Persistent Suggestions

Persistent Suggestions by sleepingirl

Giving effective suggestions that feel intense in the moment is a goal that we work towards a lot as erotic hypnotists, but much of the time we are interested in what hypnosis offers outside of a session. Sometimes, it can be difficult to pin down just how to make triggers, post-hypnotic suggestions, and long term changes feel fresh and persistent. In this article, we’ll look at some theory behind what makes suggestions work and some tips and tricks to make them “stick” more effectively.

What Needs to “Stick?”

Often this topic arises with the concept of hypnotic triggers -- there’s a lot of interest in making your run-of-the-mill trance triggers, transformation triggers, orgasm triggers “work” over a long period of time. There is a tangent we could go on questioning the motivation of this -- why would we use triggers and avoid the sense of it just being a “shortcut” to various effects? What are ways to utilize triggers that honor the intimacy of long-form attention and work that is present in building hypnotic experiences without triggers? But this is a topic for another time; simply keep these questions in mind as you progress.

There are plenty of other scenarios where a quality of “stickiness” benefits us as hypnotists. Any type of post hypnotic suggestion -- one where a given effect or suggestion is meant to persist. For example, if the subject is transformed into a doll, or supposed to hear a mantra echoing in their head outside of trance. Or perhaps any kind of long changework -- brainwashing or other changes that are meant to happen over time. For example, if the subject is meant to feel more submissive, or learning how to grow in responsiveness to hypnotic trance.

Persistence applies within trance as well -- one issue may be maintaining suggested physical arousal through a trance, for example, or even the “sensation” of trance itself. Most suggestions we give are ones that we intend to linger for at least a little while, and understanding that gives us our first step towards making that very effective.

Accessibility

A huge topic in “what makes suggestions work” is how accessible they are to the subject as they’re given at that point in time. It is fraught to speculate what types of suggestions are objectively more “easy” or “difficult” in a vacuum, but when we are giving suggestions, we can consider a lot about how to make them as easy to respond to as possible. Parts of this include using good framing, priming, and wording; also included are considering how analogous the suggestion can be to something we might do in our daily lives. Many of these are topics that have been expounded upon in other articles.

Specifically here we will address ease of persistence and look at variables which can affect this. Here are a few factors that may make a response feel more difficult in persisting -- our goal being to work around them:

• The subject doesn’t feel enough safety/comfort to respond naturally
• The subject is hindered by perceived “rules” about how the response is “supposed” to work
• The suggested response is too complex, big, or too difficult of a process to “make” happen
• The response isn’t sufficiently associated/conditioned
• The subject feels too much like they’re the one “doing the work”
• The response feels like it isn’t surviving changes in state, environment, confidence, or etc

Safety Breeds Efficacy

Someone who feels it is not safe to respond or maintain a suggestion will struggle doing so. There are two important things we need to glean from this: genuine ethical safety, and perceived safety. Is it legitimately safe if you give your partner a squirrel brain and direct them to cross a busy road? (Don’t do this probably.) But we also must consider -- even if we preempt our suggestions with “when it is safe and appropriate,” does our partner legitimately feel enough trust and comfort to respond naturally?

Objective safety is of course the first step towards a feeling of subjective safety, and we as practitioners should be constantly trying to excel at creating safer experiences. When we teach beginners we often tell them that certain safety practices are obvious: if you don’t put boundaries on your triggers, your partner may respond at inopportune times. We also caution that some are not obvious: what if your partner suddenly flashes back to an unpleasant experience your suggestions accidentally evoked? We say that there is no way to create mitigations for every single potential problem that may arise, and this is true.

Working with suggestions that are meant to persist in some way throws an additional wrench into this. In a contained scene, the hypnotist is there to respond. In many cases, there is a sense that waking up from trance will serve to mend any unpleasant experiences that the subject might stumble into. But a persistent effect -- whether the idea that someone will respond to a later trigger, or maintain some sort of headspace after a chunk of the scene -- puts more responsibility on the subject themselves.

Subjects feel this, either as something they are consciously aware of or potentially as a kind of gut unconscious feeling. This can be really distracting to manage on top of some kind of effect. We may be tempted by one of several ideas in this case: perhaps giving a blanket “things that you don’t want/are unsafe won’t happen,” or trying to make the process of safety a wholly unconscious one (“you will automatically avoid unwanted responses without having to think about it”).

Neither of these approaches are failproof, of course, but they alone also don’t necessarily remove the feeling of “carrying” the weight of safety responsibility. As with all hypnosis, some ways to help out your partner are spending the time to openly suggest and co-opt responses that you know are already going to happen.

For example, we can tell our partners, “I know that there will always be a little part of you monitoring your experience, checking to make sure everything is OK, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. That part of you can feel safe doing that, even when it pops up in conscious thoughts; you can allow it to do so. And by letting it do that it becomes more effortless, more integrated with your experience, transforming with you to fit the way you respond. You know you are responding hypnotically because you are doing this, and it becomes less and less important to consciously focus on as you sink into the suggestions.”

In general it also goes a long way to build trust and comfort holistically in scenes. It can be challenging for some people in pick-up play to fully feel like they’re letting go, and some of this is because they don’t know what to expect or they don’t feel confident about releasing fully into trust. More direct experience where a subject feels like things go in an expected, comfortable way can intensify hypnotic effects. For persistent suggestions, this may look like creating “limited” persistent experiences (a short time in a controlled environment) that helps to teach them what it feels like.

Make Responses Reasonable

Above, we talked about how any response that is meant to persist becomes more of the responsibility of the subject. This concept is one that’s central to many of the ideas we’re going to talk about -- understanding what that means and how to work with it will go a long way. If you are hypnotizing your partner through a kind of intimately complex transformation, you as the hypnotist can guide that experience at the right pace and with the right amount of help to make it feel pretty easy. By contrast, a trigger that is supposed to do the same later (or the need to maintain a complex response) will rely on the subject to do a lot of that “work” themselves. Understandably, this can take away from that feeling of “automatic” response that tends to define for subjects what hypnosis is -- and can ultimately make things feel like they’re not persisting.

There is a balance to strike when suggesting persistent effects. You don’t want the effect to be too specific, leading to no “wiggle room” of what it will feel like in different situations. At the same time, you don’t want it to be too “vague,” leading to unsureness of how the response should even happen at all. You want it to be “big” enough so that it’s a recognizable change from the subject’s waking reality, but “small” enough to be manageable to maintain on its own.

Nearly any response can be translated to fit inside these parameters, and the wonderful thing about hypnosis is that you can essentially tell someone in so many words that it will. This is akin to the meta suggestions like, “This happens exactly the way it needs to, at the right speed, just the right fit for your mind.” In this case we are making meta suggestions about the quality of the response that needs to persist: “This happens with just the right amount of clarity for your brain to feel it and facilitate it, not so big that you have to consciously expend a lot of effort on it, but with the exact amount of intensity for you to be aware of it, recognizing it happening.” An effect of this is that it gives the subject permission to accept their own response as the “correct” one.

Of course, it can also be great to tailor this to the actual suggestions you’re giving. In this case, you should be thinking about the questions: “What makes a response feel like it’s less work in general? What are responses that are naturally easy or automatic?” To some degree, this is about finding the aspects of suggestions that someone might have experience with in their daily lives. For example: things that someone might daydream about, read about, fantasize about (“when you masturbate you’re so used to imagining the process of becoming a drone, even from a different perspective”); an emotional response that is similar to the ones directly or indirectly involved in your suggestions (“responding to me with that euphoria washing over you just like being high”); previous experience, memories, or personal history (“just like all of the other times you’ve gone so deep”); understandable metaphors/fantasies (“stuck just like a pretty posed dolly gets nice and still”); etc. Remember also that small changes progress much easier to bigger ones.

In this case, you can make suggestions that incorporate these ideas: “And it’s easy for your mind to maintain this dollspace, even for a long time, as it knows how to go off into fantasies, it knows how to experience things in the background. And now it can do that as a dolly brain, in the way that’s just right for it, feeding you dolly emotions and dolly feelings like a drip at just the right speed.”

Lessen the Work

As with all hypnotic suggestions, it is usually more effective to do more than give a simple statement. Of course we want our partners to feel generally like they’re not taking on a lot of the work of maintaining effects or going through the process to make a persistent response happen. But we can do much better than saying, “And it will feel like it happens automatically.”

Key to giving suggestions is understanding the inner process of them and making that as smooth as possible. In this case, we can think about what it might usually feel like for the subject to do that work. With a trigger, there might be a kind of process where they hear the trigger, have to recognize that it is a trigger, have to identify if it’s the right time and environment to respond safely. Perhaps then they are internally “checking” to see what their initial response is, and having a conscious impulse to go through the rest of the response. In the case of a response that is meant to be maintained (like a psychological change), there is probably some amount of inner maintenance and checking on all the aspects that they assign to the response.

Breaking down the subject’s inner process like this helps us understand how to transform and co-opt it into something useful. How do we identify the more “conscious” aspects of these responses and make them feel more unconsciously-driven? In Erickson’s model of hypnosis, taking a conscious behavior out of its usual conscious context is a key attribute of hypnotic response itself.

We can start at the very beginning. We should spell out to our partners that hearing an initial trigger will always be partially conscious and partially unconscious -- this is true. The question now becomes, “How do we utilize both of these aspects of response to make the whole response feel easier?” Here are a few things we might suggest/communicate:

• Conscious recognition and response aids and intensifies the unconscious process of response
• The unconscious response contains memory/associations of responding to the trigger
• The unconscious process happens no matter how you consciously respond
• The conscious response feels easy and fluid -- it is something they are skilled with

We talked about safety more in depth above, but here are some suggestions you might make around the idea of identifying if it’s a good time to respond to a trigger or exhibit hypnotic behavior:

• The way that you check to see if it’s appropriate to respond is part of the entire response itself, like it’s the part that drives the hypnotic response
• Safety checking is your brain getting comfortable so it can respond most effectively
• While you consciously and unconsciously identify if it’s appropriate to respond, the rest of your mind gets put into a kind of holding pattern, preparing itself to respond as intensely as it can

After they recognize their first responses to the suggestion, there’s often a part where they feel the need to “finish” the job -- they have this initial response, for example, to becoming puppy-brained, but they feel like it’s not “complete” until they sort of push for it to happen. It’s especially important in this kind of suggestion that we accept if there is a conscious impulse here. A lot of the time, when someone goes through this process it can feel very “active” -- but many times they don’t recognize just how much of the process is unconscious, including that additional impulse and all the stuff their brain does in the background. Here are some ways to talk about this:

• Being aware of yourself going through the process of responding means there are parts that are happening outside of your awareness
• Parts of you that you’re not aware of take over and go through the response
• Consciously wanting to intensify the response leads to your brain doing it habitually, becoming more and more automatic over time
• Consciously pushing your brain towards responsiveness is a submissive and hypnotic act

Associate

In any suggestion, tapping into the associative process that the subject has can make things feel more intense and persistent. We tend to think about this in terms of triggers -- making sure we properly condition our responses -- but this especially applies to any kind of suggestion that’s meant to have a lasting effect.

The more you connect a response to things that are important to your partner, things that are naturally part of their behavior, or things that are part of their environment, the more you create situations where they are reminded of the response and “surrounded” by stimulus that helps to maintain it. For example, if we want to create a profound sense of submission, we may hypnotically attach that feeling to a collar -- the collar is a constant reminder. This is also an example of choosing an associated stimulus that thematically “fits” the suggestion, which we know can be more effective off the bat.

But there are all sorts of associations we can draw upon, for example:

• Physical behavior (moving or breathing in a certain way; becoming very still; touching oneself in a certain way)
• Inner thoughts (an “earworm” kind of mantra; the act of remembering the suggestion in general; hearing one’s own internal monologue)
• The environment (looking at a picture on the wall; sitting in bed; sounds in the room)

These can be concrete and specific, or vague and abstract. But we can think more in-depth. If we think about the collar example, what’s really happening for a person is that the anchor is every time they notice or think about the fact that they’re wearing the collar -- and that triggers a kind of rush of response. It is not exactly that the collar creates a kind of permanent state -- so when we make suggestions around it, we should acknowledge that it is the awareness that creates the most perceptible trigger.

We can of course create situations where we associate not being aware of the anchor at any moment doesn’t mean the response goes away -- in fact, we can even tie that in: “While you are wearing the collar and it slips into the back of your awareness, as it will, that means that the response itself is sinking deeper into your unconscious mind. Always happening, sometimes closer or nearer to the surface.” With practice (and some tips from the next section), you create a confidence and belief that the response is still happening even when it is not fully conscious.

We may be tempted to say, “OK then, every time you breathe, every time you move, every time you think are the triggers for this response to happen.” But we need to acknowledge that maintaining a response (or responding in the first place) is a kind of process that is gone through -- with a start and an ending. There tends to be a sort of body scan or other self-reflection, going through and becoming aware of or managing/maintaining the response. By acknowledging this, we may want to emphasize that this is periodic rather than constant -- there’s no way that someone can focus all of their attention on this at all times. The belief is the more constant aspect; the awareness, sensory feelings, checking, and management are not happening at all times.

In persistent responses that are meant to be maintained headspaces, it can also be helpful to train the component responses themselves into habits and triggers, so that they become automatic themselves and serve to “remind” the subject of the state. For example, someone who is meant to act like a bimbo can grow to find that as they do things that are very bimbo-like, it becomes easier and more habitual, and every time they notice themselves doing something that fits that behavior, they become very consciously aware of it -- which triggers perhaps a rush of dumbness or that sexual headspace.

Maintaining

A big part of persistent responses is maintaining them as there’s different kinds of “changes” or shifts in state, environment, sensation, etc. A lot of people, for example, can find it challenging at first to stay in trance when they have to move their bodies. Another example of this is when you induce something in trance that is meant to stay when you wake them up -- or even when you train a trigger in one environment and use it in another.

Working around this first starts with pacing and incorporating the feeling of change, and even a “dip” in the response. It makes perfect sense that a response is going to feel different when someone is in trance versus awake, or when they start trying to interact as opposed to being passive, or when they are trying to go about their daily life with some sort of effect that had been previously contained to “a hypnosis scene.”

You can tell your partner this explicitly, with the goal of accepting the feeling and interrupting the sense that when the response changes or lowers in intensity it slips away and is a “failure.” Acknowledging that these changes will happen and explaining why it’s reasonable to expect that will help to incorporate their natural response into the hypnotic one: “As you go through your day in this state, it will respond to the changes that you yourself go through, sometimes becoming more or less intense as it adjusts to fit your new situations, interruptions, and patterns.”

Future pacing can be a valuable tool here -- bringing someone through imaginative fantasies where they are responding perfectly in various changes in state and environment. You can affect aspects of the response this way too -- future pacing them through the feeling of the response fading into the background, having that be a part of the response itself, and then confidence that it will intensify.

There is a level of belief that is really important in this kind of play. Ideally the subject fully believes that the response is happening regardless of the kind of qualities the response goes through. Someone who has a very high level of buy-in can, for example, feel like they’re still “dumb” even if they’re normally going through their day, doing work -- because their actions fit within this believed context. Maybe it’s as simple as their inner monologue being slightly different in pitch, or the way they feel they’re going through their tasks, or some other very small and subtle response that they might not even be able to put their finger on.

This can help to avoid normalization of response -- where the feeling of it becomes so mundane that it’s not as recognizable. We see this happen especially in long-term suggestions around things like submission or other headspaces. In this way you can focus on creating a very high level of confidence for your partner that they are responding. You can alter belief by emphasizing it in your future pacing: “Seeing yourself as so confident that you’re dumb as you go about your day, waking up and thinking, ‘Wow, I’m dumb,’ walking around thinking, ‘Wow, I’m dumb.’”

Encouraging your partner to be able to notice really tiny responses and changes in themselves can also affect this a lot, even more than relying on “big” aspects of the change or headspace. Things like very slight visual changes, noticing colors more, a thin veil of magic over their senses, subtle difference in motion of muscles, etc can all contribute to this. Working with subtle suggestions can be very powerful because simply the act of paying attention changes the quality of someone’s experience a little bit -- so “noticing” their senses will change them automatically.

A Note on Pass/Fail

So much of what we’ve discussed here is working around a subject’s perceived sense that they are either succeeding or failing -- many of these tricks are about teaching someone to see success in as many places as possible, to incorporate their usual behaviors as part of the hypnotic response. In hypnosis, creating success everywhere is one of the most important principles in general. It’s why we emphasize ambiguity and “artfully vague” language -- something we can utilize here as well. Someone who is told “You will become a perfect maid, obsessed with cleaning, fetishizing only the tools you use, the outfits you wear, the squeak of a clean surface, and no other stray thoughts” is given a very rigid framework to fit into and a lot of opportunities to feel like they’re outside of that and thus “failing.”

As always, we want to mention that sometimes the best thing to do is to define the desired responses less and encourage our partners to do the same. The “that’s right” principle applies: the natural responses that someone has to a suggestion are the correct ones. This is especially important with triggers and effects that are meant to last a longer time.

Above all, leaving wiggle room and creating a sense of both confidence in response and curiosity on how it may evolve over time will help the longevity of any suggestions you make. You don’t want natural changes and evolutions to invalidate the fact that someone is hypnotically responding -- in most cases, of course they still are. This is especially true with very long-term suggestions, brainwashing, and maintaining states; our preferences evolve, our behaviors and habits change, our brains grow, our relationships progress. You can talk about this over the short-term and for things that you play with over years.