004 - Safety Misconceptions

While hypnosis is pretty safe, some misconceptions can make it less than it could be. You could not realize you can speak in trance, you may feel you can’t reject suggestions, or on the flip side, you may just assume it’s only as dangerous as a conversation. Let’s get these out of the way.

Is Hypnosis Safe?

Fuck no.

Just as dentistry is not dangerous, but a poor dentist is, hypnosis is not dangerous, but a poor hypnotist is.

Yapko, Michael D; Yapko, Michael D.. Trancework: An Introduction to the Practice of Clinical Hypnosis (p. 30). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

Your hypnotist may mean well - but when they pull out their favorite beachside relaxation deepener, you’re brought back to your most recent shoreline memory - waking up to find not one, not two, but three crabs in your swim trunks. This wouldn’t be a big deal if you asked to avoid beach deepeners during your pre-talk.

I do like to crack jokes at hypnotic misfortune, but unfortunately, there’s a more insidious side.

“The capacity to influence people to do things against their will exists. There is little room for doubt that people can be manipulated negatively to do things seemingly inconsistent with their beliefs and attitudes (Bordens & Horowitz, 2002; Branscombe & Baron, 2017). To put it bluntly, untoward influence and, at the extreme, brainwashing, exist. In other words, controlling a person is possible under certain extreme conditions, but those conditions are not at all reflective of hypnosis applied in clinical contexts, where cooperation is emphasized rather than coercion.”

Yapko, Michael D; Yapko, Michael D.. Trancework: An Introduction to the Practice of Clinical Hypnosis (p. 38). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

The Bambi files are notorious for escalating subjects through ‘fun’ addiction, to losing agency and identity, all the way to the point of relocating to be abused by the hypnotist that created them. The dangers of these files have been well documented, but it’s less obvious when someone slowly shifts preferences over time, starting with some ‘harmless’ resistance play. The “rush” isn’t there anymore, so they suggest pain when attempting to remove suggestions, and use this to take control of areas you didn’t agree to - like your finances and relationships. You can always break out of it - but it sucks. That’s going to be a fuck of a therapy bill.

Resistance play is fun, common, and in 99% of cases a well meaning interaction between two hypno-horndogs having a good time. The fantasy of brain-washing is far removed from the reality of it being a disgusting mess. It’s natural to titrate intensity to get to a previous high, which is why there are so many deaths surrounding breath control. The risks are just less obvious when playful influence brushes close to mind control.

Disregarding safety can become problematic in unexpected ways. What if your hypnotist is unavailable after addiction suggestions? That consensual co-dependency you set up just turned into genuine misery. Please be proactive in your own wellbeing and plan for when things go wrong.

Do Suggestions Go Directly Into My Subconscious?

Absolutely not!

Brain scans during hypnosis show that we’re processing and aware of the suggestions we’re given. There’s a misunderstanding that when a response seems automatic that we didn’t process the suggestion, our ‘subconscious’ processed it for us. Things can feel automatic. It’s more likely that we were unaware of forming these intentions. (Cold Control theory from Zoltan Dienes goes into the nitty gritty - I’ll drop a link in the footer.)

You may have heard of ‘overload’ inductions like Terrance Watt’s “Seven Plus or Minus Two.” While yes, we can only hold a certain number of chunks of information in our minds at one time, the stuff that overflows isn’t automatically processed. These inductions work by reducing your capacity to analyze the experience. If you’re busy thinking about how the chair feels, the pace of your breathing, the shape of the letters on the page, or what you hear in the room around you, you’d be less likely to have the brain-space to question whether or not your eyelids are getting heavier or not.

Can You Talk in Trance?

Yeah sure you betcha! You can move too!

This is like asking if you can talk when you’re groggy. You might sound like a zombie, or you may not want to speak, but you haven’t lost your ability to communicate.

Talking during a session can be mildly distracting - but it’s often worth it. You’ll have a lot more fun if you tell your hypnotist that you forgot to take your phone out of your pocket.

004 - Safety Misconceptions

Is Hypnosis Safe?

Do Suggestions Go Directly Into My Subconscious?

Can You Talk in Trance?

Further Reading (and Videos)