Suggestion Building (Courtesy of XX Erotic Hypnosis Peershare)

Now that you have amazing ideas for what to do in a  hypnosis scene and can achieve trance, you'll need to be able to effectively form and administer the suggestions to make it happen. Here are some ideas from the Peer Share.

After the inductions, deepeners, and safeties come the meat of play: suggestions. A suggestion is the communication between a hypnotist and the hypnotee's subconscious. What you will learn here is essentially the programming language for the human computer. A lot of it looks a lot like English (if that's the language you're speaking).

• Positive Suggestions: Always phrase suggestions in the positive. For example, "you will notice that your legs will remain straight, your knees locked," as opposed to "your knees can't bend." This is because as soon as a negative like "do not bounce in your seat" is suggested, the mind has to first imagine bouncing in the seat, which makes it a pretty strong suggestion to bounce in the seat.
• Replacement: To add on to the positive framing of suggestions principle, if you want something gone, do not suggest that it's gone; replace it. Instead of "do not think of pink elephant" say "think of an orange hippo."
• Use Simple Language: Eschew obfuscation. Refrain from pontificating in such manner as to fatally quell subconscious comprehension.

  

  There will be no foolish wand-waving or silly incantations in this class.

  
  
• Speak Clearly: And speak loud enough. There are few things more distracting from trance than having to say "what? Can you speak up, please?"
• Choose Your Tone: Choosing a hypnotic voice comes before the induction, but there are many tones to choose from for specific suggestions that may augment the effectiveness of that suggestion. Here are some tones.
• Dominance/Control
• Warmth/Relaxation
• Monotone
• Humiliation/Condescension
• Expressive
• Dreamy
• Shock: Changing tone or pace rapidly can also be effective, for example a dreamy, relaxing induction followed by a commanding, dominant, sudden suggestion.
• Meter: Use pacing and meter to emphasize your suggestion. Deepeners are often...slow......down, whereas bringing someone into an energetic suggestion may require a different tactic.
• Use Repetition: Use repetition. Use it. Use repet...sorry. Repeating a suggestion gives the subconscious more time and opportunity to process. Try to repeat using approximately the same language every time. It can be tempting to say something a bunch of different ways to make it clearer, but try to say it one way. If it doesn't work, try it a different way next time. Repeating different ways can be confused as conflicting or separate instructions.
• Suspension of Disbelief: If you're doing a cool mindfuck or amnesia suggestion, especially for the first time, do not disturb the suspension of disbelief. If they think they're Severus Snape, don't say their real name, don't ask them if they're sure they're Severus Snape, and don't point stuff out to the contrary unless you're trying to confuse them or break the suggestion. Similarly, the suggestion is to forget, say, the number 3, when you're waking them up, perhaps count "one, two, four, awake!"
• Passive vs. Direct: Consider the language for the suggestion itself. Which one might be most effective for the hypnotee in question? Direct suggestions sound like "you will wake up in a moment and you will be Severus Snape, and it will be as if you have always been Severus Snape." A passive suggestion sounds like "you may find yourself that feels a lot like your potions classroom, and it may seem like you belong there as the potions professor, Professor Snape." Passive suggestions work better on people who don't necessarily like being told what to do. Passive also work better for suggestions that rely on the senses. "It would be okay for you to begin feeling more and more aroused." "You may notice your arms getting heavier." As you can see, there are many different ways to word passive suggestions. "You don't have to remember all of these wordings, but they may come in handy."
• Use Metaphor: Metaphor can be a powerful tool to create imagery, sensation, or to distract. For instance, when doing memory play, I use the patter "it's slipping like water through your hand, like sand through an hourglass, fading away like a dream after you wake up. The harder you try to remember, the more you focus on the image of water trickling away down the drain, going, going, gone."
• Cater for Modality: Modality refers to whether someone's more visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. There are a bunch of ways to figure out someone's primary modalities. Look forward to a post all about that! For the meantime, look for clues in someone's descriptions. If you ask someone about their bedroom or office and they talk most about the decorations or colors, probably visual. If they talk about layout, textures, or clutter, they're probably kinesthetic. If they talk about how it's in a quiet part of the building or within earshot of their boss, auditory. Another good test is "imagine you're on a beach." Ask what they notice. Once you have established their modality use that sense most in your suggestions and descriptions. "You'll be awake and alert as if you've just stepped out of a nice hot shower." "You'll be awake and alert as if you're half way through listening to your favorite peppy song." "You'll be awake and alert as if you've slept for hours and the sun is streaming through your window."
• Mantras: Establish mantras of suggestions to continually reinforce. Have a hypnotee memorize them word for word. A hypnotist can prompt the hypnotee to recite or think about their mantras on a cue. Mantras can take the simple form of a personal statement like "I have patience, warmth, and compassion for others," or "every day I enjoy shampoo more and more."
• Write it Down for Review: For important or "permanent" or tricky suggestions, write them down to get the wording right. Negotiate the wording. Edit.
• Use Anticipation: Expectations are a powerful tool in hypnosis. Drawing out expectations before the suggestion is actually supposed to take effect can make the suggestion even more powerful when it does, especially if the hypnotee is excited about or particularly interested in the suggestion. "In a moment, not now, but in a moment you will find yourself very aroused." And then stall.
• Naturalize: When giving suggestions for characters or compulsions, make the suggestion feel natural. Language for that might look like, "and it will be as if you have always been Severus Snape. It feels perfectly natural for you to shout at your students and brood over your steaming cauldron many hours of the day, whipping through assignments with your red pen, always regretting Lily..."

  

  And regretting that smock you wore when you met.

  
  
• Anchoring: anchoring is an NLP term referring to associations that the subconscious makes between two things that are concurrent but not necessarily related. For example, if a person were to flex their calf muscles to fatigue every time they had an orgasm, that person may also become aroused when exercising their calves to fatigue in the gym. Anchoring can be more subtle. If I casually gesture to myself every time I say a positive adjective in conversation, my conversation partners may begin to associate those positive adjectives with me. Please, for the love of god, use this with consenting partners to better do things that they have already consented to.You are being a creepy rapist pickup artist if you use this to pick people up or get them to sleep with you.
• Nonverbal Suggestions: Use body language, gestures, eye contact, and touches to create suggestions. This is what partners do when they dance. This is what you do for your puppy when you pat the chair next to you.  It's simple and an important tool to keep in mind amidst all these verbal suggestions.
• Incremental Suggestions: Some suggestions work best in absolutes, for example "you are Severus Snape," and some can be increased and manipulated incrementally, for example "every time I snap my fingers, you become a little more dour and sadistic," one of which may have a stronger effect depending on the hypnotee and suggestion at hand. This works well for sensation manipulation and things that tend to happen gradually anyway like arousal and feelings of being awake. 

  

  Incremental Snape

  
  
• Conditioning: There are instructions and a description for conditioning in the bottom of this post. Check it out.

Interested in joining the Peershare discussions? Check out our description.

Your Hypnotic Fantasy: Suggestion Inspiration Guide (Courtesy of XX Erotic Hypnosis Peershare)

What's your hypnotic fantasy? Sometimes the hardest part of hypnosis is figuring out what to do after you've finished an induction. This person is under your utmost control! Time to do some sleep voyeurism play while you try to figure out what to do next.

Here's what the XX Hypnosis Peer Share came up with.

Triggers
Create a trigger word or gesture or touch that creates a compulsion or subconscious response.
There are a few ways to set this up. The hypnotee can know about the compulsion, or you can make it so that they don't remember the compulsion, and don't even suitcase notice the trigger so that suitcase if they suitcase read this sentence suitcase, they wouldn't even notice suitcase the extra words suitcase in it. A trigger can be a specific stroking of the arm, or a finger snap, or a particular tune when whistled. It can be a word, or an event like every time the hypnotist sits down. Make sure to set this up so that the trigger, whether in scene or posthypnotic, is only triggered when intended by the hypnotist.

What does the trigger do?
The classic, of course, is an orgasm trigger. You may see that referred to generally in this blog as "the Knee-Tap Orgasm" (whether or not the trigger is actually a knee tap). Another fun way to do this is to link it with arousal triggers. "Every time I take the cap off this pen and put it back on, you will become a little more aroused." A great way to combine these is with, perhaps, a countdown. "I will count to ten, and every number will make you more and more aroused, and you will stay that aroused until I say the next number. When we reach ten, you will experience an amazing orgasm." This can be done over a matter of seconds, minutes, or hours.

Other kinky trigger compulsions could include a compulsion to remove clothing, a compulsion to always have their head below the head of the hypnotist as a form of D/s, compulsions about laughing more and more, freezing and becoming immobilized, or compulsions to say or do humiliating things. Triggers based on flavors and scents can be quite powerful.

Triggers can be incremental or absolute. "You will become completely hard when I say the word 'cactus.'" versus "You will become a little more aroused every time I bite your ear lobe."

Get to Know Your Brain
Hypnosis can be extremely introspective and a great way to get to know a partner. Poke around and see what comes out. Here are some great ways to do that.

• Draw Your Subconscious (easy): hypnotize the hypnotee to go deep down in their subconscious. Guide them into a space that you call something like "the creativity center of your subconscious" and have them look around. Give them a pen and a big piece of paper, and have them draw what they see. Suggest that they can see everything there with their eyes open, but that they can refocus especially if they close their eyes for a minute.
• What's Your Fantasy? (intermediate): hypnotize the hypnotee to be compelled to say their fantasies and desires. Suggest that they find new ones they hadn't thought of before. This can also be used as a humiliation scene. If you want inspiration for future scenes, ask the hypnotee to write down the fantasies on index cards. You can then pull out and negotiate the index cards later.
• Hug Fortune Teller (easy): This works especially well when doing hypnosis around other people. Suggest that the hypnotee can see someone's future when they give them a hug. Suggest that they may only hug people with verbal consent. Have them tell the hugged-person's future. 

Kinky Scenarios and Role Play

Now let's get to the real kinky shit. Turns out, hypnosis is an excellent medium for bondage, role play, regression and age play, abduction scenes, interrogation scenes, humiliation, and much more. Here are some ideas.

• Bondage (easy): the hypnotee can be stuck in any position or to any object completely bonds free. This can be done with no rope or bonds at all, or could be done with bonds that are much lighter and easier to break out of than the This is also an accessibility tip for people for whom it would be unsafe to be bound!
• Role Play (easy): Ever had a fantasy of fucking Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer? What about having Barack Obama on his knees sucking your strap-on? Now you can! (Disclaimer: I do not intend nor am I encouraging the sexual harassment or assault of the president.) The hypnotee can be under the impression that they or the hypnotist, or both parties are specific characters. This also works with character archetypes like "sexy firewoman" or "stripper with daddy issues."
  Note: be cautious with age play suggestions. Know someone well before doing this. It may work to hypnotize someone to be "their little," but hypnotizing someone to "be six years old" may have the unintended result of making them actually think they're six years old while you're in a dungeon, or who they were when they were six, which may or may not have been a good time for them.
• Abduction/Interrogation/Non-Con (expert): A lot of people have intense non-consent fantasies, and these can be played out carefully using hypnosis. In a hypnotee/hypnotist relationship with a lot of trust and rapport, a set of partners can create a framework for a scene that actually feels like stranger danger or non-con (in a way that is fun and consensual for those players). This can go beyond typical consensual non-consent scenes in that the scene can be set up so that the hypnotee actually doesn't recognize the hypnotist, or feels real fear or other "negative" emotions for the hypnotist. A possible scenario is to make the hypnotee think and feel like their drink has been drugged. These are doable, but must be set up very carefully and only by a hypnotist who knows a lot about abreactions and with a pair of partners that know each other well. 
• Pain/Impact (expert): This is recommended for folks who have already played with and enjoyed real pain and have done other forms of hypnosis as well. There are a few ways to involve pain play with hypnosis. Hypnotees can feel intentional psychosomatic hypnosis pain. This is another accessibility hack for people who medically or psychologically can't be hit but want to feel pain! For example, a hypnotist can give a trigger that gives a particular pain sensation that the hypnotee likes or does not like (but consents to). The trigger can be anything like a word or finger snap, or even an impact of a much less pain-inflicting toy. For example, a hypnotist can make a bunny-hair flogger feel like a rubber flogger.
  
  
  "Real" pain play can also be incorporated with hypnosis. Hypnotists can use impact or pain as a trigger for something else, can add a dimension of role play using hypnosis, or even just use hypnosis as a safety by giving suggestions that the hypnotee can get into subspace really easily but check in really well in and out of subspace. A hypnotist can also help a hypnotee come out of subspace and/or avoid subdrop using hypnosis. Just use a positive cheerful wakener!
  
  Increasing pain tolerance is not recommended because pain keeps us from actually hurting ourselves and messing with that perception could result in someone taking more pain than they should. People who play with impact and pain should be aware that subspace and endorphins due to pain already increase pain tolerance as the scenes go on. Specific toys and skin damage (marks, blood, etc.) should be negotiated before a scene starts. 
•  Top From the Bottom (easy): A fun suggestion for swtiches, a hypnotist can actually hypnotize a hypnotee to be dominant. This is good for switch hypnotists partnered with submissive hypnotees, or switch hypnotists with switch hypnotees who sometimes have difficulty getting into dom-space. In this scene, both partners can be both dominant and submissive in different ways.
• Denial/Chastity (intermediate): A hypnotist can make a hypnotee unable to reach orgasm. This can be through physical inability, forgetfulness, or any number of mechanisms. A hypnotist can ruin or push off an orgasm as well.
• Human Doll (easy): Whether limp and floppy or animatronic or clay-like, a hypnotee can become a human doll or bot with any amount of responsiveness. The hypnotee can be forced to sit and watch any number of interesting activities in the room with no ability to participate, or can be taken advantage of in any (consensual) number of  ways. The hypnotee could be mindless or trapped inside their head. 
• Guided Fantasy (easy): A hypnotist can turn a hypnotee's fantasy real by narrating and storytelling them through the fantasy. For instance, a hypnotist can verbally create the experience of a tentacle bondage scene by suggesting the sensations and creating imagery and even hallucinations.
• Decreasing Inhibitions (intermediate): Hypnotists should not suggest this particular idea. Always let this come from a hypnotee. Lowering inhibitions needs to be an independent goal of the inhibited, otherwise consent for everything thereafter gets murky.  Steer clear of anything that could sound like "I want to hypnotically lower your inhibitions so that you might let me fuck your ass." That being said, this can be a great way for people to feel more comfortable doing things they're already interested in doing but feel too shy in the moment. Dancing or doing a striptease is a common example. Dirty talk is another example. Making noise during play or being dominant are other examples. 

Conditioning

With longer term hypnotic relationships, partners can actually establish response conditioning. The simplest form of this is when a hypnotee begins associating a particular tone of the hypnotist's voice as hypnotic and is conditioned to go into trance just because of the tone of voice. Because this almost always happens naturally, hypnotists should always have a separate voice that they use for hypnosis so that their hypnotees don't fall asleep in the middle of conversations.

Never eat sea urchin with a hypnotist.

Intentional classical conditioning is real stuff messing with real people's brains, so make sure that, if you're a hypnotee, you are with someone you trust and already like a lot. This is a form of play that can affect a hypnotee in scene and out. Negotiate carefully. Do not go near hypnotists who do this crap without asking. This type of play is subtle, but the effect can be great. Hypnotists should not underestimate the need for negotiation.

One popular form of conditioning in the erotic hypnosis community is pleasure conditioning (surprise). If you have established a trigger that creates pleasure, like for example saying the word "pleasure," or, like, touching their dick, the hypnotist can then begin creating associations of other things with that pleasure. The subconscious does not have any concept of cause and effect, so when two things happen concurrently, the subconscious links them. With consent to pleasure condition a partner to do things that the hypnotists wants the partner to more often, the hypnotist can begin designing the project. If the hypnotist likes when their partner gives them a head massage, the hypnotist can give the pleasure trigger any time the hypnotee puts hands hand on the hypnotist's head. 

This can be done covertly, if negotiated as such, or explicitly if negotiated as "can I pleasure condition you to give me more head massages?" The beauty is that this form of conditioning work whether or not the hypnotee is aware of it. In the scenario where the specific conditioning is negotiated explicitly, a clever hypnotist may even suggest that it works better because the hypnotee knows. 

Other Hypno Tricks
Please remember that under no circumstances should play be mixed with hypnotherapy. If you are not a trained and licensed hypnotherapist, you should not do hypnotherapy at all. You do not know what you need to know. Even if you are a licensed hypnotherapist, you should not mix play with therapy. Some of the following border on therapy, but can be done in a way that..isn't.

• Synesthesia (intermediate): This is a suggestion that one sense is linked to another. For example, a hypnotee can experience tasting colors or seeing sounds.
  
• Relaxation (easy): Relaxation is often an automatic response to hypnosis, but can also be brought in as the main purpose. You should not be setting out to treat anxiety! This can be a good type of play to wind down after a tough day in place of a warm bath or massage.
• Partner Dance (easy): Turns out, partner dance already has elements of D/s and many dancers find that they go into space when dancing. This can be augmented with hypnosis! Try messing around with it.
• Time Dilation (easy): People under hypnosis can and often automatically experience time differently. This can be fun to play with.
• Hallucinations (intermediate): Some people find it easy to hallucinate in one modality or other, and for others it takes a lot of work and practice. It can be interesting to try and create auditory, visual, kinesthetic, or any hallucinations. 
• Messing With Headspace (intermediate): Use hypnosis to go to extra creative, relaxed, introspective or empty spaces. Check out the corners of your brain. Do some research on different states of consciousness and see if you can find 'em! 

You can join the XX Peershare discussions on the second Sundays of the month at 3PM (or 2 if you're new to hypnosis) at Wicked Grounds Cafe in SF.  What's your fantasy?