The Milton Model: Part Two by sleepingirl

In part one of this series of essays, we gave an introduction to how the Milton Model came about and some of the basics of its key topics. It’s important to remember that these essays are not a 1:1 look at NLP -- moreso, they are a way to view its practices in a more sensical way that fits with the lens that we look through as hypnokinksters. There will always be some debunking and some ignoring of erroneous or questionable content, but the main goal will always be to give a perspective on how we can use certain aspects of NLP to further our play.

This being understood, this article will be rephrasing and repackaging some NLP and Ericksonian concepts for more practical thinking. Especially, we’ll be delving into concepts related to indirect hypnosis, such as ambiguity and other parts of language in order to provide more of a foundation before we tackle NLP’s infamous language patterns. Let’s explore.

Direct versus Indirect: One Approach

The idea of being “indirect” comes up quite a bit in discussions of NLP and Erickson. Oftentimes, this gets boiled down to changing a suggestion like, “You feel yourself getting turned on by listening to my voice in your head…” to “Perhaps you can feel yourself getting turned on, maybe from listening to my voice in your head…” Tacking on “mights” and “maybes” is a common practice, especially in the hypnokink world, and sometimes it’s assumed that this is a form of indirect practice -- after all, you’re not directly saying something is going to happen, right?

These words should not be assumed to have this exact kind of power alone. In a scene in a hypnokink space especially, subjects often can hear the word “perhaps” and parse it as “I should…” especially when the hypnotist doubles down to achieve the response they seek. For this reason, we should really aim to think critically about the words we’re using not as magic spells with static meaning, but instead as ingredients that send messages which vary quite a bit based on all of the elements they interact with. But, there are plenty of reasons we use this kind of language already, and ways that it is useful.

“Magic”: An Aside

Speaking of magic, this thought process is something you should keep in mind especially as we move towards the kind of specific language patterns that NLP puts forth. NLP uses a lot of “magic” metaphors in its literature and teaching -- the therapists it modeled are referred to as “wizards,” its books have titles like “The Structure of Magic” and “Frogs into Princes.” This can easily be read as haughty and unnecessarily pretentious or disconnected, but let’s talk about it. As a somewhat philosophical or esoteric discussion, perhaps that has led to folks drawing the conclusion that since words are purported to be “magical,” they carry inherent, immutable power. Many see the categorized language patterns as the primary aspect of NLP; they are often the topic that’s studied most. Use the right combination of words, get a result. Even if it’s acknowledged that results will vary, we give a lot of attention to discerning how different language can affect the brain in specific and unambiguous ways. (Even ambiguity itself!)

Some people are helped by this kind of metaphor to better understand and practice hypnosis. But consider that this operates on a specific assumption -- that magic itself has an exact recipe and works as prescribed. It may be much more accurate to compare hypnosis to different kinds of magic. Instead of the technical, academic wizard who pours over books and takes the words of power literally (maybe this is the caricature of an “NLP guy”), an effective hypnotist could be seen more as a druid who aims to understand the nature of everything around them to better utilize the power that exists within the world. Their words aren’t exactly incantations, it’s not how the syllables are strung together -- it’s what they’re actually communicating behind them; they are more like prayers. The words are potent, but only as a vehicle to transport and transform meaning. In the metaphor, no two druids do magic the same way or use exactly the same words, but they all aim to understand similar things.

So What Is Indirect Hypnosis?

All of this metaphysical digression behind us, let’s return to indirect hypnosis and start hypothesizing concretely about language itself. There are many different ways of being indirect with someone within the context of hypnosis. In this section, we’ll explore one or two ways, and some ideas of how language becomes more or less direct.

• “Feel x.” This is the most direct way to phrase something (grammar nerds will recognize it as an imperative). We use this when we have a position of power over the listener, both in kink and in speech.
• “You feel x.” Notice that adding the subject softens this a little bit.
• “You can feel x.” An element of permission is being added.
• “Maybe you can feel x.” Uncertainty is being added -- a hedge, which we’ll discuss.
• “Maybe you can feel a little bit x.” Starting to qualify the feeling -- reducing it allows for a more broad level of feeling the response.
• “I wonder if maybe you can feel a little bit x.” The indicated focal point changes -- now we’re talking about the hypnotist’s perception, and also the statement doesn’t necessarily have to be parsed as true. However, note again that this is extremely common in hypnotic patter and the subject will likely not shift their attention based on words alone.
• “My friend John felt a little bit x when he did what you’re doing.” Taken a bunch of steps further to completely change the framing.
• “I don’t know when you’re going to start to feel x…” An example of a classic Ericksonian presupposition -- it is assumed that x will happen, the only question is when.

There are a couple patterns here that you might be noticing in some of these examples -- the first is that we are “padding” our initial direct suggestion with more and more words that slightly change the meaning of the statement as well as its tone. In this way, we are softening our message from a command to more of a suggestion in the truest sense of the word. You could conceptualize this as adding more and more packaging to the intended communication that needs to be unwrapped. This unwrapping could be seen to serve a variety of purposes -- it could be a distraction, it could necessitate further processing. You may see sources assert that it “bypasses the conscious mind.” Any of these reasons are more metaphorical than literal. On a very base level, adding more words to a simple message or “imperative” tends to sound a little bit more conversational, appropriate, or polite.

Another effect here is that we’re attempting to shift the focal point of the utterance further and further away from the subject. The actual suggestive intent of the statement is the true focus, but we can move away from it by moving someone’s attention or shifting cognitive levels -- adjacent to meta states and chunking from the Meta Model. One thought process here is that the actual message or suggestion needs to be parsed within different frames of reference, which is less direct than parsing it head-on. It can be a sort of confusion or uncertainty quality, where it is unclear where the experience is actually coming from.

These phrases are examples only -- remember that we don’t want to be wizards, but druids, and if we spoke like this all the time in hypnosis it would sound stiff and rehearsed and probably not communicate what we want to actually communicate. If your intent is to shift someone’s focus onto you and off of themselves for a suggestion, instead of leading with “I wonder…” and assuming that will do the job, you could say something like, “I was thinking a lot about this…” or go even further, “I was thinking a lot about this because I found it really interesting...” Again, it’s very important to consider your intent first and the words second -- it can be helpful to think about regular conversations and speech and try to analyze where the participants’ heads are going with “vanilla” language. What are different ways to soften speech? What are ways to change the focus of a sentence? What other elements are involved in this besides just the words being used? Tone, for example, plays a big part -- in the “I wonder” example, it’s often used as a sort of flowing phrase and not directly highlighted. Some emphasis and a pause might change it. And of course there are all sorts of variables like the quality of relationship and personal histories.

There is also a lot going on in all of these statements beyond what we’ve discussed here, and quite a bit more to being “indirect” with our suggestions in hypnosis. We’re going to look at a few more aspects in this article, and later in this series, we’ll apply these ideas and frames of reference to NLP’s infamous patterns.

Ambiguity

In the last article, we talked about two foundational ideas of good hypnosis connected to NLP -- yes sets, and pacing and leading. This general concept as a whole -- communicating with a subject in such a way that their internal “checks” of your statements read congruent to what they’re experiencing -- is incredibly useful in hypnosis, and one of the best ways to do this is through the use of ambiguity.

Ambiguity is an especially potent ingredient in hypnosis. It can be talked about and defined many different ways; the dictionary definition is, “The quality of being open to more than one interpretation; inexactness.” Sometimes, we talk about “ambiguous touch” to use in kinesthetic hypnosis, especially as an Ericksonian method -- a touch in which intention or quality can’t be quickly discerned, and the process of discerning can become hypnotic. (As an aside, when the “Ericksonian handshake induction” is discussed, this is more accurate to what Erickson might have actually been doing, rather than the rehearsed pattern interrupt that is often considered synonymous with this technique.)

But linguistic ambiguity is more what we are aiming to discuss here. And to be specific, achieving a sense of ambiguity through language -- whether the language itself can be specifically defined as ambiguous doesn’t necessarily describe the whole of what we want to do. For example, “flying purple people eater” is very strictly ambiguous in that it could refer to something that flies, is purple, and eats people, or something that eats flying, purple people. But for our purposes, ambiguity can mean much more.

“Not No” Sets

You can conceptualize the kind of ambiguity we are looking to achieve by thinking about it in terms of the broadened idea of yes sets we discussed in the last article. You want to pace your subject and get those “yes” responses, whether they are direct yeses or something more subtle, so logically, one of the ways you can do this is by speaking in a manner that is more difficult to “disagree” with (or framed differently, easier to buy into). For example, a common hypnotic suggestion might be something like, “You feel your eyes getting heavier and starting to close.” This is rather concrete, and there is plenty of opportunity for the subject to check on that feeling and notice inconsistency with their experience. Instead, you could be more ambiguous and say, “You can notice something happening to your eyes, and you can feel them starting to shift.” “Something” is ambiguous, and this idea of “shifting” without clear direction or quality is as well. This particular statement also includes the hypnotic trick of getting to change someone’s focus to within themselves and then using that shift as proof that they’re experiencing something distinct as they go internal for a moment.

Another aspect of ambiguity which we touched upon when discussing kinesthetic ambiguity is the need for the subject to parse through the statement in question in order to make sense of it. This shouldn’t imply that ambiguous language needs to be confusing -- moreso that when we meet statements that take some processing, that act of processing is useful from a hypnotic standpoint. Some suggestions or observations may be ambiguous in such a way that they create a transderivational search: the subject has to look for meaning within them and come up with something productive -- or perhaps they don’t.

Of course, it isn’t impossible for the subject to find incongruence with these kinds of less clear statements, but using broad and ambiguous language like this also covers more bases. You can think of this as broadening the “yes” part of the yes set to be anything except a “no.” If your partner looks internally and begins feeling that your statements are potentially correlating with their experience, or they find that they’re not sure and settle on that, that can be just as useful and lead into more “agreement,” especially as you progress into the scene. Calling back to our discussion of Georg Barkas’s model of rope scenes as question and answer, he posits that generally when you are “asking questions,” the only response that is undesirable is a true “no.” All other responses are interesting and useful in some way, and this holds especially true in hypnosis where we place a lot of value on the principle of utilization.

To some degree, these kinds of ambiguous suggestions or observations are statements that have lost all of their useful information. There is almost nothing discernable left in a statement like, “You’re feeling something interesting, right?” while at the same time it contains a lot of possible informational value because it allows for an extremely broad range of response to qualify. This is an easy way to build your “yes set.” Notice as well that the word “interesting” doesn’t have an exact value or prescribed response either, thus allowing for a lot of interpretation. This particular pattern is observed by NLP in its discussion on language in the Milton Model.

Mind Reading with Ambiguity

We know that it’s very important to acknowledge the responses that our partners have, no matter how big or small they appear. This is because feeling known and understood is extremely desirable and helps the subject feel like the hypnotist is more in control, more confident, or more on top of things. “Mind reading” within hypnosis is an interesting and complex idea, but very simply to discuss a small part of it, we can make our partners feel like we are telepaths by utilizing ambiguity as well.

For example, if you notice your partner having some kind of response, even if you’re not sure what it exactly means, by saying, “Oh, you felt that, huh?” you’re able to acknowledge the reaction without specifying what it was. Even the common “That’s right” lacks this “referential index” -- a term you might remember from the Meta Model of NLP that describes when a phrase doesn’t provide clarity in what it’s referring to. We can also use description words that don’t have precise, objective meaning -- “Wasn’t that a fun, complex feeling?”

Verbal Hedges

A “hedge” in linguistics is a word that’s tacked on that can call into question the certainty of a statement or make it more vague. Words like “maybe,” “sometimes,” “almost,” or “relatively” are examples of this kind of speech. It represents how the speaker is distancing themselves from the potential veracity of the statement. If you say, “You seem like you want to go into trance,” it becomes much less of a direct claim than if you were to say, “You want to go into trance.” We hedge statements all the time as humans accustomed to conversations -- it is often read as more polite. For example, “I think you might be mistaken,” instead of “You’re mistaken.” Hedging serves an important purpose in communication to be able to soften our language.

This is where words like “perhaps” and “might” do enter our language, hypnotic and otherwise, and naturally so. We began this article questioning our use of these words, and hopefully here we’ll be able to provide some insight on their purpose. If we think about hypnosis as simply a means of communication, we can understand that saying something “might” happen has a few different possibilities. We could be implying a true uncertainty, or we could be hedging. In a scenario where you say something like, “You might experience trance in a way that you’re familiar with, or maybe you won’t,” you’re doing the former effectively by providing both ambiguity and allowing for two separate options -- not discounting the possibility that the initial suggestion is not congruent to the experience. On the other hand, if you say, “I think you might find yourself responding as fully as you need to respond to me,” you’re hedging -- softening your language, not really intending for your suggestion to be rejected in any way.

Notice that this idea of hedging can be seen to connect to our earlier discussion of indirect language -- we added more and more “packaging” and from this perspective we are adding more and more hedging. Hedging can mark information as unreliable, but it also can cause the listener to need to process it a little bit more in order to understand why it’s being hedged in context of the statement. This is not always a conscious process, but consider that if you make a suggestion like, “Maybe there’s almost a sort of dumbness around the edges of your mind,” your partner has to parse through the softness and the uncertainty of the statement itself may translate to uncertainty or ambiguity of response within the subject -- as discussed, a useful thing.

There are different kinds of hedges and each one serves a different purpose in different contexts; indeed, they are all highly dependent on context. Consider the following examples:

• “Can you feel a little bit of that trance infecting your brain?” Here, minimizing the threshold for the described action allows for a high correlation of experience. Coupled with the term “infecting,” which has (playfully) dangerous connotations, it plays off of the exciting idea of risk.
• “I’ve been told that turning into a doll can feel incredibly good.” The “owner” of this information is no longer the hypnotist -- there is also a presupposition that others have experience with the kind of good feeling that they are indirectly promising.
• “Trance is just another kind of pattern we go through, isn’t it?” In this example, the hypnotist is creating a connection between two concepts which could be considered members of different categories, but uses hedges to soften that certainty. (The “tag question” at the end also functions as a hedge here, and we will discuss them more in detail later.)

In Conclusion

As we mentioned in part one, the Milton Model is in some ways an inverse of the Meta Model. If the linguistic chunk of the Meta Model is about using language that is intended to create cognitive clarity, the linguistic chunk of the Milton Model is about purposefully using language to obscure -- often this is termed as being “artfully vague.” This article serves to provide further foundation on some general hypnotic and linguistic concepts to be able to relate to what NLP is trying to achieve. Hopefully it is clear that all of these concepts, while there are some distinctions, are interconnected.

There is much, much more to being indirect with hypnosis including concepts like permissiveness, presuppositions, or metaphors that we’ll hopefully cover in a future article. Look forward to more in this series especially as we bridge the gap to NLP itself and the way that it attempts to codify hypnotic language in different ways.

Bibliography

Markman, A. (2012, October 30). What Do (Linguistic) Hedges Do? Retrieved August 28, 2020, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ulterior-motives/201210/what-do-linguistic-hedges-do

Nordquist, R. (n.d.). What Is Verbal Hedging? Retrieved August 28, 2020, from https://www.thoughtco.com/verbal-hedge-communication-1692585

Wang, Y. (2010). Analyzing Hedges in Verbal Communication: An Adaptation-Based Approach. English Language Teaching, 3(3). doi:10.5539/elt.v3n3p120