Skip to content
yourinductionsucks.fyi

03 - Your First Induction

Finally, we can do something!

What’s In an Induction?

Section titled “What’s In an Induction?”

What makes an induction an induction?

You can think of them as bundles of road-tested suggestions. Often, they’ll have some of these components:

  • Relaxation. It’s easier to take suggestions when you’re buttered up.
  • Going deeper. Deeper is ambiguous - but it indirectly gives your subject the option to zone out or to just let your words become more effective.
  • Playing Simon Says. You say thing, and thing starts to happen automatically. You’re creating a gradual shift from ‘doing’ to ‘happening.’
  • Dissociation. Fractionation feels ‘weird’ and ‘abstract’ and makes it feel something special is happening. This gives you credibility.
  • Building rapport and trust. Do you know what you’re doing? I have no fucking clue, but at least you’re doing your reading.
  • Giving you, the hypnotist, time to get into the groove. It’s normal for the first bit of your induction to be the roughest when you’re starting out - by the time you’re a minute in, you’ll be confident and butter smooth.
  • Time to notice (and later utilize) responses Saying funny words doesn’t make shit happen. All the action is happening in your subject where they’re hopefully able and willing to follow along.

Sweet! I’m Ready to Get Started

Section titled “Sweet! I’m Ready to Get Started”

Great!

Pardon my dust, but I’m in the middle of reworking this guide. I recommend learning the Sensory Overlap method as your first induction. You can read that guide here. Learn that first. Simple and easy.

What about PMRs?

Section titled “What about PMRs?”

In earlier versions, I’d recommend learning to do a PMR, or a progressive muscle relaxation induction. While this is easy to memorize and execute, it’s not the most informative place to start. The Sensory Overlap guide will give you a more flexible approach out of the gate. That aside, here’s some other options, including two PMRs that I like.

🦈 Bruh! I heard I don't need to use an induction... You're right! Strictly speaking, you don't. But it's a great way to get warmed up. These scripts are just as beneficial for the hypnotist as the subject. Learning how inductions 'work' is a rite of passage.

Also, if you know this, you’re probably already way ahead of this guide. Go read Graham Old or the journals in Clinical Hypnosis and Self Regulation. Or - if you like the idea of working this way, just jump in to reading James Tripp’s Hypnosis Without Trance.

🦈 Don't I need trance?

Here’s a hot take:

Hypnotic trance is subjective, therefore, it’s the byproduct of expectation and suggestion, and not set in stone.

Many people you’ll work with are routinely ‘stuck in their heads.’ While most people will be wowed and amazed with how they felt, and how they were able to focus on your voice after an induction, some people will just felt like they were focusing a lot, and others will feel like they just started their afternoon yoga class.

I’ll get to it later - but if you need to ‘convince’ someone that something hypnotic happened, your go-to tool should be phenomena, not trance. This includes things like arm levitation, being unable to move, or being unable to say their name.

Getting to the point - trance isn’t necessary for hypnotic phenomena. Trance and inductions do increase expectation, so they help, but they’re not the cause. Graham Old, a hypnotherapist and one of my favorite authors, puts this pretty well…

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.