Inside knowledge

I've just realised that this is my 100th post! Wahey, go me!

Recently I did some hypnosis with a friend who had never been hypnotised before. This was quite a special session for me because it made me realise just how what I've learned during my own efforts at improving my own abilities as a subject is transferrable to taking the role of the hypnotist, and so I will share some of the highlights with you here.

My friend, whose name isn't Sarah, had expressed quite a strong interest in hypnosis ever since she heard about the time about a year or so ago when I hypnotised the guy who is now her boyfriend. It was clear to me, from the particular way in which she insisted that I simply had to hypnotise him again in front of her, that she really wanted to experience it herself at the next opportunity.

As we live quite a distance apart the opportunity was several months in coming, but recently on a holiday with a group of mutual friends I got the chance. You'd think that the chance to see some real hypnosis first hand would be a popular party trick but amongst our friends, a group of pilots, it turned out that this simply wasn't the case. Sarah, her boyfriend and I went back to our cottage, sat quietly by the roaring open wood fire and I took things from there.

I have found that pilots, by the way, are just about the worst bunch of people to try to pedal hypnosis to. There's an aura of egotistical control-freakery that seems to come hand in hand with the skills required to fly an aeroplane and this is added to the analytical mindset of the usual type of individual who decides to learn. This is not an ideal peer group of a hypnotist, much as I like my friends, but there is perhaps at least some consolation, which is their lack of desire to spontaneously close their eyes, go completely limp, and fly into the side of the nearest hill.

So anyway, I opened the session with my usual introductory routines of magnetic fingers and magnetic hands. Sarah did what quite a few people tend to do with magnetic fingers, which was to try to physically hold her fingers apart and I did what seems to work best in such cases, which was to tell her not to force it, but relax and go with it.

"Relax and just go with it, trust your instincts" is a good phrase I think.

You can always tell when someone is forcing their fingers apart simply by virtue of the fact that their fingers aren't moving together. When they relax simple physiology causes the fingers to move together on their own; hypnosis has nothing to do with it. Indeed, when a subject has done magnetic fingers I usually explain this, that it's not hypnosis, but what it has just done is show me that they are able to follow instructions and concentrate.

Next I moved on to magnetic hands. I like this because it follows on nicely from magnetic fingers, but it does rely on suggestion to work. Sarah responded well, always a good sign, and I made sure I continued to encourage her and pre-empted her hands touching. Pace and lead.

It's been a while since I hypnotised a new subject and so I decided that in light of this, since I wasn't feeling amazingly confident, I'd use the rehearsal induction next. I'm not such a fan of the term "induction" because from my own experiences I'm more inclined to see hypnosis not as something that one is in or not, but as a continuous scale from fully aware to deep trance. Sarah was a subject who was enthused about hypnosis, her hands had come together pretty quickly so she was clearly already in the foothills of hypnosis and I thought the rehearsal induction would be the best way to intensify the state.

I find it amazing how naturally the patter comes to me in the moment, and it's a good feeling when the words simply roll off my tongue with little effort. I explained to Sarah that as I raised her arm she would let herself relax and go into trance, and as I brought it back down she would come back to the room, and went through this process several times. I like this induction because it is a nice progressive progress which allows for plenty of feedback, and I was able to judge that Sarah was responding well and went into deepening the trance. Her facial muscles loosened and her breathing became slower and steadier, then she laughed.

Novice hypnotists take note here; a laughing subject is a good thing. This is a point worth mentioning because I've heard hypnotists say that they've had to re-start their inductions because their subject was laughing.

When, as a hypnotist, you are hypnotising someone what you are trying to do is get them into a state where their conscious mind is giving way to their subconscious mind. Assuming this, how can it be a bad thing if they are unable to hold back their own instinct to laugh? When a subject is amused, or if they start laughing, it means that the right part of their mind is calling the shots; they are letting their subconscious dictate their behaviour. This is exactly what you want to see from your subject! Commend them, and utilise it!

"You're laughing, that's excellent! Your instinct was to laugh and you went with it, you couldn't stop yourself doing it. That's exactly what we're looking for!"

One could even go further and tell the subject that they can't stop laughing, and challenge them to try to stop laughing. It is a good convincer, especially if you follow that by saying "okay, now become calm, let all your muscles relax, and go deeper" and the forced grin simply melts from their face.

With Sarah I actually tried to get hand levitation from her instead. Frustratingly, whilst I felt her hand getting lighter, I never really managed to get it to levitate. This was quite unusual because otherwise all the signs were good. I decided to switch to making her arm too heavy to lift instead, and this was where my inside knowledge as a subject proved to be quite invaluable.

I told sarah she could not lift up her hand, that it was stuck to her, and sure enough when I challenged her to lift her hand up she did not. Excellent, I thought, and so I told her that any time I told her to sleep she would go straight back into trance, reiterated that her hand would remain stuck to her leg and then brought her back up.

Her hand was indeed still stuck. "But," she said, "I can still do this."

And then lifted her hand up.

Now, back when I started out as a hypnotist and such phenomena were just things that happened to other people I would have become upset and demoralised by this response. I would have felt that the magic clearly wasn't working with this subject and given up. This time, however, having been through that experience, I knew I could hazard a pretty good guess at what she was thinking and carry things on.

"Ah!" I said, "but it took you a while to move your hand didn't it!"

She smiled.

I said, "A lot of people expect hypnosis to be very unlike what it actually is. You found it difficult to move your hand then, you had to resolve to do it, and what you're going to find from now on is that it becomes increasingly more difficult."

Then I told her to sleep.

As with a lot of new subjects she closed her eyes as though instinctively, but quickly opened them again. This is another of those situations where I know, as a subject myself, that what is usually going on in the subject's head when they do this is simply that they are looking for confirmation from the hypnotist. Of course the hypnotist who knows this, has confidence and keeps going will win through.

"See how your eyes closed then?" I said, "You're good at this, now let this happen, I can see you want to close your eyes."

Am I a mind reader? No, but I've had these experiences myself. I appreciate that the mind has to recognise, and to learn, how each phenomenon works in order to do it. Sarah's brain was actually very quick on the uptake especially, as she told me later, once she realised what it was I was trying to do as I deepened her. As soon as she made the link between states of mind she'd experienced in the past and hypnosis she was able to embrace the process and go into a deeper trance much more easily.

Something I may have said before is that I don't think it is ever necessary to feel that one should have to "trick" or otherwise deceive ones subjects into hypnosis. All you need to do is be honest, understand what they are experiencing, and use feedback to give them suggestions that work for them. In Sarah's case she even commented that in the past she'd visualised things to help her relax, like walking down some steps into water, so I immediately took notice of that and used it to deepen her.

We returned to the hand sticking suggestion a few times and, whilst on a couple of occasions she was able to lift up her hand again, it became a more and more difficult process each time to the point where she genuinely couldn't do it. Likewise the instruction to sleep became more effective each time. I also did a few fun suggestions such as getting her to laugh uncontrollably when I clicked my fingers, and took her to quite a deep level of trance.

If anything this episode revived my enthusiasm and confidence as a hypnotist, and I am very grateful to Sarah for letting me borrow her mind for an hour or so. Most of all though, it has strengthened my belief that the best thing hypnotists can do to understand the hypnosis their subjects are experiencing is to go there themselves and experience it first hand. It's the inside knowledge every hypnotist should have.