Hypnosis Glossary for Hypnotists

Hey. I’m just some rando furry on the internet. Take these definitions with a drop of salt water. Also - a lot of these are a hodgepodge of terms from various hypnotists - please don’t take any of this as science.

Glossary For Hypnotists

Anchoring - Associating one thing to another. Like Pavlov’s dog. More specifically, you anchor the state to a stimulus, not an action.

Catalepsy - A state where a body part (or muscle group) becomes rigid or unmovable. EG - ‘small muscle catalepsy’ “Just close and relax your eyes, and when you’ve convinced yourself that they’re so relaxed that you couldn’t possibly open them, give me a nod.” Or, large muscle catalepsy, “Feeling your body drift down into that wave of relaxation, so far down that every muscle lets go, becoming so relaxed you couldn’t possibly move.”

Convincer - Anything that will help your subject feel more ‘convinced’ that their state of hypnosis is effective. For example, suggesting they’re so relaxed they couldn’t possibly move, then asking them to try to move. When your subject finds they cannot move, they’re ‘convinced’ they are in hypnosis. The point of a deepener is also usually to serve as a convincer. Suggestions of your body becoming heavier and heavier are generally pretty effective - they’re fun, too!

Generalized Reality Orientation - Unconsciously processing sensory input to derive proprioception, sound direction, and other general senses.

Ideoaffective Response - The effect of thinking of a specific time or instance where a feeling was strong, re-creating the experience and feelings.

Ideocognitive - An idea that changes how you think. As part of the softest science of suggestion, responses like amnesia or confusion would be in this bucket.

Ideomotor Response - An automatic motor response - like an arm levitating.

Ideomotor Signaling - Suggesting an ideomotor response in reaction to something else. Such as, “the better you feel, the further your arm moves down.”

Modality - A sense or type of feeling. EG, is it an emotion, touch, smell, mood… Those would all be modalities.

Nominalization - A subject’s reduced concept. EG, ‘freedom’ - could be a feeling, but we don’t know that for sure. We can either utilize this directly, unmodified, or ask them to talk more and expand on it.

Pacing and Leading the subject - You can ‘pace’ the subject by repeating things they’ve already felt. If you chain a few things pacing with them, you can lead them in a new direction afterward.

Parrot Phrasing - I hate this - but repeating precisely what the subject said, without modification. There’s no guarantee that ” freedom ” means the same thing between two people, so if you want an unmodified effect, use an exact word just as it was. This does not mean you should repeat the whole sentence; it should just be the same word.

Post-hypnotic Suggestions - Suggestions given during hypnosis for some sort of response or action to happen. For example, “When you see me hold up two fingers, you will vividly remember the image of a coconut, and be driven deep down back into trance.”

Reality Testing - Checking your senses (specifically, ones from your Generalized Reality Orientation,) for accuracy.

Ratify - To validate to the subject. EG - you can ‘ratify’ their hypnotic reality by giving them an ideomotor suggestion - like their arm will go up all on their own.

Transderivational Search (TDS) - when someone is presented with vague or ambiguous content, leading them to look inside their mind for meaning and understanding, likely bringing those feelings and associations to the surface. EG: “And what is that like inside?” Or even, a common manipulative one, “You did it again, didn’t you!”

Utilization - How something is used to assist in deepening trance. Eg: suggesting that noticing conversation around you leaves just as easily as it came, and as you watch the thought leave, this relaxes you and deepens your trance.

Common Inductions

Dave Elman Induction - An induction that starts with eye closure, arm heaviness (and traditionally dropping the arm onto the leg), the suggestion of full body catalepsy, and has the subject count down from 100. The induction is ‘done’ when the subject no longer recalls the following number.

Dr. Flowers - Begins with an eye fixation. Generally, the subject will be counted down from 20, blinking on each number, sending them into a deeper state of relaxation and trance. The Dr. Flowers induction relies heavily on fractionation as part of the induction.

PMR (Progressive Muscle Relaxation) - Similar to a ‘body scan’ meditation - this induction steps through the entire body, step by step until the whole body is relaxed. The subject tenses and relaxes their muscles on each step in some variations.