrenaline, heightened sensation makes experiences more vivid and memorable. Suggestions given during high arousal may be absorbed more deeply.

  • Directed response - High arousal causes your partner to focus on the Four Fs.

Ludwig & Lyle’s paper, Tension induction and the hyperalert trance provides an example of a "hyperalert trance" using tension-inducing methods that contradicts traditional relaxation-based inductions. Their subjects achieved all standard hypnotic phenomena - catalepsy, hallucinations, amnesia - while in a state of high physiological arousal and tension. As opposed to alert inductions that focus on a runner’s high or revelation inductions that focus on transcendental states, Ludwig & Lyle’s paper focuses on tension.

Tension inductions are good for scenes where traditional hypnotic inductions fail. For recreational hypnosis, this means kink scenes involving fear play, threat, control, and intensity. If you’re already playing with kink involving consensual non-consent, monster scenarios, corruption/transformation, or other fear-based themes, you can leverage physiological arousal to deepen hypnotic responsiveness. Tension inductions shine when imagination is brought into play, whether it’s a external threat (tentacles, mind controlling aliens, droned citizens, overcomplicated supervillain mind control ray) or an internal transformation (robotization, dollification, corruption) that must be resisted.

Evaluating Risk

Intense physical exercise is an inherently risky activity.

Holding stress positions is an inherently risky activity.

Emotional play is an inherently risky activity.

Emotions are sticky and can take time to recover from.

I’ve added some safety tips and precautions, but you should tailor them for your own situation and evaluate your own risk profile first, and continue to hold safety in mind throughout the session as a dynamic calculation. Don’t assume that following a predetermined checklist is enough to cover you.

Pretalk and Negotiation

This is edge play, and it does come with risks. You will need extensive pre-scene negotiation to discuss hard limits and plan for abreactions. Crying, shaking, and intense reactions are normal and intentional in these inductions, so you will have to pay careful attention to your partner at all times.

People may not behave the way they expect when under intense physical stress. You may want to have a small sample session after a pre-talk, letting it stew for a few days, then have a longer negotiation before engaging in a full scene. Practice your grounding exercises together.

Bias towards tapping out. If the scene ends because it was a bit too spicy, that’s fine. You can do it again later. If you have regrets because the scene didn’t end when it should have, that can be a lot more to get over.

One thing you will have to map out in detail is how to translate a fantasy into a scene that both of you can play out. Read through guidelines section and work out how best to adapt it.

Organizing a scene that involves fantasy and physical activities is much closer to BDSM than traditional hypnosis. A full introduction to BDSM is beyond my abilities, but SM 101: A Realistic Introduction is a good place to start, and anything by Anton Fulmen or Lee Harrington are good educators. Vahavta is a good resource on emotional S&M. Additionally, Mastering Erotic Hypnosis has a chapter on roleplay that goes into detail on creating scenes.

Induction

A tension induction will consist of four stages:

  • Engage imagination (to your tastes)

  • Physical arousal

  • Cognitive overload

  • Direct commands

The tension induction as given is unpleasant.

The tension-induction procedure proved to be far from benign. All but two subjects (S3 and S9) broke down and cried, and behavior such as holding their hands over their ears to shut out the rapid verbal statements, spontaneous tremors and gross shaking in the extremeties, occasional writhing movements, neck muscle spasm (ST), short periods of hyperventilation, gross clinical signs of anxiety and discomfort, heavy sweating, and angry retorts during questioning were commonly found in one or more subjects. Only one subject (S1) broke out of the trance and subsequently refused to undergo this experience again.

You don’t have to put your partner through this, but whatever situation you put your partner through will be stressful by design.

You can use anxiety and fear suggestions and even horror suggestions to manipulate your partner’s emotions. You are creating a horror movie, so you can leverage horror movie tactics for fear play.

Engage Imagination

Sit down with your partner and get them in the right headspace. Have them talk about the scene, and place themselves in the role. If there’s a video or scene that they want, you can have them watch it to pick out details. You might have talk with them as if you are both hiding out, or you might be asking them to please hold on even as they begin to suspect that they’re transforming.

You can use sound and light to set the scene, and then work up from there as the scene progresses.

Let them sit for a bit and work themselves up, then move onto physical arousal.

Physical Arousal

As with any physical exertion, make sure your partner is in good shape for it, can exercise safely in the space, and is not overexerting themselves.

  • Consider having your partner wear a heart rate monitor so you can check it at any time.

  • Always have a safety kit: water, electrolytes, food, a first aid kit, and a place for your partner to lie down comfortably.

  • Consider collapse, trips and falls. Use a padded floor, keep any furniture padded, remove rugs or toys your partner could slip on, and make sure your partner is not holding anything sharp or hard.

  • Consider fainting and vasovagal events, which can cause low blood pressure.

  • Consider panic attacks, especially considering the high emotional range your partner may have.

  • Avoid using pre-workout like caffeine and niacin, as you can’t flush these out easily.

  • Make sure your partner can always breath comfortably and can recover safely.

  • Do not do or suggest anything that might interfere with their safe physical recovery.

Start with a warmup and stretching exercises.

Then go into cardio intensive exercises like rapid pacing or burpees, and get your partner’s heart rate up. Once they are flushed and breathing heavy, move to exercises that interfere with proprioception, such as spinning until dizzy. Finally, have them hold stress positions.

The paper details several methods:

  • Walking method. Subjects were instructed to rapidly pace the floor while suggestions of muscular rigidity and immobility were given.

  • Spinning method. Subjects were told to spin around, and while doing so, to sweep the room with their eyes. They were told that they soon would become so dizzy that they would be forced to sit down and enter a very tense, hyperalert state.

  • Knee-bend method. The subject was required to do as many knee-bends as possible, during which time suggestions of increasing tension and inability to control his leg muscles were given.

  • Head-rotation method. While the subject was seated, he was told to grasp the arms of the chair as tightly as possible, to allow himself to become very tense, and to begin rotating his head until his neck became completely rigid.

  • Attention-diffusing method. While seated, tense, and grasping the arms of his chair, the subject was rapidly instructed to attend to his toes, to make them tense, next to shift his attention to the arch of his foot, his heel, his calf muscles, and so on up the remainder of his body, maintaining each of these named zones as tense and rigid as possible,

Your partner could be doing this as part of running from a monster, keeping physically active to resist the transformation, or some combination of the two. For stress positions, they might have to stay extremely still and quiet or they will be heard or seen. The narrative provides them with the rationale, and their physiological arousal leads them into a "fight/flight/freeze" thinking.

Cognitive Overload

Once your partner is in a stress position or is doing their best to hide or make no noise, you can start adding cognitive overload while suggesting they "freeze" in place.

You can restrict their senses further here by using gags or blindfolds. Gags make people loud. Blindfolds make people quiet. Do not use restraints with a stress position.

  • You can push someone to the point where the freeze response makes it harder to safeword.

  • Always monitor your partner carefully to check if they have gone non-responsive, and know how to troubleshoot.

Ludwig & Lyle detail several kinds of cognitive overload:

  • Attention flooding: "Notice your heartbeat, the sweat on your skin, every sound in the room, the thoughts racing—"

  • Rapid shifting: "Look here, now here, feel this, hear that—" (too much to track)

  • Emotional flooding: "Every feeling rising at once, fear and excitement and curiosity—"

During these induction procedures and between challenges, numerous suggestions and statements were given, instructing the subject to become more alert, excited, tense, and aware of things than ever before. The subject was continually bombarded with statements telling him he was "keyed up," "on edge," "preparing for danger," "nervous," "uncomfortable," "frozen with fear," and so on. He was also directed with very rapid-fire verbal commands to allow his attention to spread out as far as possible and, with some subjects, not even to listen to the investigator. He was told to pay attention and respond to all the fine nuances and details of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. His attention was directed toward proprioceptive and kinesthetic impulses emanating from his own body, and he was told to become more aware of his pattern of breathing, heart beat, pulse, and internal organs.

All these suggestions were further woven within the verbal text of other statements telling the subject to allow his mind to become flooded with thoughts from the past, the present, and hopes for the future. He was told that all the emotions, such as love, hate, joy, disappointment, frustration, anger, and so on, would be "erupting like lava from the volcano of (his) mind" and that he would transiently react to each and every one of them. Other statements, intended to disrupt the attention paid to any possible dominant thought and to shift the attention back and forth among the various other statements, were also given. The subject was told that all these experiences were parading or flashing through his mind so rapidly that no sooner did he attend to one thought, feeling, emotion, or sensation than another thought, feeling, emotion, or sensation would take its place, making it impossible for him to focus on or single out any given experience.

Have them close their eyes and raise their anxiety — the monster is approaching, your thoughts are already getting fuzzy as the alien music starts playing through their mind — and play the part. Be unpredictable. You can try to fractionate them, make loud noises, call out to them to join the hive mind. Engage their imagination and have them fixated on their inevitable ruin.

Direct Commands

Once it’s time to end things, you can have them release the stress position.

Give them clear and simple commands to follow. At this point, they’ve been captured or transformed: following direct commands should come as a capitulation and a release of tension. There’s nowhere to run, and they have to accept their fate. This is where you can trigger the "fawn" or "fornication" response.

There are two directions you can go in, depending on whether or not you want to keep the tension in the scene. You may want to let up on the pressure and provide some relief before going into tension, as prolonged arousal at the same level can be hard to sustain and you want them experiencing the full range from down to back up again can enhance the scene in general.

Maintaining tension: if the scene is purely physical, you can have them follow direct commands under threat of punishment and reward, with the promise of good treatment if they behave. This works well where you are the threat, and you are intimidating your partner. Examples of this would be Room 101 or telling your partner they see five lights when there are only four. You should be very experienced with CNC with your partner before trying this, especially if you are pushing them to perform antisocial acts. Never underestimate the power of someone yelling "DO IT NOW" at you.

Releasing tension: you can flip the scene and be kind and supportive while manipulating them. If there is a mental component, you can lead them through deepening suggestions and move to another relaxation based induction once their new mindset has been established. They’ve joined the hive. They’re now a robot. It’s all over now and they can relax.

Following this induction, you should be able to produce hypnotic phenomena with your partner now.

Although the subjects' clinical state appeared opposite to that seen following standard hypnotic induction — i.e., relaxed and drowsy — subjects easily achieved all the hypnotic phenomena generally described for good hypnotic subjects and with the same degree of convincing behavior. Although we have not listed such activities as age-regression, automatic-writing, and dreamlike, structured hallucinations, these procedures were tried on several subjects with success. At first, because of the conscious nature of the trance, we had some doubts whether spontaneous amnesia could be achieved, so we gave suggestions, which proved successful, for posttrance amnesia in seven subjects. However, with S8, who seemed to be an excellent subject, we decided not to give any suggestions for amnesia and found that she developed a complete and profound amnesia following the experience.

Aftercare

After a session involving a tension induction, extended aftercare is essential. Your partner has been through significant physiological and emotional intensity - they’ll need time to decompress, physical comfort, and space to process the experience.

You as the facilitator of the experience may also need aftercare. It can be extremely stressful and demanding to see your partner in an uncomfortable state, and it’s important to acknowledge that. Take care of yourself as well.