05 - Safety Third

Safety is not a thing to be “ranked,” but rather, a state of mind, to be applied as needed to a myriad of situations in varying amounts.

-Mike Rowe - https://mikerowe.com/2020/03/walk-me-through-this-safety-third-thing/

While hypnosis is mostly safe, it’s not inherently safe. This should cover your earlier sessions so long as you don’t veer into anything too spicy. I’ll touch on higher capsaicin levels later.

Your Mental State

Trance suggestions are probably some of the earliest you’ll get to encounter and enjoy. They’re common, easy, and when you’re new - novel and fun. They’re entirely unnecessary, but feeling zonked is pretty cool!

Physical Comfort

Get comfortable in that chair! Make sure your environment is safe enough for you to lean your head back. Stick your phone on your desk, and make sure that you have privacy for an allotted amount of time. It sucks when you’re interrupted by a call, dog, discord notification, or a sore neck.

If you’re uncomfortable during the session, it’s OK to shift around! Feelings of relaxation and entrancement come and go all the time. You can adjust, make sure your neck won’t be fucked, and sink back down to that state, going back to their voice. If you need a little help getting back down - communicate that to your hypnotist. They’ll probably think it’s cute.

With intentional suggestions and compliance, there’s evidence suggesting that hypnosis can prevent movement, just not the intention. The book Mastering Erotic Hypnosis provides a case for this.

In Cojan’s tests, there was no difference in the planning phase, meaning that hypnosis did not block the intention of moving. Activity for actually performing the move was absent. Looking at global patterns, Cojan found that the subjects who were merely pretending to be paralyzed experienced activity in a section of the brain associated with motor inhibition, which was expected. This activity was absent in hypnotic paralysis.

Gordon, James; Doll, Rebecca. Mastering Erotic Hypnosis: A Comprehensive Manual for Erotic Play, Fetish, and Kink (Comprehensive Mastery Book 1) (p. 255). Comprehensive Mastery. Kindle Edition.

The TLDR is - you can continue to comply with a suggestion to immobilize yourself to the point of injury.. So - if you feel uncomfortable or unsafe, reject the suggestion and don’t hurt yourself. It’ll be easy to pick up where you left off.

Systems, DID, and Dissociation

Many hypnosis suggestions create a degree of dissociation.

What’s dissociation?

In this context - we’re creating a feeling detachment. Experiencing things from a distance, watching our own cognition and it’s shifts, becoming aware of what our body is feeling and pulling it apart into pieces… these are all dissociative. Moving your arm feels much different than feeling or watching your arm move.

Many of these things unfortunately also happen when experiencing trauma. People remember seeing themselves in third person when being abused, or emotionally intense experiences felt out of their control.

The good news is that - hypnotic dissociation feels nice and cozy! It’s like a deep meditation. But , as misscammiedawn mentions, there are risks if you have strong dissociative capabilities. (For example, DID, plurality, or multiple identities.

This is your responsibility to gauge risk on and your ability to manage an iatrogenic (fucked up) result.* If you have a head-mate that tends to not like giving up control - work with your hypnotist know and perhaps try something less dissociative. It’s unlikely there will be a problem, but you’ll need to negotiate with your hypnotist on your risk tolerance.

*Assuming your hypnotist doesn’t do anything reckless like fiddling with your head-mates…

Abreactions

Continuing with dissociation - entering into a trance can expose you to a vulnerable state. As part of the ritual - you generally let your guard down. If you found yourself in a tough situation - or coming in to your session after a particularly troubling phone call or relationship on your mind, deep relaxation can break down those walls, causing a fairly messy outpouring of emotion.

If you have something on your mind - let your hypnotist know and work together to decide how to proceed. It’s OK to hold off! You can also agree to come back up if something feels off. Negotiating, you don’t need to dump all your baggage on your ‘tist (please don’t), a quick overview will do. If your hypnotist is skilled with it - you can also work without trance and have some fun with that.

The quick way I put it usually is - if you wouldn’t feel safe getting high / drunk / taking hallucinogenic substances at that moment, avoid trance and maybe just chill and hang.

Spontaneous Amnesia

This is less of a warning and more of a “don’t freak out if this happens” sort of thing.

Even without explicit amnesia suggestions, some people find they’ve forgotten a chunk of time after doing a session. This can be for a myriad of reasons:

You were so relaxed you stopped paying attention.
The Doorway Effect. (Why the FUCK did I go to the fridge?!) Sometimes the experience of being ‘in’ and ‘out’ of trance is so intense it creates this.
Just being forgetful.
Being so engrossed in the experience you forget chunks of it. (Hell, this could even be an indicator that you had a great time!)

Even though the mechanisms behind hypnotic amnesia aren’t fully understood (and I’m waiting for someone to tell me I’m wrong on this,) they are documented as a phenomena. If you find yourself being amnesia prone - you can always ask to record session audio. You could even do this to put your mind at ease.