Guided, Erickson-ish(?) Scenarios by sleepingirl

Guided, Erickson-ish(?) Scenarios by sleepingirl

This may be a “me” thing, but nowadays I always have a tiny knee-jerk reaction when someone references Ericksonian storytelling. “There’s so much more to Erickson!” I think to myself. “Copying his storytelling is fun, but a lot of it is about tropey hypnotic signaling!”

But I have been thinking a lot in general about the ways that we “fill” our hypnosis scenes. What exactly are we doing with the time that we are hypnotizing someone? As we grow past novice-level hypnosis, we grow out of the standard structure of post-hypnotic suggestions and triggers, and tend to focus more on the “meat” of hypnosis. And oftentimes, we tell stories.

Guided Fantasy versus Ericksonian Storytelling

One of the very first things we learn as hypnotists is incorporating imaginative scenarios into our trances. Walking through a forest, laying on a beach, descending a flight of stairs. We are taught that engaging the imagination and internal hallucinations allows someone to become immersed in trance.

Ericksonian storytelling is taught as a more “advanced” technique. It’s covert! It involves nested fantasies and embedded language! It’s full of off-the-cuff metaphors! These things are generally true about the techniques and style of Erickson’s storytelling, but they alone don’t set it apart from “regular” guided fantasy, nor do they dictate the “level” we’d ascribe to it.

Erickson’s stories had a purpose and methodology. They were meant to be therapeutic -- to fix some problem that a client had -- and they were meant to do so without being fully consciously recognized, because he felt they worked better this way. These, more than techniques, are what we might say are indicative of storytelling being really Ericksonian.

While we may steal therapeutic techniques, in hypnokink, we are not really going to overlap with therapy directly -- we are not going to cure or solve ailments. We can tell extended metaphors with purpose, certainly (which we will get to), but we might say what makes storytelling “Ericksonian” in style is the way in which he tries to operate outside of someone’s awareness. But as we’ll explore, even this has overlap with our “usual” guided scenarios.

Covert vs Overt

A large part of why Erickson was able to pull off so much “covert” storytelling was because of a) his reputation as a skilled, sneaky hypnotherapist, and b) his clients’ (or students’) relative lack of knowledge of hypnosis (or, their priming for it).

When we try to translate this to hypnokink, it is completely different. Most people you work with in the community are eagerly looking for that signal that they are “doing hypnosis.” It is unusual and difficult to go through an entire trance without the subject realizing at some point that hypnosis is happening, or happened. This goes double for “seemingly unrelated” storytelling that has a bunch of hypnotic language and imagery in it.

Storytelling trances in general follow the same principles. You get the subject engaged in the story or fantasy so they’re dissociated from a) their “usual” conscious awareness and the world around them, and also often b) their “usual” hypnotic experience.

“Dissociated” Focus

This is interesting because what is covert hypnosis but someone’s attention being away from the thing that is actually happening to them? Someone being covertly hypnotized is not paying attention to their internal hypnotic experience -- their attention is on other things, and the hypnotic sensations/phenomena are under the surface.

We could say there are lots of times in hypnosis where a person is not aware of their entire hypnotic experience -- we might even say this is always true. Someone who is very focused on their sensory/bodily trance experience may be less aware of psychological changes happening, for example. A defining quality of hypnosis is the way that a person’s focus is different from how it “usually” is -- whether they are more hyperfocused, more internally or externally focused, more “distractable” (as distractions are just unwanted foci), etc.

A person being told a hypnotic story is also not always focusing in this “aware” way. Think of it this way: if you are narrating a fantasy to someone about them being put into a brainwashing chair, the act of them engaging with that fantasy and its details IS hypnosis. They’re going back and forth between focusing on you, focusing on their own internal experience and body, and focusing on the sensory/conceptual/narrative elements of the fantasy. When they are focused within that fantasy, the other parts fade away -- therefore things a) that you do/say, and b) that they are feeling are less noticed -- they are less aware of those parts.

One of the benefits to covert or semi-covert play is that it highlights the surprise that happens when a person begins really responding, or noticing that they are responding. It is very convincing and intense when all of a sudden a subject realizes they are dropping into trance when they weren’t paying attention, or when their body is responding to physical suggestions in tandem with the story.

Mirrored Focus

Perhaps you narrate that the visor on the chair pulses lights that make them drowsy, and they notice that they feel that drowsiness settling in to them. They may not clock the visual imagination of lights as a hypnotic effect, but they certainly may notice the kinesthetic or psychological response of “dropping into trance.”

(This is pretty interesting that we take for granted certain parts of imagination -- we don’t recognize them as hypnosis -- but other things feel more obviously hypnotic to us. This is a really convincing thing to prove to a subject when they are in the thick of listening to you narrate a fantasy. Can they really separate out what is “hypnotic effects” versus “just imagination” like watching a movie? Stories manipulate our emotions and imagination, but would you say all hypnosis is storytelling? Or vice versa? If you blur the lines on “what is hypnosis” to a subject, you can lead into a space where they accept more and more parts of their experience as “hypnotic” as opposed to just listening, playing along, or other “mundane” experiences [which we know are not really mundane at all].)

Whereas sometimes focus is dissociated away from the inner experience, sometimes it is doing a direct comparison or mirroring of it instead. A person will be following the story and then noticing the effect it has on their body/mind in tandem with narrative changes. This active attention is split between their inner experience, the imagination of the story, and sometimes on you telling the story. We know that the imagination (or hallucination) of what is happening the story IS an inner hypnotic effect/experience. But this shift to active mirrored attention is often triggered when the subject feels a distinct change outside of their “norm” as a response to something happening in the story. Some examples of this might be:

• Arousal

• Kinesthetic effects such as temperature changes, tingling, heaviness, etc

• “Trancey feelings” such as the markers where someone realizes they are dropping into hypnosis

• Psychological effects such as stuttering or laser focus, extra vividness of imagination, etc

Any effect being described in a story can trigger this. In the brainwashing chair example, perhaps you describe your partner’s heightened emotional response turning to artificial numbness as they see a progress bar filling up. Just like when you are feeling a constant physical sensation, when that sensation changes, it jolts and heightens your awareness.

There is a weird overlap that happens when what a person hears in a story correlates with their own experience, a kind of double focus. Whether you are describing a fantasy scenario that is purely hypothetical, or something you want to do to someone in the future, or even describing something happening to someone else -- hallucinating/imagining a scenario and then feeling the effects of it in the present moment can be a strange experience. You can heighten the intensity of it by emphasizing this and “breaking the fourth wall” to address your partner directly, to say perhaps that some part of them is helplessly trapped inside the story while their body and part of their brain in the here and now is responding to these hallucinations as you describe them.

Other Things Focus Does

These are certainly not the only two “modes” of focus that occur within storytelling, and they’re both a simplification of what a person’s attention is actually doing when they are processing an imagined narrative. Some other things a subject’s focus might do within a storytelling trance might be:

• Internal reflection (“What am I experiencing right now?”)

• Conceptual wondering (“What is a deeper or different meaning to what I’m being told/imagining?”)

• Detailed bodily focus (“What exactly am I feeling physically?”)

• Anticipating, getting it right or being surprised (“Oh, I think it’s going in this direction -- Oh, I’m right/wrong”)

• Lack of anticipation (“I cannot predict what is going to happen and I’m taking everything as it comes”)

• Shifting modalities (“What am I seeing, hearing, feeling, focusing on?”)

Why does it matter what a person’s focus is doing while being engaged in a story? It’s because the meta aspect of understanding and influencing what a person’s attention is doing is hypnosis. If you tell someone you are being attentive to the inner machinations of their brain -- especially while you are narrating a fantasy to them -- it feels like deep and intimate proof of hypnosis and control.

This is one way to break the fourth wall -- to tell the person in the midst of being engrossed in a story that you are crafting it to enthrall them, that you are watching their reactions and striving to see exactly what their focus is doing so that you can better influence them.

You can never know exactly what is happening inside someone’s head, but you can make educated guesses based on what parts of the story you are describing and your partner’s reactions. For example, if you’re in a part of the scenario that is tense, and your voice delivering the words is getting tighter and more excited, and maybe if your partner’s reactions are getting more intense. You can use any number of mind reading tricks we’ve talked about in other articles or books.

But Erickson, instead of stating this overtly, would often do this covertly. He didn’t usually tell people he knew what they were experiencing -- often the opposite, where he would tell them that he didn’t know (and that the subject didn’t need to know what was happening to them either). This is a pretty big Ericksonian concept in general, but consider that it’s not really at odds with mind reading someone -- it doesn’t have to be about knowing exactly what is happening, just that you are paying close attention. Hypnosis is unique in how the hypnotist can pay attention to the subject in a way that both parties don’t usually ever get to experience in their day to day lives.

(Erickson, with resistant clients, would sometimes pretend he was not paying attention or didn’t care, so that the clients would try to perform therapeutically in order to get his attention. Maybe there is some use for this model in the context of bratting or emotional sadomasochism -- a story that you are telling only for yourself to get off, with no regard for how your partner is responding, that paradoxically makes them heighten their reactions.)

In the same way that a story has natural twists, turns, ups, and downs, the way a person’s focus shifts between different focal modalities and actions IS storytelling. The story itself being told is only one part -- it is also the dynamic response to the stimulus of the story and a person’s internal worlds, being led, and following. The way someone goes from not noticing what is happening in their body to noticing very acutely (because it is surprising and sudden) is part of the essence of this.

So for example you may be narrating a scenario of someone getting hit on by a hypnotic stranger at a bar. You ratchet up the sensation of excitement in the story so your partner has a greater response to it and they are focused on the story causing them physical response. Then you dive back into the fantasy, perhaps on a visual aspect of the stranger’s spiraling eyes, and how the “subject” of the fantasy is getting up obediently to follow them into the back of the bar. Then perhaps something very physical happens and your partner is back in their body feeling arousal.

Their dynamic responses to the story are just as much the story you are telling as the narrative itself. It is similar to the idea in rope bondage that we are not tying rope, we are tying people -- or the idea in hypnosis that hypnosis is what the brain is doing, not what the words are doing.

Separation from Self

One of the greatest things about hypnotic storytelling of all kinds is the way that they separate a person from their immediate, present self. Erickson’s storytelling was often wildly vague and metaphorical, almost so esoteric it was difficult to discern how it was related to the patient at all. But even a scenario you are building for someone about something you want to do to them is removed from the “me” that your partner feels like they inhabit.

In NLP, there is a concept from Robert Dilts called “logical levels” that describes in part how “close to” a person a given suggestion is. For example, if we told someone “You are a doll,” that is a direct remark on their identity. If we instead said to someone, “You are acting just like a doll,” that’s a much more indirect remark on their identity because we are instead commenting on their behavior. It still refers to identity, but less overtly, and is often easier/softer to accept than a direct suggestion. (This is not the only use for logical levels -- it can also help someone detach things from their identity.)

Storytelling in hypnosis can be said to be like this. Telling someone “You are going to have an orgasm right now” is very direct and puts a lot of pressure on them to respond in a specific way. Telling a story about someone else being forced to have an orgasm, or telling your partner a detailed scenario where you make them orgasm later is much more indirect but still causes a lot of immediate response (even if it’s not an instant orgasm!).

The “meta level” of hypnotic storytelling is basically: If it is something happening to your partner in the present, it is “reality.” If it is anything else -- a scenario happening to someone else, or at another time, or just in “imagination,” it is “fantasy” and thus doesn’t have to play by the same rules as reality. This is really one of the benchmarks of these kinds of guided scenarios and opens up a lot, hypnotically.

Experienced hypnotic subjects tend to get a handle on the idea that hypnotic suggestions do not feel quite like reality, nor quite dreamlike -- it is sort of a third thing. This can be really difficult to accept especially for sensory suggestions like specific kinesthetic hallucinations. Putting them in the context of a story, where you are taking advantage of mirror neuron stuff as well as taking them out of the context of having to be “real” can help subjects sink more deeply into accepting what they are feeling as hypnotic.

Here are some categories of what we might call story meta levels:

• Imagine that you are…

These scenarios are present and direct about the subject. “Imagine that you’re in a haunted sex forest” or “visualize yourself on your knees and staring blankly.” They’re instructive and very clearly fantasy because you are weaving a story to your partner. These are the most obviously guided storytelling and removed from reality -- “We are making this up right now.”

• What if later/earlier you…

These scenarios are still about the subject, but are not quite as far removed from reality because they take place in a distinct (“real”) time. “Someday, I’m going to tie you up and blindfold you and put headphones on your head playing subliminals…” or “Remember when you were a little younger, fantasizing about being hypnotized for the first time -- what if back then you met me?”

Even totally fantastical scenarios or false memories can sometimes feel more real in this context than direct stories. It is less set up as “here is a complete fantasy” and more as “in the context of a real time, construct this potential scenario.” “Imagine yourself wandering into a brainwashing chamber” feels different from “What if on your way home, you accidentally wandered into a brainwashing chamber in an unassuming building off the street?”

• What if someone else…

These scenarios are about “watching” someone else entirely. This is essentially the “My Friend John” induction style as a story. “Can’t you just imagine someone getting touched so perfectly that it melted their intelligence out, over and over, addicting them to sex?”

We might call this the “My Friend the Deeply Hypnotized Bimbo Slut” induction style, where we tell a story about an erotic fantasy so that the listener is almost in the role of the voyeur or erotica-reader. These types of scenarios have an extra added layer when your partner inevitably experiences some of the narrative effects. You can directly include them as a voyeur in the story, or the role of basically watching porn, or not mention them at all and just implicitly let them assume the part of the subject being acted upon.

You are ostensibly asking your partner to hallucinate and construct a scene, including what it feels like, while “pretending” that they aren’t actually part of it. It’s a different sort of covert because your partner is doing all of the unconscious work to imagine the sensations but then “assigning” them to a different (not real) person in a fantasy. Those sensory experiences are separated from the self but very available.

• Tomatoes

Erickson’s most famous story is arguably when he told a story about gardening tomatoes to a patient with chronic pain -- a metaphor for growing past and living with a pain disorder. In general, true Ericksonian storytelling is focused on finding a suitable metaphor in order to allow a client to unconsciously solve a problem. When we say “Ericksonian stories are covert,” his presumed methodology is based on the idea that a person best helps themselves when the parts of their brain they don’t control are doing the most “work.”

This is a different beast than a guided erotic scenario, even if they largely can take advantage of the same tools. The purpose is different and it is SO far removed from the self that it is difficult for the subject to consciously determine exactly what the story is about. But as with all things from the therapeutic sphere, we can steal this too.

If you set an erotic tone and choose a story/metaphor with an erotic “feeling,” you can tell a very ambiguous sexual-but-nonsexual story. For example, you could put on a “dirty talk” voice and tell a story about a beloved instrument being skillfully played by its owner. The instrument would be touched, vibrate from sound, etc -- all descriptions of which would be ambiguously interpreted by your partner’s mind to produce sensations that they can’t anticipate.

Blurred Lines

Narrating a scenario to someone can create a really fascinating experience where a person feels as though they have permission not to respond. Hypnosis can feel like a LOT of pressure to respond to suggestions in the right way or even at all -- and we understand this pressure can be counterproductive to actually letting go and being able to respond authentically (and thus have a genuine, deep trance experience).

Being told a hypnotic story can be framed almost that responses are a bonus, but not a given -- even though we know guided fantasies produce a lot of sensory feedback and hallucination. After all, it’s “just a story” -- not a direct trance with direct expectations. If your partner responds to any suggestions or imaginations, it’s a sort of nice surprise, and if they don’t, that doesn’t mean they aren’t having an immersive and hypnotic experience.

This can lead to really interesting modes of hypnotic play where the line between play and not-play is much less evident, which can be really desirable for hypnosis. It may sometimes feel like suggestions or effects are directed to the subject, and other times where they are more the watcher or creator of the fantasy.

This back and forth -- especially when it becomes fluid -- can reduce general expectation, which can facilitate a type of ideal hypnosis where the subject is not anticipating what they are “supposed” to be responding to. They can just be along for the ride.

You can as always state this overtly -- that your partner doesn’t have to respond in any particular way, that they can just ride the wave of the story -- in order to manage their expectations about what is supposed to happen. It’s very Ericksonian to tell a subject that they don’t have to do anything, that whatever happens in the trance IS the trance experience and is supposed to happen. You can even invoke the kind of pleasant confusion that can happen in these blurred storytelling trances: “It’s so hard to know where the story begins and ends, where your own responses begin and end…”

Mixing and Matching

We could say that Ericksonian storytelling is defined in a couple different ways: In form by its goal of solving a problem or initiating changes, and in technique by various “Ericksonian tropes” in patter. 

• Metaphor?

If we’re talking about actual “level” or challenge, the most difficult thing to replicate about Erickson’s stories is off-the-cuff finding a suitable overarching metaphor or allegorical story that is not too abstract, not too overt, and fits the subject’s situation well. This is often a non-issue when we are talking about fantastical guided scenarios. As erotic hypnotists we are telling stories to create a hypnotic experience. It is an opportunity to fill space in our scenes with desire when sometimes we get overwhelmed with “well, what do we do?”

Ericksonian stories are metaphor-forward, whereas guided scenarios are “let’s just go and see what comes up.” (I’m sure Erickson was not planning his metaphors, per say, but he was somewhat goal-oriented by the nature of his practice.) It is great practice in erotic hypnosis to be able to start with a scenario and just let it unfold, paying attention to your own pleasures and your partner’s responses to guide its turns. It is a sharing of desire where you are being vulnerable about your own fantasies, using them to hypnotize your partner, and letting your partner know you are watching them in the most intimate way when you let their minute responses change the narrative.

These scenarios are not just time-filling, they are an exchange of information and can be used to create changes just as Erickson’s stories do. You can brainwash your partner using a story by proxy -- for example narrating a fantasy about a “victim” experiencing helpless addiction to total servitude -- and you can easily give long-lasting suggestions within the bounds of fantasy scenes.

• Big Tropes/Techniques

There are a few other hypnotic building blocks that feel quintessential to Erickson’s style, and they translate well when we are thinking about stepping out of “Ericksonian” storytelling and into our guided fantasies. Besides Ericksonian language -- covered by NLP or more authentically by Erickson himself -- nested stories and embedded suggestions are probably the two biggest markers of an Erickson storytelling trance.

Nesting one narrative within another -- or revealing that your original narrative is contained within a different one -- may seem like it is challenging to pull off. But the reality is that much of the time, there is no need to maintain cohesion in storytelling within hypnotic scenarios. They can be fully stream of consciousness where, for example, your partner is captured by a tentacle monster, and then turned into the monster’s sex toy, and then imagining watching a harem full of sex toys in a totally different context, and so on. Having a coherent plot is not really important, and this feeling of one fantasy transforming into another can add to that sort of dazed feeling inside of dreams.

“Embedding suggestions” into stories like these is what we might call taking control of your partner’s spontaneous responses. As we talked about above, we tend to have a little intuition about when our partner is going to respond to a suggestion inside the story. We can “mark” these moments with our usual verbal marks: preceding with a change in tone and delivery, or some kind of “that’s right” afterwards. Perhaps you are telling a voyeuristic story about a girl getting slowly turned into a mannequin: “And she knows she’s doomed when she feels her legs going limp, now.” There are tons and tons of methods and “rules” for giving embedded commands and suggestions, but they don’t have to be more complicated than just telling your partner, “Listen -- this is for your ears and brain.”

Conclusion

I feel like in the middle of this article I got sort of into the weeds, but that’s what re-training the muscles of thinking about this stuff is like for me, and I wanted to share it instead of editing it out. I started this article thinking about “what is it that we actually DO when we are hypnotizing our partners,” especially because growing as hypnotists usually means moving past the “Induction > Suggestions > Wake Up > PHS/play” model. But it is sort of hard to describe what I do in hypnosis that isn’t that -- the part that is like “Well, I just hypnotize my partner a lot. No, I don’t wake her up much.”

This article was meant to be a short rambling about something I was thinking about almost two months ago now, and was interrupted by extended and severe illness that sort of leaves me feeling now like I didn’t really address where I was trying to go in the first place. There is a part/chapter in my next book that is about this question of the “meat” of the hypnosis scene, and I’m looking forward to exploring it more in real-time as I organize more thoughts on it (and, EVENTUALLY, when this book comes out). I think we still got to some really interesting places in this piece, and I hope you enjoyed it :)