Twitter Thread: Beyond Relaxation | 9/8/22

Original thread: https://twitter.com/h_sleepingirl/status/1567972659631386625

Don't get me wrong, I love the tropes and I think relaxation can be fun for hypnosis. But seriously if I could ban relaxation from trances for a week so that people had to get creative, I would.

Relaxation brings to the table: 

• Focus (necessary ingredient)
• Body stillness (one sensation associated w/ trance)
• Mental changes ("mind relaxing" is hit or miss but easy to understand)
• Provable response to easy suggestion (convincing: "I'm relaxing, so it's working")

These are helpful things for hypnotizing someone, but you can create all of them and more with different kinds of suggestions. You don't have to get caught up in "I need to create a state" (like hypnotizing someone with fear instead). You can wind together different stuff!

• Get focus. 

Make suggestions about how you're able to mess with someone's attention. If you make suggestions about their body/mind, they'll focus internally. If you make suggestions about things outside themselves, they'll focus externally. Both can be useful. 

• Suggest familiar trance responses.

Sensations of trance are in the body. Try suggesting that your partner's eyes are starting to flutter, their lips are tingling, their shoulders are slumping, or their spine is straightening. Feeling the feeling = feeling trance.  

• Suggest mental shifts.

This is a big place we can improve -- hypnosis isn't mental relaxation. Suggest that your partner's mind is following you obsessively, drifting off and processing in the background. Suggest realistic psychological responses to hypnosis.  

• Convincers.  

Give small, easy suggestions and then remind your partner that they're responding. "You're feeling it when I tell you to have little pulses of arousal." "You're stuck, aren't you? You're hypnotized." "You're helplessly following my words like a good subject." 

BE CREATIVE, think about a person's natural experience, and what you can co-opt, take credit for, and use as a springboard in their process. Pick a theme and use observation of your partner to drive what you say.  I'll expand on this in a big article later but bye for now!