Non-Visual and Non-Sensory Suggestions

Non-Visual and Non-Sensory Suggestions by sleepingirl

One of the first things we learn as beginner hypnotists are suggestions that rely on imagery. Imagery suggestions are at the core of our first metaphors, our first guided fantasies, and our first fixations. They are one of the easiest ways to conceptualize talking to someone and expecting them to have some sort of internal response from what we say. But there are reasons we may want to expand beyond visual language -- some people don’t “see” things very easily, and in general, everyone can benefit from some variety. In this article, let’s look at some alternatives -- not only to visual suggestions, but all sensory-focused suggestions.

Moving Beyond the Sensory Model

It seems that one of the “obvious” answers to this question is to make suggestions that revolve around other senses. For example, suggesting that someone imagine sounds that draw their focus, or the experience of touch. But doing this still locks us into a model of hypnosis that puts a heavy focus on sensory qualities.

This is limiting. There is so much more we can draw upon that is suggestive and hypnotic, and once we open up our idea of how hypnosis works and what kinds of suggestions we can use, we can do more holistic and effective trancing in general.

In many cases, making non-sensory suggestions will have the effect of indirectly producing sensory responses. For example, if you spend a few moments simply thinking about making yourself or someone else hilariously bad at math (or some other attractive fantasy), certain physiological responses or modalities will engage. There may be words, pictures, feelings, emotions, abstractions, or patterns that arise from this or engaging in any kind of train of thought/fantasy. This isn’t about diagnosing a primary process -- it’s more useful simply to know this is happening as part of a holistic experience.

A Different Model

Many times, we’ve talked about not using trance as a crutch -- not relying on the idea that trance is the mechanism that creates response to suggestions. Instead, we can think about a “suggestions-forward” model. Hypnosis at its core is about focus and attention. In any hypnotic interaction, we obtain the subject’s focus first. Then, we make suggestions to change that focus in order to make our scenes “go”.

• The Goals for Suggestions
  
• Suggestions that allow a person a more nuanced observation of their own experience

Hypnosis is a process that is improved greatly by awareness. Paying closer attention to what we are feeling, thinking, and experiencing allows us to notice more of it and become engrossed in it -- intensifying it. If you tell someone simply, “You feel aroused,” it has much less bite than if you tell them something like, “If you really pay attention to your body and mind, you can notice all sorts of signs of sexual excitement.” In fact, many people who struggle with “feeling hypnotized” just don’t have the muscle memory and skill of noticing all of the subtleties of that sensation; hypnosis contains a lot of small sensations that we’re not used to recognizing.

• Suggestions that show a person that they’re engaging in something that can change their experience

Belief greatly improves the hypnotic experience, but belief is complex and often elusive. What really gives a person faith in their capabilities is proof. This ties into the above point -- a person noticing their experience changing breeds belief -- but this is something you can build into your patter (or pretalk) in any suggestion: “Being hypnotized is an opportunity to experience changes in a different way than your waking moments, so [you can pay attention more fully][you can be curious about what’s going to happen][etc].”

• Suggestions that create small responses, building confidence, curiosity, and experience progressively into bigger responses

Very fast and big suggestions tend not to stick as easily as following a pattern where you more slowly prove to someone that they are (and capable of) responding. Again, this builds on the above points. Instead of suggesting, “You feel yourself becoming a doll,” you could build confidence towards this by suggesting, “There are little changes in your mind as it becomes more objectified, barely noticeable at first but creeping into your awareness; the way your thoughts shift, the way you see yourself, and moving outwards tingling through your body as it starts to transform…”

• Suggestions that change a person’s focus in a way that makes more things accessible

Hypnotic response is made easier when the setting fits and we give our partners the tools to experience things more easily. For example, if someone is thinking about a fantasy, they’re engaging the creative parts of their brain to imagine it, plus they’re focused internally. Other suggestions that require internal creativity (such as other fantasies, reconstructing memories, or etc) may come a little easier.

• The Role of Trance

While trance is secondary to suggestions, it nevertheless plays a part in our hypnosis scenes. It is multifaceted, being:

• A sensory experience that is enhanced by noticing it and awareness of it

In the same way that hypnotic suggestions can be made more immersive by a greater awareness, the experience of trance itself relies heavily on the ability to discern that it is happening. Everyone “feels” trance in a slightly different way, but that is very important -- it is a feeling, or set of feelings. Bodily sensations, abstract mental sensations; the capacity to recognize them enhances the holistic experience.

• Reinforcing of the idea that someone is in a situation where they can experience things outside of their norm

Erickson famously described trance as something that happened when the subject experienced being in a “different reality.” Someone who feels as though hypnosis is a time where they are capable of different, amazing things is someone who can buy-in more fully and experience more fully with curiosity rather than skepticism.

• Correlating with some kind of shift of focus or perceptual experience

It is fraught to attempt to prescribe direct correlation between the sensory experience of trance and concrete changes in “suggestibility” or thought. However, we can broadly say that if someone feels that they are in a “different” space, their perspective changes, thus their capabilities change, and thus their sensory or mental experience changes.

Concept-Based Suggestions

None of the above requires focus on a particular sense; instead, it’s about broadly building up a person’s capacity to recognize trance/hypnotic responses and be curious and open to what is possible.

Suggestions, at their core, are simply communications that change someone’s line of thinking. A person who is paying attention to you will follow what you’re saying and process the things that you’re talking about. This simple concept is what allows us to follow the goals we have for suggestions that we mentioned above. Even without using suggestions that directly invoke a particular sense, we’re left with quite a lot of things that we can talk about.

• Scenarios

When we are making sensory suggestions, generally we are actually just trying to flesh-out scenarios: a scene of a sunset on a beach, a walk down a set of stairs, an erotic fantasy. One of the simplest ways to stop relying on sensory language is to simply eschew it from our descriptions of scenarios.

For example, instead of saying, “Imagine the hues of the sky changing as the sun dips below the horizon,” we could say something like, “Think about what happens when the sun sets -- the world goes to rest every day, completely naturally and effortlessly, without even thinking about it.”

The key to doing this is to think about the actual purpose of the scenarios that we suggest based on the ideas we’ve outlined above. Usually when people describe sensory scenes, the only goal is to create a simple internal (imaginative/creative) fixation. But we know that hypnosis requires more ingredients than this.

• Allow a person a more nuanced observation of their own experience

“What if you were hooked up to a machine that fed back to you all of the things that your body and brain were experiencing, even the ones that you weren’t consciously noticing?”

• Show a person that they’re engaging in something that can change their experience

“Imagine if you went to sleep and instead of dreaming, you went to some other space in between, not quite awake and not quite asleep but so suggestible, already noticing some of the ways that that would affect you…”

• Create small responses, building confidence, curiosity, and experience progressively into bigger responses

“Think about what would happen if you were hit with a magic spell that slowly, inevitably sapped your will? What do you think would happen first; how long would it take?”

• Change a person’s focus in a way that makes more things accessible

“Can you imagine the next time you touch yourself, if you were so enthralled in it, every single aspect of your body and the sexual fantasies consuming you, pulling at your focus so you couldn’t escape the pleasure?”

• Ideas

One of the other rich places that we can make suggestions about is simply ideas. Instead of describing direct scenarios like guided fantasy, we can easily just talk about concepts that are naturally hypnotic. But how do we identify what is a hypnotic concept?

The ideas that we outlined in suggestion-forward hypnosis give us some clues. In this section, we’ll explore a few different ideas of how to do this more concretely.

• Fractionation of focus

Most of us know fractionation as the phenomenon that happens when going between in trance and awake. But fractionation -- as in, the emphasis of a state -- can happen when going in between any two different ends on a spectrum.

One of the reasons why fractionation is so powerful is because it shows a very distinct difference between one experience and another. This plays into many of our goals with suggestions -- it helps someone observe their experience, it shows them that they are capable of responding, it starts small and gets bigger, and it can change someone’s focus in a helpful way.

Bringing fractionation into a non-sensory space is simple, and a good place to start is to think about the quality of “internal” focus versus “external” focus. For a very basic example -- whether you ask someone to focus on your eyes (external) or their thoughts (internal).

Erickson is famous for saying that he preferred to have clients focus internally, because he said trance is an internal experience. This is an OK rule of thumb, but we can be more extensive than this -- if you make suggestions that cause someone to focus internally, they’ll tend to notice more nuance about internal phenomena (and vice versa). There is value in intense or nuanced external focus as well.

Some patter in this vein might go like this: “I want you to pay attention to what I’m saying to you, in any way that feels right. I wonder what parts of my words you focus on and how that focus changes? The quality of the tone; the words themselves? Perhaps your focus wanders or gets sucked inside of you, instead thinking about the thoughts they evoke, your own internal responses, the way the words vibrate inside of you…”

Think about other kinds of concepts or experiences that can be fractionated in this way -- when you find yourself talking about a sensation, experience, concept, or quality of focus, ask yourself what the opposite of that is and if it’s worth bringing up.

• Change/Transformation

Another hypnotic concept is the one of transformation. Hypnosis is naturally transformational -- it is the change from one state to another, one perspective to another, one experience to another through suggestion. Generally using lots of words that invoke the idea of change is great for hypnotic response.

Here are some transformational concepts you could riff of of:

• Magical transformation of any kind
• The transformation from unconscious thoughts to conscious thoughts (or vice versa)
• The small transformations that someone’s brain goes through every second of the day as they go through experiences
• The transformation of conscious experience as someone goes deeper into trance
• The transformation of something “experienced” becoming a memory
• The incremental transformation into a more capable hypnotic subject, past/present/future

• Accessibility

Accessibility or “easiness” is a powerful idea in hypnosis, because the ideal trance experience is one that feels effortless. Like all other suggestions, telling someone “responding to me is easy” works better when you have the proof to back it up. For all suggestions you give, you should start to think about what kind of logic or experiences would prove this to your partner.

Here are some examples of things you could talk about:

• They’ve done things like this before even while awake, so their brain has an existing framework for it
• You’re invoking parts of them that don’t have to think in order to respond
• Becoming progressively skilled at hypnotic response happens unconsciously and becomes more and more effortless without effort
• They’ve thought about this so much that they’re primed for parts of it and the rest will follow

• Emotions

Emotions are a powerful focal point -- when we are feeling happy or sad, it can easily turn into something that we fixate on (for better or for worse). Thus, suggestions that evoke an emotional response are an easy way to capture someone’s attention.

We know that simply directly suggesting any change in someone’s experience lacks the “grip” necessary for someone to fully buy-in to it. Additionally, we want to think about the purpose of these emotional changes so that they are useful to us in some of the ways that we’ve outlined above.

Emotions are a reaction. They arise based on the situation we are in, based on our associations with an idea, based on our recollection of a memory, or something else. To indirectly invoke emotional responses, start by thinking about what makes those responses happen in the first place. For example, when talking about scenarios or concepts like the ones we talked about, pay attention and use your intuition (or simply ask) to figure out what kinds of emotions are being experienced. You can then switch your partners focus to the emotions themselves, using the initial suggestions themselves as a springboard.

Think about where those emotions could lead -- is pure glee something that could empty your partner’s head and turn them into a bimbo, puppy, or doll? Is conflict something that could be used to make sexual pleasure feel more taboo and sweet?

Non-Sensory Language

In this section, let’s have a simple look at some of the ways that we can remove (and replace) sensory language. Almost any suggestion that contains the words “see,” “hear,” “feel,” “smell,” or “taste” can be reworded to avoid directly invoking that sense. The benefit to using more neutral words like this is that it gives your partner more freedom, and will often indirectly create a pseudo-sensory experience that is most tailored to them.

• “Think about the idea of…”
• “Consider…”
• “What if…”
• “Imagine…”
• “I’m thinking about…”
• “It’s interesting that…”

Keep submodalities in mind as well, because they imply sensory perception. For example, if you said to someone, “Think about the big, bright moon,” the words ‘think about’ are sensory-neutral, but ‘big’ and ‘bright’ are visual descriptors.

Teach your Partner How to Respond

Someone who struggles with sensory suggestions can potentially be stuck in a frustrating loop. They are so used to being fed visual or other sensory language and then running into a wall trying to experience it. As always with problems like this, we want to acknowledge the issue so they know we are not trying to do the same thing, and then give them more useful tools.

You can very simply tell someone something like, “I know that your mind is used to trying and trying to imagine things a certain way -- but for now, it doesn’t have to do that. It can explore more nuanced, more abstract ways of imagining. Maybe that’s something you notice right away, or slowly you realize how it’s processing.”