Helping the hypnotist

I have, on a few occasions, heard hypnotists saying this their subject:

"Don't try to help me, let it happen automatically"

Some of these times the subject has been me, and my own experience was that this instruction was very unhelpful, and even restricting, until I figured out a way to get past it.

I have said before that the biggest misunderstandings that some hypnotists have come out of their either being no good whatsoever as a subject themself, or else being a very good subject. This is, to my mind, another of such misunderstandings; a result of said hypnotist not appreciating what a subject with only mild abilities is experiencing.

Consider something like the magnetic hands set piece. You place your hands straight out in front of you, hands facing each other, close your eyes and imagine that there's a magnetic attraction between your palms.

Now, as you do that, consider this: Don't try to move your hands, let them move automatically.

Not that the exact phrasing of the statement isn't that important, it's more about the suggestion that there is a specific way in which the subject should respond. If you're anything like me you will be asking yourself the same question that I was, which I think is implicit in the statement: "Am I doing this consciously, or not?" The statement also gives the impression that consciously responding is something that the subject shouldn't be doing. "Am I doing something wrong by having my hands come together in this way?"

Now obviously this isn't the case for all subjects but the result for me, and for many subjects I've seen hypnotists fail with, is that the subject stops moving their hands together, or the equivalent thereof, consciously holds them exactly where they are, and stops to wait for hypnosis to move the hands instead.

My response to hypnosis is improving gradually but continuously and now I know how to respond to that kind of suggestion, which is to consider the question as to who or what is moving my hands to be unimportant, and appreciate that all that matters is that they are moving. To start with my response to many suggestions has felt very conscious and deliberate, but as time has gone on I have gotten better at responding and the process has felt more automatic.

This is why the learning analogy is something that works for me. The process by which my response to hypnosis has improved reminds me most, of all things in my life, of my experience of learning to play the piano. This started with me poking gingerly and very deliberately at the keyboard, but over time the process became much more natural and, if you like, "automatic". Conscious incompetence to unconscious competence is a gradual process for most people. It's now easy enough for me to find my way around a piano keyboard, play back tunes from memory, and sight read music, although I will confess I rarely practice these days. The one thing that was always guaranteed to throw a spanner in the works for me and bring any recital of a piece of music to a keyboard mashing halt was to try to think too consciously about the process, or worse question whether it was a conscious process.

I can easily picture a well seasoned pianist, who can barely remember when they were learning, or who was a child prodigy, telling a beginner to not just let their hands press the keys automatically; after all it's what works for them. I can also imagine someone who has never actually played a piano themself, but has heard that same mantra said by an expert, repeating that mantra because it works for someone who can play the piano very well and thus must be good advice.

This comes back to my feelings about that group of people that I have decided to call "undeveloped" subjects ("analyticals"). It is my belief that there is nothing wrong with these people as such, with respect to their apparent inability to go into trance, but that they simply lack certain important bits of information and practice with that information.

Many hypnotists, and as a result of my cynicism and the difficulty I had whilst starting out as a subject I would be inclined toward saying most hypnotists, do not know this information or how to teach it because they only work with subjects who already know it.

So in summary I would suggest this to you: You and your subject should not care what part of the subject's brain is responding to the suggestion; all that matters is that they're responding.

"Analyticals"

Something that has really been getting at me recently is the way in which the term "analytical" is applied to a certain group of subjects by hypnotists. I think it is high time for me to challenge this expression and question exactly what it is supposed to mean.

It seems to me that the term "analytical" is generally used to describe subjects who are difficult to hypnotise; people who are at the opposite end of the scale to those somnambulistic subjects who are an absolute gift to any hypnotist. There are some well known supposed percentages to quote here; setting willingness aside, 20% of people are easily deeply hypnotised, 60% of people are capable of basic hypnosis, 20% are very difficult to hypnotise. It is this latter group that are usually branded as "analytical" subjects.

I have talked before about why I think some people, despite being equally willing to cooperate, are more hypnotisable than others. I think it comes down to being able to think in a certain way, in an uncritical way. Somnambulists can do this well; anti-somnambulists, if you'll pardon the expression, cannot do this or at least not very well in the right context.

The very term "analytical" is, I think, inappropriate when describing these hard-to-hypnotise individuals, because it carries with it a lot of implications that are in themselves quite misleading. The biggest red herring is the idea that a difficult subject is troublesome because they are analysing the suggestions they're being given, which is can lead to a profound misunderstanding of why the subject may be finding hypnosis difficult and how best to proceed with them.

Everybody is "analytical" if by that you mean they take in what's going on around them, including what the hypnotist is saying, and consider what they think about it. Something that I think illustrates this well is one of the better subjects I have worked with and what they said to me after the first induction I did on them. I was feeling confident so I went straight in with a hand drop induction, which actually induced fits of giggling but those soon melted from her face as I continued to deepen. Afterwards she told me that she remembers questioning whether that was really all there was to it, thinking how funny that the whole situation really was, then being surprised by how much she was relaxing because she never relaxed like she was in that moment, and then her memories of what happened next were a bit fuzzy.

Now it seems to me as though there's a general expectation that the word "sleep" is supposed to make something dramatic happen by both hypnotist and subject alike, like for example stop the subject thinking, knock them unconscious or shift them to a different astral plane. Something that is irritating for me is this pervasive received wisdom that the best way for a hypnotist to deal with an "analytical" subject is to use a shock, confusion, or overload induction. The subject might analyse your suggestions if you go slow, god forbid, so hit them hard and fast and knock them out before they have chance to start computing what you're doing. I really don't think that this does anybody any favours because this approach only serves to accentuate the above expectation, and for certainly the majority of people who experience hypnosis that isn't really what the experience is like for them at all.

There are hypnotists who claim to have zapped "analyticals" into somnambulism with a shock induction, who like patting themselves on the back for being so clever. I'm afraid my answer to this is that if the subject did go into a deep trance from those sorts of induction I cannot see how they can be one of these lower 20% anti-somnambulists, and thus described as an "analytical". To me the implication being made here is that if a subject does not know how to think uncritically telling to them to do so more suddenly will suddenly enlighten them; of course in practice that can't and doesn't work.

A lot of hypnotists subscribe to the view that the subject is either in hypnosis or out of it and that every induction is an instant induction because there is a specific point in time when a subject goes from not being hypnotised to being hypnotised. So, get the subject "there" and you're home and dry.

I like to see hypnosis differently. To me it's a more like a channel of communication that exists between the hypnotist and subject. This connection, rather than simply being on or off, is more akin to something that is ramped up in intensity along a continuous scale. The "sleep! you are now in a trance" model is still something that can be utilised of course, but as I have mentioned in previous posts it really isn't needed to achieve phenomena. The intensity of this state is of course characterised by the phenomena that one is able to achieve with the subject.

This is the point that I am trying to get to: I don't care how much my subject analyses what I am saying to them, because as far as I am concerned being "analytical" is not a problem. In fact, my best ever subject holds degree in chemistry from Oxford and is currently doing their Ph.D at Cambridge and I don't think I've ever met anyone more analytical.

No, a subject being "analytical" is not an issue whatsoever.

Or rather, to put it more precisely, it's not the issue. So what do hypnotists really mean when they say "analytical"?

Well, I think there are a number of words that better describe a willing but hypnotically unresponsive subject than "analytical". Such subjects could be described as "critical" or "challenging" for example, as in being naturally inclined to challenge what the hypnotist is saying and seeking to correlate it with outside evidence before they believe it. Perhaps "curious" is another word one could use; the subject having a desire to be fully aware so that they can watch hypnosis working on them.

Ultimately though I think that it is better to see an unresponsive subject not as someone who is doing something obstructive to hypnosis, but as someone who is simply not doing what they need to be doing for hypnosis to work. I still see the ability to go into a hypnotic trance as a skill which comes to some people more naturally than others, but is within the reach of anybody given the right guidance and enough practice. This is the premise that best fits my own experiences, and those of others that I have met.

My conclusion here is that I would like all hypnotists to cast off the misleading and inaccurate term "analytical" and refer to difficult subjects by an expression that conveys the impression that like everybody the subject has a latent ability to be hypnotised that, as a consequence of their natural way of thinking, merely remains undeveloped.

That's settled then. Until I find a better word I shall refer to these people as "undeveloped subjects"