The Handbook of Hypnotic Phenomena in Psychotherapy

My notes on this book will be fairly selective. I’m already not a big fan of Erickson, and if you’re reading my website for ideas on therapy you’re turbo-fucked. These are mostly notes for me - so you’ll be reading my own perspectives and rants intermixed ambiguously with the authors. Otherwise this whole document would turn into a ton of “but I think bla bla bla.”

Some thoughts:

• Initially, I was charmed with how forthcoming this book was about having an Ericksonian approach. Around the chapter on dissociation - there’s some advice in there that could really fuck someone up if applied like, not even judiciously, but at all.
• I apologize to any Erickson fans reading this. Ericksonian ideas and veneration have dominance over the recreational space, and I feel this is largely unwarranted and a byproduct of Ericksonian techniques being quite literally marketed as elite and superior in both effectiveness and intellectual understanding. Non-Ericksonians are often treated as dumb, inferior, and “not getting it.” Sociocognitive perspectives are often seen as unpalatable and dismissive of subjective experiences. The disagreement, at its core, is about the mechanisms behind hypnosis, not about its validity or effectiveness. Lofty celebrity perspectives unfortunately pervade much more loudly over the understated and frankly frustrated assertions of sociocognitive academics.
• That was a long way of saying - I’m going to bitch a lot.
• For other readers in the recreational space (and god help you if you’re a therapist reading this) - if you’re skeptical of the crazy shit you hear come up in the hypnosis community (or even in spaces discussing therapy,) you’re doing it right, and you’re not alone.
• There is value in this book if you’re not used to giving suggestions in a specific area. This book should have come covered in warning labels - if you’re a clinically trained therapist, you’re more likely to know how to not fuck someone up. A recreational reader will need to exercise a lot of caution and common sense.

Part 1 - Preludes

1. An Overview of Ericksonian Hypnosis

• The book is pleasantly forthcoming about its Ericksonian perspective.
• Trance is a substrate for creating phenomenal change that can affect the client’s daily life.
• Indirect suggestion is good for implication, or when direct suggestion would just make the symptoms worse.
• Ericksonian hypnosis creates a process for change, working with the parts of the problem, rather than directly attacking it. The style is designed to guide and give permission rather than demand. It also attempts to empower the client to use (and find) their own resources, rather than giving them new tools.
• The Ericksonian approach also encourages tailoring suggestions to the client’s needs.
• “Multilevel Communication” is supposed to change the client’s behavior or experience in unrelated areas without them being aware. Their example is talking about how to savor a meal (highlighting sensory stimulation) to improve someone’s sex life. Or doing what hypnotists always do - taking credit for things the subject did.
• Utilization, from a classic Ericksonian perspective, is about using what’s already there. EG - a client’s hypervigilance, instead of being fought against, could be used to absorb them into an experience.
• Thank fucking god they warn people against using hypnosis in forensic applications.

This quote on contraindications is… pertinent and a bit amusing for a recreational context.

Some conditions, however, do require an advanced amount of knowledge of hypnosis and special parameters because of the risk of severe regression, the emergence of overwhelming affect states, or personality disorganization. Treating psychotics or severely character-disordered clients would be included in this category (Edgette, 1988). Sometimes hypnosis is ontraindicated because of what it means to a client; one example of this is the client who insists on seeing hypnosis as a way of giving up responsibility for solving a problem. Another example is the client with a very eroticized transference who insists on construing the hypnotic session in sexualized terms.

Page 9, Edgette, J. H., & Edgette, J. S. (2013). Handbook of Hypnotic Phenomena in Psychotherapy. In Routledge eBooks. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203777268

2. What Are Hypnotic Phenomena?

• Trance phenomena can occur outside of formal hypnosis (EG - age regression could be interpreted as a child ego state or transference reaction in other modalities.)
• The author wants to disambiguate characteristics of trance from hypnotic phenomena. Trance shit happens automatically (physiological and cognitive shifts) and is used as an indicator (in my view, a readiness to respond,) where phenomena is created deliberately.
• There’s a list of hypnotic phenomena here with short descriptions. It might be useful as a shopping list but I’m not going to list them all out since they’ll be covering techniques later.
• They provide a few conceptualizations of hypnotic dissociation - which I personally want more concrete descriptions of beyond “a feeling.” Here’s what they’ve got…
  • A separation of the conscious and unconscious
  • ”… a separation of emotions from thoughts, behaviors, and feelings.” (p14)
  • “systems of ideas are split off from the normal personality and operate independently” (p14, from Hilgard)
  • Personal note - despite sociocognitive research, they still cite trance as a precursor for other hypnotic phenomena 9.9
• 💩 Aw ugh - they’re already talking about repressed memories… I don’t like where this is going.
• Hyperthesia might be worth looking up some time. (Enhanced feeling. I’m not sure the mechanism is related but I swear I’ve serendipitously bumped into this one a few times.)
• One idea is to shape unwanted behavior in hypnosis. EG - creating the phenomena in hypnosis, then giving the client control of the phenomena, then they can apply that skill outside of hypnosis.
• They make an argument for an “experimentalist” approach… which… I think misses the point of academic research but I like the conclusion. Work with your partner/client to create phenomena within their abilities.
• They include the usual list of cross-correlation between hypnotic phenomena in measurement scales… which I feel is useless in recreational practice. Ideomotor suggestions are usually low-hanging fruit. If I was practicing as a therapist, I’d probably go for a hand-stick to check for readiness to respond then go directly for components of the phenomena I wanted to elicit. In person, I’d probably enjoy the nerdery of being administered a formal scale.
• They suggest Quick and Convenient Assessment of Hypnotic Depth: Self Report Scales for measuring depth.
• Creating phenomena may be relationship dependent. (Or - the no shit version, you need to build trust and expectation.)

3. With a Buffet Spread Like That, How Do I Know What to Eat? Selecting Hypnotic Phenomena

This fucking chapter title. These fucking section headings. 🧡

• Starting out with a client, give them a neutral zonk. Take notes - they’re skilled in whatever worked well for them, and you can utilize that.
• They suggest drawing inferences of their hypnotic abilities from their existing behavior. (Check your epistemology and causality.)
• Try to redirect the unwanted behavior in the direction of a solution. (One of their examples - someone that has obsessive tendencies can focus on their successes instead of their failures.)
• Another technique is to focus on opposites. While intuitive, I disagree with this as well. Opposites may have entirely different mechanisms. Food for thought at least.
• You can use hypnotic phenomena as teaching tools in implication.

Part 2 - Hypnotic Phenomena for Intervention

Section A. Memory Functions

4. Amnesia

• Erickson would encourage amnesia to make changes more permanent. (EG, forget that you made a change, so that you’re less likely to change it back.)
• Expectancy does not seem to predict amnesic abilities. (Ashford and Hammer, 1978 - this might be worth reading into.)
• Welp - interestingly, amnesic subjects are less likely to recall what happened during a session. There was an AB test where they showed amnesic/non-amnesic subjects a recording of the session - the amnesics were surprised and didn’t have that “oh yeah I remember” moment.
• If you’re going for amnesia, don’t go against the grain. Avoid things that will make the client recall what you’re trying to help them forget.
• (Kihlstorm, Evans, Orne, & Orne, 1980) did a study that provides a strong counterexample to purely sociocognitive views on amnesia. Individuals unskilled with amnesia suggestions were affected by suggestions to recall. The results from skilled participants did not change depending on the request (either by asking them to use temporal sequencing, effort, or telling them that it was an important scientific study.) Paper at Attempting to breach posthypnotic amnesia.
• “Source amnesia” is separate from other cases of amnesia. They remember the information, just not the source.
• Spontaneous amnesia is also its own thing.
• There’s notes on how to apply amnesia here therapeutically - but that’s not why I’m here. It’s worth a read if you’re a therapist that unserendipitously stumbled into my garbage.

Recreationally relevant contraindications:

• Paranoia and hypervigilance
• Memory erasure (you’ll create a mess, not a solution)

Methods

• Basic direct and indirect suggestions. You can let yourself forget, let the memory fade, let it go to the back of your mind, etc.
• Double binds. The usual you can forget to remember or remember to forget. (A suggestion with a bit of confusion stacked on top.) BTW - Zeig thinks indirect suggestions for amnesia are cool.
• Distraction through attention bouncing. (Achy back? No prob, notice how your butt feels against the chair, the cool air coming in through your nose, the feeling of whatever is in your hands, or when you realize that you’re just an inflatable flesh bag and your ribs are moving.)
• Implication - “some thoughts” “certain concepts” can be forgotten or not need to be acknowledged
• Seeding (priming) - highlighting something they’ve forgotten about. EG - they came in thirsty, but they forgot all about getting a coke by now.
• Expectancies that the “unconscious mind” can do something for them. (Really, you’re just directing their attention to a concept while you say some pseudo-profound bullshit about the minds ability to forget.)
• Bring up something where forgetting happens naturally, or something is out of awareness. They talk about driving - you can usually chill and drive to the store while thinking about what you’re going to do for dinner.
• Hide your suggestion deep in trance or nested stories. See also: dogs. (Me being a smartass aside, they do highlight that we often remember the beginning of something, the end of something, and the emotional ‘peak’ of an experience the most.)
• Interrupt a social ritual - like start a handshake, interrupt it with trance, give your suggestion, finish the handshake and then carry on. The abrupt end of the ritual is key. (This is often incorrectly cited as TOTE by NLPers who can’t disambiguate cybernetics from rituals.)
• Be boring as shit - they’ll tune you out.
• Surprise someone! Like when you get a phone call right before doing something, and you forget what you were going to do.
• Post hypnotic suggestion near the end of trance. When you come back, you can safely forget, let it fade, whatever. Then bring them back.
• Suggest gradual forgetting. (Or, the implication is to look for evidence of forgetting.)

5. Hypermnesia

For fuck’s sake don’t use hypnosis for memory retrieval - it’s inaccurate. I’m going to scrape out the effective bits here - not necessarily good or bad, and it’ll be up to you to figure out if you should be using this. For example…

…it was discovered that confabulated memories produced via hypnosis canbe found to be unshakable under cross-examination (Laurence & Perry, 1983).

The Handbook of Hypnotic Phenomena in Psychotherapy - P54

Anyway, back to bullet points.

• Hypermnesia, from their view, is vivid remembering.
• “Familiarity and nostalgia” are core components. (p53)
• “Hypnotic focus” (relaxing someone) will likely help someone recall something, correctly or incorrectly.
• This isn’t a magic bullet to change how someone feels about something.
• If someone has trouble remembering something like a test or performance, focus on the emotional blocks.

If it’s unclear, I dislike the idea of using hypermnesia in therapy. This is so jank. They do a good job of explaining how the sausage is made, but I hate this sausage.

• Use seeding. This seems to boil down to using language to allow someone to remember something automatically. EG - allow your body to remember bla-bla-bla.
• They say use evocative language. You’re pretty much acting as an emotional cheerleader to encourage them to absorb themselves into their memory. They don’t hold back on the set-dressing with words like reminisce an relic.
• Presuppose they’ll remember the thing in detail, as well as that they’ll be able to recall this at any time. Ya know - assume it will work.
• Use double binds to shotgun ways they may experience this.
• Use conscious and unconscious dissociative statements. (There is so much placebo here.) EG - as your unconscious mind begins to gather resources, your conscious mind may still be working on whatever its focus is.
• This language is so fucking flowery. You probably should use flowery language, unlike me, to improve engagement. I’m still going to be a pain in the ass about it.
• Frame recall as a process, and you may need to iterate. (Which… as I’ve mentioned before, this whole section is rife with peril.) Recalling isn’t an all-or-nothing thing.
• If you need to uh - give them more time to “remember” something in detail, use your metaphor of choice to fill the dead air. I guess it gives you something to do. Fuck I picked the wrong hobby.
• Just guide them. Be careful. This is so easy to fuck up. Hell - even them self-guiding recall is likely to fuck them up. I really wish people weren’t doing this seriously and just having fun with it.
• If they’re anxious about their ability to recall something, talk about something remarkable they remembered in the past, and have them re-use that strategy. I can see this backfiring in multiple ways.
• Use the “tip of the tongue” story. EG - you try to remember something, it’s frustrating, and it doesn’t come back. A bit later when you’re not paying attention, it just comes back to you.
• They mention the idea of “symbols” like a skeleton key to unlock a memory. Really, just do the same shit you’d do to help your friend remember where they put their keys. What was the last thing they did? (Or, olfactory cues could be useful if it’s not directed remembering.)

6. Posthypnotic Suggestion

It’s interesting to read about PHS without a bunch of recreational warnings about safety. In the therapeutic context, you want the response to happen without anything impeding it. Most follow this structure:

• When X, then Y

Their goal is to have this phenomena manifest itself automatically, ideally outside of awareness.

🦈 All right fuck it, I’m deviating entirely from the book here for a moment. Erickson would expect a short, spontaneous trance to develop during an automatic response. Recreationally, with consent, a common practice is to fire off a ‘trigger’ then immediately give another instruction. The subject often responds readily. I feel that at this point, their response set is active, and that makes a hell of a lot more sense than explaining it as some brief, automatic trance.

They’re a bit heavy on the Erickson fanfare here, but… I signed up for it. Eh, anyway.

• A PHS can either degrade over time or remain strong over the years. (If you don’t care about the Ericksonian superstitions, go read about extinction.) They note a study where response is initially strong and then plateaus (conceding methodological issues,) I feel they likely didn’t account for the effects of reinforcement learning when testing. So… we don’t really get an explanation for long-lasting PHS responses. They also didn’t note if there was cueing or social context that would expect the response. I could get this from the original study, but eh, I don’t want to be here forever.
• Why am I arguing with a fucking book. (Almost) nobody’s gonna read my shit. (Hi!)
• More difficult suggestions may become extinct more quickly.
• Thank you for stating that trance depth probably doesn’t matter for the longevity of a suggestion.
• If you want to boost effectiveness of a PHS, you can suggest they’ll enter a trance first before carrying out the PHS automatically, and/or have them practice it. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
• Ah, here’s an interesting quote. Perhaps - deliberately disrupt sequencing if you want those effects.

…and patient success at achieving posthypnotic amnesia seems to be related not to forgetting per se (inasmuch as material is eventually recalled when a reversibility cue is given), but to a disruption in the retrieval process, which is, most likely, an outgrowth of the confusion over the temporal sequencing of information that is to be forgotten. That is, subjects who are good at posthypnotic amnesia tend to achieve it by virtue of an inability to retrieve, perhaps due to an uncertainty about the ordering of information over time.

The Handbook of Hypnotic Phenomena in Psychotherapy - P73

• Yeah, repeating and reinforcing a PHS will probably strengthen a PHS.
• They say you can use a PHS with someone that is “highly suggestible” but I don’t really feel this is a requirement… My perspective might be skewed by working with individuals that make hypnotic response their hobby.
• This note about how the unconscious mind doesn’t process negatives can fuck right off. If that was true, the last sentence would be hard to read. I do agree that you should give someone something to do, rather than tell them not to do something.
• They suggest you set up your PHS to occur right at a discrete moment. I think there’s room to mark when something begins to work - in case someone immediately finds evidence to the contrary.
• They don’t explicitly mention this, but it’s implied. Tie a PHS to an action your subject/client/co-operator/participant/whatever can take. EG - when they touch X in situation Y, Z can happen.

Tips, oversimplified:

• Repeat and reinforce the suggestion during the session.
• Repeat it at different levels of trance. (My thoughts - more reinforcement more better, and may remove the requirement of the feeling of trance for something to happen.)
• Repeat it in as many different ways as possible. (My thoughts - priming and association.)
• Tie it to something - either an event, experience, or action.
• Ask your participant how they think when you want the PHS to fire off. EG - if you want someone to think of eggplants when they open their door, what do they think before they grab the handle?
• Remember to express not just with your words, but also with your voice.

Eliciting:

• When creating the PHS, do as much contextual priming as possible. EG - if you want someone to relax before going to the dentist, find overlapping sensations - like feeling the chair behind you.
• Again, shotgun with more than one association with which you want the PHS to take effect.

Section B. Toying with Time

7. Time Distortion: Contraction and Expansion

• Time dilation and compression often occurs spontaneously. (But we’re bad at telling time anyway.)
• They credit Rossi and Cooper for discovering this phenomena… but I’m not sold. (See Erickson’s Collected Papers Volume II)
• For any phenomena, be patient trying to create it. (Personally I likely over emphasize efficiency. My approach is pretty direct.)
• Removing distractions and “the objective sense of time passage (p91)” may help encourage time distortion.
• They post that even if most modern perspectives suggest time distortion is often a subjective misattribution, it’s still useful.
• They describe a few attempts at creating time distortion - most of them involve the subject doing something familiar with a lot of discrete events - experiencing or re-experiencing a story that’s much longer than the allotted time.
• There’s a story of Erickson working with a painter who experienced time distortion and painted something to completion in 6 hours instead of his usual 70, then having amnesia for completing the painting. I’d probably get more from the original paper, but his expectancy to experience amnesia might have put him into creative flow.
• (Personal note - time contraction might just have to do with focus and flow more than the suggestion itself. It’s not inconceivable you could enter flow with only an absorptive internal experience.)
• Hm. They mention using time distortion for both delayed and premature ejaculation. If you’re a hobbyist with a spicier interest in hypnosis, you’re probably already coming up with ideas.

Tips:

• Prime through implication during your induction. (Are they getting zonked slowly, quickly? Allowing feels slower than something happening automatically on its own. Bouncing focus and attention will likely slow things down.) Then suggest how easy it is for time perception to be adjusted.
• Spray-and-pray with double binds ways they could subjectively notice a change in their experience of time.
• Interesting. Suggest the conscious and unconscious minds can act differently. EG - the conscious mind could be attending to what’s at hand, while the unconscious mind watches in the background. Or flip it.
• Relate your suggestions to their real experiences. You can dog-pill your direct suggestions by offering them as anecdotes.
• Use symbols in storytelling - anything that represents the passage of time.
• Demonstrate time is difficult and inaccurate to measure anyway, so why bother? For time contraction.

8. Age Regression

Eh, I don’t care much about this stuff. Don’t mess with memories or try to recall things. If you want a more interesting, out there, and only tangentially related read, check out A psychoanalytic theory of hypnosis: A clinically informed approach.

Put frankly…

To just reexperience a negative event from the past does little to help a person.

The Handbook of Hypnotic Phenomena in Psychotherapy - P105

Some light notes:

• Everything is a subjective experience. EG - you experience being a child again from the perspective of an adult.
• Creating a “safe space” to escape to automatically and internally surprisingly echoes some ideas in the popular erotic hypnosis book Mind Play.
• Reliving something recent and enjoyable seems reasonably harmless - so long as you don’t fuck with memories. (Even just hypnotic recall will screw things up, so, this is less of a “be careful” thing and more of a “you’re willing to suffer the consequences” thing when it goes wrong.)

Some more reminders that you probably shouldn’t do this.

Loftus and Yapko (1995) note that at present, no studies demonstrate the validity of repressed memories of childhood abuse that resurface in adulthood. Further, we have found in our review of the literature little or no evidence to support the notion that lost memories can be reliably and accurately recovered during hypnosis.

The Handbook of Hypnotic Phenomena in Psychotherapy - P108

• Here’s a personal note that I don’t have any backing for - the experienced emotional intensity for a perceived retrieved memory likely has a lot to do with the participant’s subjective belief in accuracy.
• A tip that doesn’t need to be applied to just this topic - you can maintain physical contact with someone to ground them. EG - place your hand on the back of theirs, and they can just grab your hand if they need to stop the experience.

9. Future Progression

… Is this its own hypnotic phenomena or a GDF? Guess it makes sense to split this off for therapeutic context. I don’t think I’m going to get much out of this section - but that doesn’t mean it would be useless for you to read.

• Pseudo-orientation in time as an hypnotherapeutic procedure might be worth going through at some point.

Huh. Emotional and therapeutic context. Okay. Fair.

Future orientation as a psychological phenomenon can obviously be experienced either in or out of trance. What distinguishes it as one of the hypnotic phenomena, however, is that when experienced in trance, it becomes more than a superficial overlay of time orientation on one’s reality; the client ideally attains a whole different phenomenological world of time, sensation, and experience of the self.

The Handbook of Hypnotic Phenomena in Psychotherapy - p129

• You could suggest their unconscious mind can present a memory as a gift. (Yuck.) Or just ask them to be patient and wait for the first thing that comes to mind.
• The “future self” is just parts work. (Which, you’ve probably heard me bitch about enough since it can create weird, iatrogenic results.)
• I dunno, the advice here mostly seems obvious or trite. How long has it been since you’ve watched Back to the Future?
• There’s some ideas around using confusion techniques to mess with time. EG (my words, half-assed) “do you know if it’s been 2 or 4 minutes since we started? How sure are you of that? If I told you when it was 8 you would still be unaware?”
• If you’re doing this recreationally just read Kinky NLP or The Brainwashing Book, even if you’re not a perv. You’ll have more fun and have a better sense for safety. This content is for 🌈therapy🌈 and I don’t want to get into it.
• Oh - I guess they explicitly mention the dangers of suggesting time machines. Maybe my Back to the Future gag is bad. Different stoats for different goats.
• Iterate on your approach.

If you want to sound more “Ericksonian,” like most transcripts here, the examples are good. Notably, the Ericksonian ambiguity around a specific future. The mixing-and-matching of phenomena they do is fun.

Section C. Duality of Reality

10. Dissociation

I need to do a whole-ass writeup on this at some point - but often “hypnotic dissociation” is its own brand, and shouldn’t be conflated with other types. For a (dated) primer, check The Domain of Dissociation from Etzel Cardena.

From the Authors’ perspectives, they’re looking at it from the whole shebang - from (normal) automatic behavior, disconnected processes, and multiple personalities. They do highlight that some dissociation is healthy and normal (EG - automatic behaviors,) but if I write more on that I’ll start ant-fucking the definition in the wrong place.

I’m in a shit mood today, so… expect somewhat toxic opinionated notes. (Apologies to the authors if they run into this section.)

• (My thoughts.) Hilgard’s hidden observer theory should have died a long time ago.
• (Again - my thoughts.) Just because phenomena are connected (like amnesia and feelings of dissociation) does not mean there’s any related causal mechanism. Just say there’s heuristic value in the correlations.
• Hypnotherapy could be useful in helping a client learn how to guide or control their dissociative symptoms.
• Oh my god fuck ideomotor signaling. Go charge someone $300 to read their tarot cards - you’ll hurt them less. (Obviously, my thoughts.)
• I hate parts work - even with the subconscious. I don’t care if it’s effective - it’s gaslighting at best and they’ll need therapy to fix your shit therapy at worst.

How the sausage is made:

• Priming the idea of a conscious/unconscious split.
• Get your thesaurus out for splitting and distance.
• Assume they’ll notice their mind drifting, highlight the phenomena, and grow it. Accept partial wins.

Holy fuck. Whatever you do - don’t do this. P152

I’m fucking serious. I’ve lost all respect for the authors in a sentence. I don’t need a Psy D to tell you this is a bad idea.

Edit - coming back later. I’m really hoping they’re implying they’re working with someone that already has multiple identities rather than creating new problems for the fun of it.

Nobody is paying me to read this. I’m going to skim from here.

11. Hypnotic Dreaming and Daydreaming

You should probably just read the book on your own if you’re interested - from here on out, there’s going to be a lot more snark.

Unrelated to everything, this track is pretty good.

• From personal experience, there are some REM-like movements when someone’s in trance or deeply relaxed. I’ll often check for finger-twitching. This doesn’t mean that this is equivalent to REM1. That being said, there have been experiential reports that people respond in REM1, and just the same way that you can give a suggestion when someone is sleeping, I’ve slept through fire alarms before and they’ve presented as alarms in an alien sci-fi base, so yeah. Nothing particularly special there. Binaural Histolog has a much better take on this titled Hypnosis and Sleep.
• Wow this section could’ve just replaced “your unconscious” with “your mind” and kept the same placebo.
• Don’t fucking suggest their mind can lift amnesias, they’ll gaslight themselves.

Ugh. These techniques are underwhelming.

• Tell them they can have a dream.
• Say dreamy things and do some set-dressing.
• Tell them to have a self-directed GDF without my bitterness.
• Read the Manual of Psychomagic instead of digging into the dying bullshit of psychoanalysis.
• Anyone will find patterns in noise. Maybe this could be a harm-reduction technique in creating false memories.
• Man this crap really is a shamanic blessing in a cheap lab-coat.
• Really, if you want a quick version of how to do this - just man-splain dreams to your partner and suggest healing in the most condescending and ambiguous way possible. Create positive expectancies as usual.
• My salt aside, I do like the suggestion that your subconscious can give you gifts and kind memories. This seems harmless and is genuinely sweet.
• This all seems like priming in the “selected transcript material” section.

Section D. Dissociated Movement

12. Catalepsy

• I wouldn’t trust Esdaile’s, Charcot’s, OR Rossi’s takes on catalepsy.
• Yeah - obviously, if someone expects catalepsy to be an indicator of trance, and you highlight their inability to move, they’ll become more responsive.
• Huh - genuinely interesting - inducing catalepsy through “light stroking of the skin.” (p177)
• A few interesting suggestions related to catalepsy…
  • “When you start to notice you don’t want to move” is bread and butter basic.
  • Suggesting warmth or numbness, or invitations to notice either of those, indiscriminately, is novel
  • Suggesting one side is heavier than the other is just a comparison, but one I hardly use
  • “Mental catalepsy” might be a funny thing to tinker with, or spreading the immobility into thoughts.
  • PSA reminder - interoceptive sensations are easy to reframe and build expectancy around.

The suggestions at the end are pretty vanilla for inducing catalepsy the same way you would with any other flavor of the ritual - maybe just with more permission and looking for temperature changes.

13. Arm Levitation (Ideomotor Movement)

• Apparently Erickson said that his work was easier after doing some sort of ideomotor movement. Therapy aside, if you’re a hypnotist and you can’t elicit arm levitation, that’s a pretty good sign your partner isn’t ready to respond, whether it’s your fault or not. I guess there’s utility in highlighting how cool hypnosis is and use that as an experiential demonstration that the allegedly impossible may be possible.

• You can suggest they can cheat a bit and help out. (There’s some really solid secret sauce I’ve heard from another hypnotist, but that doesn’t belong here. There are always tiny ways you can improve your techniques, and you’re not always aware of them when they happen.)

• You’ve heard five million direct metaphors about getting an arm to rise. However, storytelling could be kind of a fun way to approach this if you have someone particularly responsive.

• Wow there’s even some psychoanalytic bullshit around the regression to a child-like or “learning” state where someone will be compliant. I guess I signed up for this with an Ericksonian take… You ever been in the unfortunate position to have to buy a car on Craigslist, it’s a bit old but it could be fine, but you check the coolant and there’s rust in there? That’s my metaphor for the day.

Ugh… Using implication as a method. You can try these if you want…

• Ending your intonation upwards.
• Expressing through body movements. If you want to look goofy, tilt your head up. If you want to look competent, try gesturing.
• Actually - a decent method - very gently help them get started, supporting their wrist with a finger or two.
• Some good advice - you’ll have a much easier time getting a wrist to levitate if it’s already suspended mid-air. If it’s resting on their leg, you’ll have a harder time. (Sometimes, I’m stubborn and I want to skill-check myself, so I’ll start with their hand in a resting position. )

Ideas from the transcripts:

• Imply a response will happen, and they can wait for it, then watch as it happens all on its own. This can easily backfire.
• Okay - I do like the idea of doing a countdown hidden inside of describing TV channels. That’s just playful.

14. Automatic Writing and Drawing

Wow, let’s just kick off the chapter with a psychoanalytic classic.

Anyway. Let’s see what I can scrape out of here for recreational use.

• Just do some cheerleading for them to sketch or write as you zonk them. Suggest it happens automatically.
• If you’re feeling Ericksonian you can fill the air by yapping about a conscious/unconscious split.
• Warm them up by starting with a scribble. Keep them distracted as they write gibberish.
• Suggest it feels like doing anything else they find automatic - doodling, gaming, Tetris, whatever.

Hm. An alternative explanation for the last story in this chapter - the client may have been uncomfortable and rage-quit, absent-mindedly written goodbye, thinking about what they wanted to say.

Section E. Modifying Perception

15. Anesthesia and Analgesia

NGL - I’ve mentally checked out from this book at this point. If you want to learn about hypnotic anesthesia and analgesia, I’d recommend Essentials of Clinical Hypnosis: An Evidence-Based Approach for practice and Hypnosis, Imagination, and Human Potentialities for context. For a primer on neuroscience and hypnotic pain reduction, Hypnosis and Conscious States has some solid but slightly dated (2007) information.

• The book talks quite a bit about the positives of hypnotic pain modification. If you read Hypnosis, Imagination, and Human Potentialities, he was not all roses about the idea, even if he found it effective and generally beneficial. Not that Edgette’s accounts are inaccurate, they just don’t entirely match the vibe of Barber’s work.
• In disagreement with the book, most sources cite that there’s no clear evidence indirect suggestion is better than direct suggestion (see Handbook of Hypnotic Suggestions and Metaphors, p23, subheading Myth of the Superiority of Indirect Suggestions for a counter-perspective.) However, it does help to actually listen to the person you’re working with, always.
• While Hilgard’s neodissociation theory isn’t completely dead at this point, the grave of the hidden observer phenomena has more nails in its coffin than your local hardware store could hold. See The hidden observer: a straw horse, undeservedly flogged. I’m mostly just frustrated that self-professed Ericksonians seem unwilling to entertain any other model of hypnotic function, despite pleas.

Here’s the components they outline for pain management

• Split the pain into parts and work on the components (emotional and sensory, throbbing/stabbing/itching)
• Work from “the outside in”
• Start with small changes, then build them
• Help the client appreciate small improvements in perceived pain
• Improve on the pain as a process, iteratively, not expecting to be done in just one session

16. Hyperthesia

Since these book notes have already gone completely off the rails, I decided to go read the referenced paper. Here’s some notes…

Unwarranted Antfucking

• They selected high responders measured by HGSHS:A. (IMO, they should have had a control group of low or normal responders.)
• I’m not sure, but it seems like they’d likely be able to see the laser pain stimulus, inferred from the fact that the volunteers were issued “protective goggles.” Edit: the volunteers were instructed to keep their eyes closed and gave them earphones. They also randomized the timing. Argon lasers (they used a Spectra Physics 168) are allegedly mostly quiet, so I’ll chill and say they probably did a good job of hiding the stimulus. (If they cared enough to have them close their eyes and wear headphones, they probably didn’t do something dumb like yelling PULL THE LEVER before firing off a zap.)
• They measured a single point on the vertex (fancy for ‘top center’) of the scalp with an EEG, and used this to measure pain intensity. The idea is that this is an ‘objective’ measurement of pain. My counterargument is that there’s nothing to say subjective experience won’t affect this potential, which isn’t directly against this paper. While this is more objective than subjective reports, it may not be as meaningful.

• Their study did show that that they were able to lower the threshold for pain response in the hyperthesia group. I didn’t see in the study where they measured a ‘sensory’ threshold though. EG - I can poke the back of my hand absent-mindedly with a pin gently and not flinch. If I’m careless, I’ll probably jump. It doesn’t mean that when I’m idly messing around with the back of my hand that I didn’t feel anything. When talking about their measurement, they were looking for finger twitching in response, which is reasonable. However, the ERP could be more related to an intent to respond as if something is painful, rather than changing sensory awareness.
• Volunteers returned to ‘normal’ rapidly as far as their pain response goes when the suggestions were removed. They cite this as evidence that “endogenous substances” don’t have a major role in hypnotic analgesia. Admittedly playing devil’s advocate, this is useful and worth further testing, but it doesn’t mean this response is universal. (EG, in more extreme circumstances, maybe those systems do kick in.)
• Kinda cool - they highlight the difference between “stimulus-related somatosensory” potentials that happen <100ms, and the vertex potentials happening after that (>100ms, around 300ms). The early potentials may not be modifiable, but the later potentials (“pain stimulus related”) likely can.

Back to the Book

Ah yeah - okay! Commentary on the Experimental Studies section. I agree with this for once. Their experience of pain was subjectively altered. I feel like the paper suggests that the spike at 300ms is correlated with subjective alterations of pain, and these alterations are real, but it does not rule out behavioral response as a component of the 300ms measurement. It also doesn’t clear up what’s more accurate - a subjective report on the feeling of pain, or an EEG reading. It does provide compelling evidence that the reports are not merely compliance to placate a researcher.

And to the indications for use section…

Oh man - I really hate the psychoanalytic tendencies to see the mind as a metaphor. The previous study does not imply, at all, that this applies to emotional pain or numbness. Psychoanalysis is a fucking reification party, and everyone’s invited.

I’m just going to skim to the suggestions - I want to see if there’s anything good for recreational use, like modifying the phantom touch illusion.

Oh wow, fuck Masters and Johnson, right up there with Elman. (CW, homophobia on both, suicidality on the second.)

Anyway, the suggestions are just more cheerleading and associations. You might look for instances where your hypnosis partner historically felt more sensitive and work incrementally. Break sensations down into components and see what they notice. Also apparently, try reminding them of the last time they had some nasty sunburn. /s

I’ll concede that you could probably take some inspiration from “Hyperthesia for a Depressed Woman with Bodily Numbness and Diminished Sexuality” for use in a recreational context. (pp238-241) At that point you might as well just go all in and read Mind Play.

17. On Experiencing What Is Not There: Positive Therapeutic Hallucination

Finishing this book is now officially at the point of me doubling-down on the sunk-cost fallacy.

Anyway, let’s get on with this book summary turned into a list of thoughts.

• On the subjective experience of daydreams, while it doesn’t directly mention “neurophysiological” changes, there are physiological changes in systems when using your imagination to take a role, as Sarbin found in their research on their role-enactment theory of hypnosis. (See Psychological Approach to Abnormal Behaviour, First Edition, p89.)
• Some of the ideas here are for working with folks with schizophrenia - that’s too spicy for me to touch on, even with my take that [your safety and risk tolerance is your own responsibility](Psychological approach to abnormal behaviour).
• I would not suggest creating a lot of the hallucinations they suggest here in a recreational setting.
• For a more useful (and fun) alternative, may I present Binaural Histolog’s Hallucination and Pareidolia.

18. On Not Experiencing What Is There: Negative Therapeutic Hallucination

Sure - hallucination sounds cool, but perceptual alteration does a better job of not overselling the practice or experience.

I’m frankly exhausted by this book.

• I absolutely agree that hypnotic responses are not fake. Their argument that classical conditioning happens at a subcortical level, and that hypnosis affects conditioning at the subcortical level is weak. Breathing is subcortical. You can decide to hold your breath. Using your cortex to adjust your breathing is unremarkable.

Ranting - Feel Free to Skip

Time for some quick bitching about Erickson and Ericksonians.

Experiments like Erickson’s above help to disprove theories that describe hypnosis as a phenomenon of social cooperation or role playing. This kind of experiment also points out the inaccurate criticism that Ericksonian hypnosis is not supported by research findings.

The Handbook of Hypnotic Phenomena in Psychotherapy - p261

This is a generalization. Erickson did a bunch of field experiments - a fancy term for fucking around and writing about it. While I’m sure he did some research with Clark Hull, Erickson’s assertions on mechanism are either missing or too conceptual to be tested, like most psychoanalytic approaches. Metaphors cannot be objectively tested.

Parenthetically, we can mention that it is a shame that clinicians—within both traditional and Ericksonian schools—remain largely unaware of Erickson’s research contributions.

The Handbook of Hypnotic Phenomena in Psychotherapy - p261

It’s more likely that ‘hypnosis academies’ and therapeutic training programs, regrettably, often teach more about techniques than research. Erickson is quite popular in pop-psychology circles. Academics don’t have a lot of use for theoretically empty anecdotes, and clinicians shouldn’t treat people based on vibes. Erickson’s field reports are interesting, but not conclusive or elucidating.

Critics of the Ericksonian approach who cite the approach for not being adequately research based cannot be speaking of Milton H. Erickson himself.

The Handbook of Hypnotic Phenomena in Psychotherapy - p261

There’s two parts here - one, the Ericksonian Approach™️ is not Erickson. There is no clear definition of what the approach actually is. Also - Rossi’s perspectives, while not explicitly Erickson’s perspectives, are inextricably conflated with “Ericksonian ideas.”

The criticism in large part holds true for the more recent work among Ericksonian-oriented therapists and stands in the way of the Ericksonian approach from gaining prominence in academic and scientific circles.

The Handbook of Hypnotic Phenomena in Psychotherapy - p261

For something to gain acceptance in an academic or scientific circle, it needs to be testable. Unless you’re doing psychoanalysis, in which case you can flout your lack of testability as a strength and not a failure in epistemology.

For instance, I could re-name the Ericksonian Approach™️ to Ericksonian Cock-gobbling. The term has no academic or scientific value. However, I can subjectively test that saying the term Ericksonian cock-gobbling is both useful and therapeutic. It is not, however, useful at all in a clinical or academic sense. If Ericksonain cock-gobbling makes you feel better, feel free to use it, but don’t call it scientific.

The lack of acceptance of The Ericksonian Approach™️ is testament to the resilience of the academic community, not indicative of a lack of understanding.

(Also - credit to a friend for coning the term, but I don’t want to bring them a bunch of heat by pointing them out.)

I don’t really want to talk more about this section. I’m tired of the psychoanalytic-style reifications. Really. THAT as a therapeutic use of suggested color blindness? Come the fuck on.

Some of the research they mention here is interesting, and the researchers aren’t dumb. I’d advise you to not rush to their conclusions on mechanism, though.

The researchers don’t say much in their methodology section about the induction itself; downplaying the significance of the induction is typical in research these days.

The Handbook of Hypnotic Phenomena in Psychotherapy - p263

Gee I wonder why.

Look - a lot of the suggestions they mention are likely to be effective in some capacity, but really take a bit more care before applying their advice.

Less Ranting

There are some useful tidbits in this chapter…

• “Hypnotic tunnel vision” is an interesting concept. The idea is to let everything in the center of focus to be ‘more vivid’ and outside of that is unimportant or ‘blurry,’ however you want to put it.
• The an extension of the idea of civil inattention, or rather - just getting lost in your own thoughts and passing by something.
• Erickson would uh - just use old fashioned lying to someone when they were “deep in trance.” They’d give an explanation and story logic for why someone wasn’t there, rather than a direct suggestion.
• An Experimental Investigation of the Hypnotic Subject’s Apparent Ability to Become Unaware of Stimuli might be worth reading at some point. It’s got some vintage hypnosis vibes (re - ‘somnambulistic state’) being from 1944.
• Re-attribution is an option and a reduction in clarity is an option. EG - if your phone icons look like chicklets, just let them be chicklets.
• A lack of recognition of an object is probably more enactable than just like, “not seeing something.” You could describe how this lack of recognition componentially could take place. EG - you could recognize a mouse as something that’s connected to a computer, but not need to know what it’s for.
• Obviously - you could suggest acclimation to a constant sound. Or - for fun, suggest they take on a ‘larger than life’ quality. Tangentially (and not mentioned in the book) this supernatural quality shows up on some itemized checklists for identifying dissociation. (See CADSS.) Apparently, giving them “permission” to not notice helps.
• For a warm-up - attention bouncing ala Graham Old, where things fall out of awareness.
• A partial lack of awareness can be something to highlight. (They suggest the double bind of you might notice it fading out of your awareness all at once, or some part of it fades into the background. )

Ugh.

Other lesser known forms of suggestion that mark the difference between simple and sophisticated (and thus more effective) trancework include twisting, tag questions, conversational postulates, misspeak, word plays, and paraverbal techniques (Zeig, 1990).

The Handbook of Hypnotic Phenomena in Psychotherapy - p263

Just because something is more convoluted doesn’t mean it’s better.

• The conscious/unconscious mind/process stuff can come into play. It really is just a fancy form of “as X happens, Y happens automatically, sometimes outside of your awareness” with a bit of hypnotic set dressing.
• The authors frame negative hallucination in normal circumstances as physiological and psychological. I think I’d reframe this as both acclimation (naturally ignoring background sounds) and giving someone permission to automatically ignore something. EG - if you actively decide to ignore something, you must make an effort. If you’ve preemptively decided to ignore something, you can likely condition that behavior gradually. They also highlight plenty of times where you just ‘brain fart’ on something and miss it - EG, missing your turn to 7/11 because you had GMS cranked at weird hours of the night.
• A few of these ‘naturalistic’ examples in here sound… implausible.
• I do like the idea of skimming something for a specific piece of information and missing everything else in the process. I’ve probably done a fair bit of that with this book.
• The ending is a bit of a ramble but if you want to “sound Ericksonian” when giving “negative hallucination” suggestions, this might work for you. (Oh god I’m “turning into” TX Barber with “all” the “quotes.”) It’s also not bad for inspiration, but I think I’ve got the gist of how I’d approach it now.

Part 3 - Apart from Intervention: Other Uses For Hypnotic Phenomena

19. Hypnotic Phenomena for Induction, Ratification, and Deepening

If you elicit the hypnotic phenomenon at the start of a hypnosis session, it will serve to accomplish much of the induction phase. This may seem like putting the cart before the horse, but consider that in order to accomplish the hypnotic phenomenon, you pretty much have to go into trance.

The Handbook of Hypnotic Phenomena in Psychotherapy - p279

This (the trance requirement) is just flat out wrong. What a start. Graham Old has a much healthier way of putting it…

To support Jeff Stephens quote that I gave a moment ago, I would add the following observation: the early stages of any conversation sets the character of the interaction that follows. And if that is true, to put it crudely, induction-less hypnosis may be the equivalent of trying to take someone to bed without even buying them a drink. In your eagerness to get to the action, you are skipping the stuff that actually counts. And that can be disrespectful, it can be a sure-fire way of guaranteeing that the action is anti-climatic, and it doesn’t get you a second date!

Old, Graham. Therapeutic Inductions: Rethinking Hypnosis from the Very Beginning (p. 52). Plastic Spoon. Kindle Edition.

• “Ratification” is indeed a very useful concept.
• Fractionation isn’t necessary - but that’s like saying you can skip the orange sauce at La Vics. If you’re doing this recreationally for fuck’s sake bring the sauce.
• The “five times deeper” bullshit drives me nuts. That being said, if I’m on the receiving end and respond to that, it’s a solid convincer. Not because I’m going five times deeper, but because I’m made aware I’m so immersed in my automatic responses that I’m not calling someone out on their crap. (I’ll advise people against doing this, but eh, minor details. This is practically a style choice.)
• Something really good about these suggestions - notice how they’re not rushing the participant and accepting their responses as avalid. This is excellent. Good job. Seriously. Everyone needs to learn this.
• FWIW, I’ll give credit to Ericksonians for being able to tell stories and pad out a description. I frankly suck at this.

Oh god. It’s over. It’s OVER.

FFF. Ugh. I don’t know how I’ll approach a short book review of this one. Holy hell it’s a mixed bag of strong disagreements, shit-I-don’t-want-people-to-try-outside-of-therapy, and a forthcoming and unabashed Ericksonian perspective.

I’ll imagine myself writing that easily and with confidence in the future.