Making Effective Suggestions

Making Effective Suggestions by sleepingirl

While a goal-oriented approach to hypnosis is often not the best path, we still have desires as hypnotists to make suggestions that provoke an intense response. Hypnotic responsiveness is a highly dynamic and variable quality, but there are a couple of techniques we can use and ways of thinking that allow us to create suggestions that are powerful and work with our partners’ natural capabilities.

1) Set-Up/Selling It

Framing, context, and pretalk are all overlapping and important ingredients to hypnosis scenes. The way that you present a suggestion before even getting to the meat of it heavily affects the way it’s received. For example, there can even be a drastic difference between, “Now, begin to visualize yourself naked…” and “Now that you’re in a place that allows your mind to be more visually creative, begin to visualize yourself naked…”

Essentially, we want to suggest and prove to our partners: “You’re in a situation where this will be effective.” While some (hypnotists and subjects) may take this as a given based on the idea that hypnosis increases suggestibility, we know that this premise is at the very least quite limited, and often not enough to convince people that they can achieve intense experiences. In this section, we’ll discuss how to frame hypnosis as an effective working state as well as give set-up for individual, suggestive ideas.

• Hypnotic suggestibility framing

We often have a desire for hypnosis to be a distinct, magical state that influences the way that a person feels and responds. At the same time, we know that it’s overly simplistic and mostly inaccurate to say that “hypnosis increases suggestibility.” This adage is limited for two main reasons: 1) it implies that hypnosis is a concrete state, and 2) it presupposes that “suggestibility” is a concrete attribute of experience.

But we do know that people are affected by trance and hypnotic interactions -- trance is useful to us and also enjoyable, and it can (in a variety of ways) affect the way that people respond to suggestions. So: how can we acknowledge this, and especially in a way that is suggestive to our partners? Because of course, if we tell them to notice aspects of their experience, it will tend to make them more available.

We want to follow three principles when making these suggestions: be realistic, reasonable, and ambiguous. We want to say things that are true to our understanding of hypnosis, aren’t far-fetched to our partners, and are open-ended enough to allow for the natural dynamic nature of trance experience.

For example, it’s unrealistic, unreasonable, and unambiguous to say something like: “Now that you’re hypnotized, you’re going to respond perfectly to all of my suggestions.” It’s more realistic, reasonable, and ambiguous to say something like: “Now that you’re deep in trance, you can understand how being altered in this way opens you up to capabilities that can affect the way that you respond to suggestions.” Let’s look at some more examples of things we can say about trance that can affect responsiveness:

• “Hypnosis allows your mind to be creative in ways that you can’t anticipate”
• “Hypnosis can give you the comfort to respond as naturally and simply as you like”
• “Hypnosis affects your processing in a way that makes responding to me feel more and more effortless as we progress”
• “Hypnosis is a space where you don’t have to abide by the things you consider reality”
• “Hypnosis makes it easier to simply notice and be curious about what’s going to happen”

• Suggestion framing

Hypnosis is a process based on imagination and persuasion -- thus, if we want to give an effective suggestion, we can pre-frame our statements with ideas that make them easier to respond to. For example, instead of directly suggesting, “Imagine my touch on your skin,” we could preframe by saying something like, “You’re used to imagining touch all the time, even though it doesn’t feel exactly the same as physical touch when you fantasize about it.”

It is in this aspect especially that we want to think about inventing and giving scenarios where your suggestion is simply easy to respond to. Suggestions may be about a change in sensory response, thought process or belief, behavioral patterns, persona, or something else. In each case, as you think about what your suggestion is doing, think about how you could “cheat” to change your partner’s experience of that. Let’s look at examples of changing this framing:

• Visualization/visual changes
  • “We’re giving attention to and engaging the visual parts of you, so you can more easily notice the way your sight changes”
  • “Even your eyes are deeply hypnotized and under control so that they see more of what I tell them to see”
• Kinesthetic hallucinations
  • “You can imagine what it would be like if your skin was more sensitive, more attentive, easy to even feel those ghosting, nuanced touches”
  • “You’re very responsive to being touched, so your mind has all of these automatic emotional and neural responses that I can make you go through at a mere suggestion”
• Thought changes
  • “Your mind is so weak to me right now, and it so badly wants to think what I tell it”
  • “You’re doing exactly what you need to do to let me modify your mind”
• Behavioral changes
  • “Every part of you jumps at the chance to have me control your behavior because I’m touching your submissive nature”
  • “Your image of yourself is one where you obey me”
• Persona
  • “Your sense of who you are becomes more malleable to me so I can more easily shape it to my desires”
  • “The desire to be who I want you to be makes your personality just a toy to me”

Essentially, we’re saying one of three things:

• “You are someone who can respond to this”
• “You have the specific capability to experience this”
• “You’re in a situation that makes this easy for you”

…And tailoring them to our suggestions in the trance. We’re relying a lot on the word/concept “because” -- “You can respond to this suggestion because…” Implying causality in general is a powerful tool in hypnosis, and especially so when we understand that providing a logical framework makes suggestions feel much more accessible.

2) Easiness

Talking about how “easy” a suggestion or category of suggestions is can be fraught because there are so many variables that affect that perception. A subject’s natural proclivities, the delivery/wording/framing, tone and mood… But at the risk of generalizing, we can potentially think about how to make our suggestions easier or more simple as a whole, especially when it comes to some suggestions that tend to be a little trickier.

To do this, we need to develop some critical thinking skills about what makes a suggestion easy versus difficult. It may feel intuitive to say that a suggestion of freezing is “easier” than a suggestion to forget something specific, but why is that? Let’s look at some ideas.

• Things easy outside of hypnosis

In the example of freezing versus forgetting, one way that we can look at this is in the context of our access to those capabilities without any sort of affecting factors such as trance. It is very easy for a person to stop moving -- in fact, it is even easier to stop moving than it is to make ourselves move. We have an enormous amount of context and experience of not moving -- when we’re focusing on something intently, when we’re really tired, even games we’ve played as children like “freeze tag” or “red light, green light.” By contrast, trying to forget something goes directly against the way that our brains work -- “don’t think about a pink elephant” and the like. As much as we wish for it, it’s nigh impossible to forget that movie that we love so that we can see it again “for the first time.”

Obviously, there is some nuance here. Freezing suggestions usually have the intention of making it such that someone feels as though they can’t move -- but again, that perception is something that we have context for. We know the experience of feeling like we want to do something, but the effort to make our bodies do it escapes us. We also may have a strong framework for being told what to do in a power exchange context and obeying, or being able to imagine what a freeze-ray would feel like. We can think of this ability as fairly accessible to us. A skilled hypnotist can easily make suggestions that remind us of it and call on this capability fairly explicitly.

When we look at various techniques for hypnotic amnesia, many of them have to do with creating a scenario or suggestion that “tricks” the brain into accepting amnesia as a possibility. It may be a metaphor such as putting information into a box and sealing it away. It may be relying on the framing of proving the mental control we have over a person. Oftentimes we make suggestions that communicate to our partners that they will get the memory back later, because we know that people hang onto and focus on memories that they’re worried about losing.

But even still, this specific sort of memory erasure is an experience that is largely alien to us. Memories are associative -- there is a “before,” an “after,” and plenty of ideas and concepts that remind us of a given experience. For example, think about your own mental process when you have forgotten something and you try to remember -- you retrace your steps to find a lost object, or you try to think about the other things that you associate with a celebrity whose name is on the tip of your tongue.

By this logic, wiping away larger swaths of memory in a way that is more ambiguous and less specific can be a bit easier. It’s easier, for example, to cause a full trance to become fuzzy and unclear instead of surgically erasing a specific suggestion -- and, in that case, many people have an existing framework for parts of hypnosis to be more difficult to recall.

We can use this methodology not only to identify what kinds of suggestions are generally more easy to conceptualize, but also how we can present suggestions in a way that utilizes a person’s existing capabilities. Let’s look at a couple more examples:

• Hallucinating sensory experiences
  • For the most part, there are limited times in our lives where we intentionally, strongly hallucinate sights, sounds, and feelings. If we believe we’re being touched by something, for example, it’s usually spontaneous -- like we’re suddenly worried a bug is crawling on us, and that happens because there is an existing context (seeing mosquitos, feeling a brush of something else). However, we are familiar with fantasy sensory experiences to a strong degree, such as when we’re daydreaming, remembering, or having an erotic fantasy. This can be a helpful context to use.
• Blankmindedness
  • Intentionally having no experience of thought is famously difficult -- the example is often given of people who meditate trying to build to and seek that as part of long-term practice. When we feel like we’re not thinking in our lives, it’s often because we’re very focused on something externally -- outside of ourselves -- like a task or a game. We also often feel single-mindedness as lack of thought, which points to the availability of using mantras or other fixations as a way to give someone the experience of limited thoughts.

• Believability/increments

We’ve talked about being reasonable, realistic, and ambiguous when it comes to talking about hypnosis and suggestions in general, but it’s worth discussing this idea of “believability” further. There is a general understanding that for the most part, if a subject feels as though a suggestion is impossible in reality, it will be more difficult for them to have an experience that feels fulfilling. Doubt in suggestions, while can be fun to override and play with in some circumstances, is generally not a friend to hypnosis.

There can be many varying sources for doubt -- a person’s preexisting feelings about hypnosis as a whole, feelings about the hypnotist, feelings about different types of suggestions and their own skill level, or more. These are all areas that can naturally evolve over time as they grow as subjects. But one of the ways that we can address some of this is by making suggestions that are, generally, seen as more achievable.

It is difficult to nail down exactly why some suggestions seem unrealistic. But intuitively we can sort of understand that, for example, suggesting to someone that they will immediately transform into a puppy with no human capabilities or memories seems less plausible than suggesting to someone that they will experience a wave of submission. (Variation in human experience notwithstanding.)

Certainly the factors that we’ve talked about before affect this (such as our existing, out-of-trance experience), but one of the other differences here is the “size” and speed of the suggestion. As a general rule, big and fast changes feel less realistic and believable than subtle ones. To adapt, we can make our suggestions more manageable as well as work incrementally.

In the puppy play example, we can think about what aspects are included and work on each individually: physical/visual transformation, behavioral transformation, mental transformation. And in each of those cases, we can take the easiest approach -- we don’t need a complete, detailed hallucinatory experience; it is perhaps more manageable to suggest to someone, “You can sense that your body is changing just the right amount to feel puppy-like, and you naturally notice it more as you get used to this new feeling.”

But we’re not just talking about incremental transformation as a one-off scene. It’s perhaps even more effective to “prove” to someone over the course of a scene that they’re capable of bigger and bigger things; getting them used to responding to suggestions will naturally increase their belief and capacity for more. A trance trigger working effortlessly, a suggested sense of powerful submission, an imaginative experience more vivid than they’re used to, a mild alteration of their personality, and etc.