Sleepingirl - On Becoming A Skilled Subject

🦈🦊 Why not get it from the source?

I’m just posting my short notes for this article. You can go read the original here - it’s free. The rest of sleepingirl’s stuff is here on linktree.

This article deals mostly with improving your own response. In addition to these, I believe that another soft skill you (should) develop as a subject is being able to communicate clearly, to establish and reinforce boundaries, and to ask your hypnotist to work with you if you’re having trouble with a phenomena. If it wasn’t obvious - the original article is geared towards hypnokink - and a lot of this is unlikely to apply in a therapeutic or clinical setting.

What’s a Skill?

• We can use unconscious incompetence => conscious incompetence => conscious competence => unconscious competence as a learning model for building our skills as a subject.
• There are a variety of skills required to be a good (recreational) subject. Detaching from the feeling of volition is just one example.
• Your hypnotist is like a coach - and ideally will try to adapt their approach to work with you.

Skill in Hypnosis

• Start by breaking down what you want to do into components.
• One component is to look for signs of trance while you’re going into trance, or becoming better at recognizing them. (Or, learning to look for the minimum noticeable difference.)
• Questioning repeatedly to yourself if you’re in trance is unhelpful. Try an affirming mantra, recentering your visual focus, or drowning out your inner monologue and replacing it with your hypnotists. (If you’re a hypnotist reading this - go ahead and suggest these things.)
• For example, you could improve kinesthetic hallucinations by asking yourself… (EG - reframe…)
  • Was there no change, or just not what you wanted?
  • Did you find the suggestion unappealing?
  • Did the response waver in intensity?
  • Did you double check a response and break it?
  • Is there better imagery or a better scenario you and your hypnotist could use?
  • Can you give your hypnotist some hints?
• For automaticity, non-volitional responses…
  • Recall previous experiences.
  • Find reasons why it could be automatic.
  • Or from my notes - as socio-cognitive theorists brutally put it - actively engage in self-deception, until it’s no longer self deception.

Warming Up and Attention

• Sometimes, you need a warm-up! This is contextual, and sometimes you’ll have an off day.
• Another component of ‘warming up’ is getting used to how your partner communicates, and warming them up to how you communicate.

When one partner gets “in the zone,” it usually creates a space that is welcoming for the other to get there, too. Attentiveness itself, feeling it and expressing it in different ways, is a universal skill in hypnosis, applicable to both hypnotists and subjects… As subjects, it’s one of the best things we can do to become an active participant in our scenes.