Some Stuff About (Limiting) Beliefs and Evaluation

Some Stuff About (Limiting) Beliefs and Evaluation by sleepingirl

People are always making judgments and evaluations about what is happening to them and around them, and those evaluations are based on their beliefs. We intuitively understand that beliefs can change a lot about how a person experiences hypnosis -- generic pretalks always contain parts to manage a subject’s expectations about what trance will be like. Beliefs about hypnosis can seem to hinder trance experience when not managed, but there are so many ways to control them, change them, and make them useful.

What is a Belief?

A “belief” is a fairly abstract concept. Instead of trying to philosophically define what beliefs are, let’s look at some qualities we know about them:

• Beliefs can be created, enhanced, weakened, or changed through experience

We understand that someone who gets scared by a dog as a child may have a belief about dogs being scary -- this is partially a result of associative conditioning. We also know that people being hypnotized form strong beliefs about hypnosis -- how it is supposed to work, how good they are at it, etc. Someone who only listens to files may believe that inductions need to be structured formulaically, or that they are a “difficult subject” if they haven’t had much luck.

• Logic/emotion/communication alone can create, enhance, weaken, or change beliefs

Pretalks exist in order to manage beliefs and expectations to hopefully prime someone for a good hypnotic experience. And we know that persuasion (malicious and non-malicious) can be an effective tool in and outside of hypnosis -- people have passionate conversations with others to change the way they think and feel about all sorts of things. But of course, this isn’t always as simple as telling someone, “Don’t worry about distracting thoughts in hypnosis; they’re normal” to someone who really believes that they are disruptive from experience.

• Evaluations are based on looking at something through the lens of pre-existing beliefs

We are always assessing, judging, and evaluating our experience -- inside and outside of hypnosis. We ask ourselves, “Should I go out to a party this weekend?” and find the answer based on information we gather and pre-existing beliefs (“I always have fun with my friends” or “It’s good for me to get out of the house”). What we believe about how hypnosis “should” work deeply informs our experience -- “You’re supposed to not be able to resist while hypnotized” can lead to someone feeling all the time that they’re just “playing along.”

• Beliefs make up part of our perceived identity

Identity is a wonderfully complex concept, but when we think about “who we are,” what we believe is a big part of that, especially because beliefs come from our personal history and experiences. Beliefs about ourselves (“I am super easy to hypnotize”) form part of our self-persona and affect our lives; beliefs about things external to us (“cats are cool”) color the lens through which we view the world. (As our beliefs change, our identities change -- people into brainwashing, take note.)

• Some beliefs are easier to change than others, based on many factors

We aren’t going to get into exactly what makes a belief more malleable versus hard-to-influence, but we understand that certain things feel more “solid.” Maybe it’s about repeated experience, or more convincing logic, or how it’s entwined with other fully-held beliefs. But this is of course just good to keep in mind -- changing beliefs won’t look the same between different efforts.

Don’t assume beliefs are uniquely limiting

A very common trap that someone can fall into is viewing belief as the singular cause behind a hypnotic response or lack thereof. We see this all the time with novice hypnotists and subjects: “I want hypnosis to work on me, but I must not believe it can because I’m not responding.” Or, “I am skeptical about hypnosis, so I’m a difficult subject.”

Doubt is absolutely an important factor in someone’s comfort and capability in responding to suggestions. Someone who has had a ton of experiences where they don’t feel like they were hypnotized is going to develop doubt and patterns of doubt that will make their trances feel lackluster or impossible.

We will of course discuss how to work with this, but firstly we want to understand where the trap is here. This kind of doubt is very tempting to address by trying to talk a person into believing in hypnosis during pretalk. In the vast majority of cases, these subjects have heard it all. “Trance is a natural state you have been in many times,” “Hypnosis is well-supported by scientific literature,” “Everyone can be hypnotized.” Often these subjects have even responded to classical convincer suggestions like catalepsy, but it doesn’t really feel convincing.

There may be an underlying belief here: “I am uniquely unhypnotizable,” “I am not good at this specific suggestion,” “Maybe hypnosis isn’t real after all.” For many people, these are very thorny/sticky beliefs -- tied to their identity and their desire for this hypnosis thing that is very important to them -- and a traditional pretalk is not going to change it. Additionally, we need to always remember that the reason a person is not responding to suggestions may simply be because it’s not the most effective approach for them.

There is a need for a blended approach here -- yes, acknowledge that there may be doubt, but also acknowledge that doubt need not be limiting, or be the singular limiting factor. After all, someone who doesn’t believe they can be hypnotized can absolutely experience hypnosis. You don’t want your partner to get hung up on thinking that just because they have doubts, they’ll never be able to experience hypnosis unless they change their beliefs. How on earth are they supposed to change their beliefs unless they have a positive experience that changes them?

Beliefs are related to anchors/associations/patterns

Beliefs are closely connected to expectations, and expectations are directly about “what is going to happen.” If a person believes that a quality of hypnosis is blankness, that is an expectation that they have going into trance. We know that expectations can influence a person’s experience, but of course it’s not always that if someone expects something to happen, it will happen -- such as in this example.

In this example, there’s an underlying belief: “If I don’t experience mindlessness, I’m not really hypnotized.” An anchor/trigger is a pattern or process -- there is an initial stimulus that gets filtered through conscious perception, and it kicks off an unconscious response of thoughts and behaviors. In this case, the belief about hypnosis triggers a person to look inside and evaluate whether they are blankminded as soon as they think they are being hypnotized. The evaluation is an associated experience as well -- in cases like this where it is about analysis, the evaluation itself feels like failure, and thus the resulting response is this gut feeling of “it’s not working.”

Beliefs like this feed learned patterns, and patterns create more beliefs. The more a person engages in this pattern, the more they may develop a belief such as “I’m a bad subject” or even “I’ll never be hypnotized.” Thoughts like this can be very pervasive -- even someone who is exhibiting signs of hypnosis who is TOLD they are hypnotized may still be stuck in a pattern of doubting associations that distract them from being able to actually experience hypnosis.

Looking at them this way, there are a lot of approaches we could take to affect these beliefs and patterns in a way that will improve someone’s experience, which we will explore through this article:

• Reduce/unanchor all evaluations

• Create an ethos of curiosity or confusion

• Change/alter specific beliefs

• Utilize the beliefs

--

• Depotentiating evaluations

The word “depotentiating” is a nod to Erickson here -- Erickson’s model of trance is about depotentiating (basically, reducing the power/association of) consciousness. His model includes methods to emphasize to a person that their experience of consciousness or conscious action is quite limited in reality, thus allowing them to behave more unconsciously, without intent, automatically. For example, Erickson might say to a client that while they feel conscious, many things about their experience are unconscious such as breathing and blinking, or imagining and dreaming -- and those unconscious experiences are more powerful than the flimsy conscious perception.

The “critical faculties” model -- “hypnosis is the reduction of a person’s capability to critically assess things” -- is a model with a lot of flaws, but we can see a similarity. It sees the critical faculties as partially conscious and aims to describe hypnosis as a time where someone is not consciously (or unconsciously) evaluating their experience -- the critical faculties are “depotentiated.”

One of the major flaws of this model is that it simply isn’t inherently true to all (or most) experiences of hypnosis. However, this CAN be useful to us if we intentionally hypnotize someone in a way that reduces their experience of making judgments.

To do this, we need to think about what this process is so we can co-opt it and interrupt it (as we might with any other pattern or habit).

• Acknowledge evaluation

Acknowledging a pattern will often interrupt it -- making it fully conscious causes the person to see it from a different perspective when usually, parts of it are running in the background. For example, you could say, “I know that you have some expectations about what hypnosis is supposed to feel like, and your brain is looking at your experience to see how it fits.”

This brings them to a kind of meta perspective where they are evaluating their evaluation -- they have to check their own process against what you are saying. It fits in as part of pacing, and can be like a cold read; everyone on some level is watching themselves go into trance, even if that is more unconscious.

You can do this with any belief as part of either cold reading or something specific you know that they believe. “I know some part of you sees yourself as someone who struggles with kinesthetic suggestions. Can you feel how you are evaluating your experience through that belief about yourself? If I tell you right now to imagine a little feeling of pleasure deep inside of you, do you feel where that belief is rubbing against it?”

Pacing a person’s beliefs -- especially when they are about their identity and who they are (“I am good/bad at xyz”) -- can add a level of separation from them. You can include this as part of your patter: “This belief you have is a part of you and when we pick it out to look at it, it’s a way that we can set it a little bit apart from you -- imagine bringing it outside of you to watch it as you listen to my suggestions; what is it doing? How are you responding to it?”

This is actually a utilization of a person’s tendency to evaluate and analyze. You are taking the impulse to evaluate and redirecting it. You are pacing them by acknowledging it and then leading and making suggestions in how you utilize it (and we will talk more about utilization later).

• Mess with evaluation

This kind of pacing and dissociation from evaluation (including some “tricks” to do that we’ll look at later) can allow for us to transform the experience of evaluation. Work this into your suggestions: “Now that we are focusing on that process and disconnecting from it a little bit, that lets us play with it.”

Even if our goal is to fully remove or reduce evaluation, an indirect way to get there is by first increasing it. Tell your partner to see what happens when they intensify evaluating things -- are they consciously analyzing more? Is there an emotional feeling attached? What kinds of thoughts are coming up? What if you try to speed it up so it happens both more intensely and faster? You can direct them to focus on a belief -- “I have to close my eyes to go into trance” -- and “aim” that evaluation towards it. It is generally easier for a person to intentionally think more rather than think less.

Changing this experience proves something -- collaboratively or in a D/s way you can control the evaluation. After they’ve been intentionally making it more intense, there is likely a feeling that it’s not sustainable and wants to return to baseline, so this is an opportunity where you can suggest that they relax that unconscious impulse to evaluate -- even reducing it more than it was at baseline. “Your brain has been working so hard to process what’s going on and evaluate so intensely, and now we know we can turn it up and down as if on a dial, lowering it now further and further as it gets so relaxed and even quieter.”

This will change what it feels like to evaluate at all, further bringing someone away from what they are “used to” feeling. When you introduce new elements or suggestions now, emphasize how this has indirectly changed what beliefs kick up: “Now with your eyes open, let your head start to tingle with sensations of trance and notice how you look at this experience differently…”

• Cultivating Curiosity/Confusion

People have varying levels of confidence in their beliefs -- sometimes they are very strong and other times they may feel more unsure about them. Getting a person to a place where they have fewer concrete expectations can be very useful for hypnosis; Erickson for example modeled hypnosis as a time where people don’t know what to expect and thus he used a lot of confusion to get there.

Building off of the previous section, one of the ways you can play with a person’s beliefs and evaluations is to make them feel more absurd. Especially if you are making the process of evaluation feel more intense, you can easily make suggestions about it starting to return more nonsensical stuff: “As you’re analyzing and judging your own experience so quickly, pushing it like you’d push a machine that’s turned up past its limits, you can see how your brain starts to throw in abstract nonsense thoughts -- ‘what am I even looking at? I can’t hold onto what I’m processing…’ Random images or stray distractions or weird results like you are evaluating something as true and not true at the same time; doubt and confidence in weird impulses together…”

This is one way to use “overloads” -- using a person’s own process as the overload. Overloads teach a person that they don’t know what’s going to happen next. In a physical BDSM scene like impact or rope, tops may overwhelm their partners by doing things quickly and randomly. This tends to lead to the bottom relaxing more into what is happening because they can’t anticipate what’s coming. Another way you can add to this in hypnosis is by repeatedly making them process various beliefs in the midst of this kind of overload: “What do you really believe about what’s going to happen when you’re deeply hypnotized? What do you really expect to feel your mind do? Do you really believe you’re not already in trance?” These questions posed quickly (and with that sneaky little “really” in there that implies doubt) can lead a person’s evaluative process to not really be able to latch onto anything.

In kinesthetic scenes (including hypnosis), there is a good example of doing this more slowly as well -- when you initiate a pattern of touch or movement and then intentionally break it. For example, physically rocking someone in a slow circle and then reversing direction at random times will cause a person to stop leading their motion because they can’t expect what you “want” them to do. Any kind of small surprise or misdirection is great for this in hypnosis -- changing a mantra by one word, going in to trigger them into trance but then not doing it at the last second, pausing for a moment in the middle of a suggestion.

Using suggestions around creating an ethos of curiosity can be really helpful for getting someone into a good mindset as you move forward with these techniques. “Your brain is learning that it really can’t anticipate what’s going to happen, so instead you can let yourself feel curious -- you don’t know what’s going to happen, and that’s amazing; it means you can take everything as it comes and build new beliefs as you experience what is happening to you in each moment.”

• NLP Tricks

NLP has quite a bit to say about changing beliefs -- as a system that’s meant to be a therapeutic tool, it puts a lot of focus on this idea of looking at underlying beliefs that may be hindering people. What we’re talking about here of course is not therapy, and we’ll look at some examples of NLP’s “tricks” to change beliefs for fun.

• Simple reframing

Reframing is just changing the perspective or angle of a belief. There are many, many techniques for reframing beliefs or behaviors, but the general idea of all of them is that a belief exists within a kind of box or environment (“frame”) and if you change that box or environment, the belief doesn’t hold the same kind of power. For example, someone might say, “I feel like it’s not exciting to hypnotize me because I just sit there in trance.” Reframing would include asking things like, “Do you think all subjects who ‘just sit there’ in trance are not hot? Why do people hypnotize them, then?” or “You think being hypnotized so deeply that you can’t move is boring?”

Reframing something in a simple way is about taking the initial expression/belief and changing a couple words to change the perspective -- either to be more “objective,” “further/closer” from someone, or leading into giving more information. For a fun example, “I am not hypnotized” could be simply reframed as:

• “I am not hypnotized yet/but/and/even though…”

• “I don’t feel/seem hypnotized”

We can see suggestive opportunities here. “You’re not hypnotized even though you’re focused on me attentively and following my instructions, and now that I say that you’re hyperaware of your body responding when I tell it to relax, right now.” “You think you’re not hypnotized but really that means that you don’t feel hypnotized, and it’s easy to make someone feel trance more intensely.”

This can make for a fun induction where you make someone doubt their “awakeness,” and that leads them into trance. “You’re not hypnotized yet, but it could happen at any time, and are you confident that you would notice immediately? You may not feel hypnotized right now, but you don’t know what I’m going to say that will suddenly make you notice something happening in your head and in your body.”

• Submodalities

Submodalities are one of NLP’s favorite little techniques that can create some really interesting results. The main idea is that if you transform the sensory details of a memory, experience, belief, etc., you transform the actual content and resulting response.

For example, you might tell someone to think about this “I am not hypnotized” belief. They don’t have to be hypnotized to do this exercise -- just ask them about the sensory details of it.

• Where do they feel this belief in their body? What are the qualities of this feeling -- strong/weak, fuzzy/sharp, heavy/light pressure, hot/cold, etc?

• If they could imagine this belief as an image, what would it look like? What are the details of that image? Colors, bright/darkness, shape, vividness, distance?

You can experiment with what happens when you ask them to change any of these details. For example, you might see if they can imagine the feeling moving more towards their toes or even outside their body, or becoming sharper and then fuzzier. You can take visual images and put them in a frame or box or on a screen, and turning them to black and white, or zooming in so close that the picture is unintelligible or zooming so far out that they can barely see it.

Certainly doing this is hypnotic in its own right and gets someone to be imaginatively engaged -- a great step towards trance.

• Utilization

Utilization is of course the cornerstone of effective hypnotic techniques. If your partner’s brain is naturally doing something such as associating beliefs or making evaluations based on their experience, there are ways to use those processes instead of pushing against them.

• Beliefs can be motivating

Beliefs about trance that stem from a person’s desires for hypnosis -- “trance = blankmindedness,” “hypnosis should feel like mind control,” etc -- are powerful. Often, a subject may for example know intellectually that it’s normal to have stray thoughts but still feel a sense of failure when they happen; clearly in this case there’s still this point where expectations don’t match reality.

There may be a really strong desire for hypnosis to feel a particular way -- this is motivation, and motivation is useful. We can have our cake both ways and tell our partners that a) this thing that they desire doesn’t need to happen in order for them to be hypnotized, and b) that they can still achieve it at some point, even if it manifests differently than they expect.

First, acknowledging and explaining your process is helpful: “You have this deep-seated belief that if you were really hypnotized, you wouldn’t be able to resist -- and that comes from this place of strong desire and motivation, and I can use both of those things to change the way you respond and experience hypnosis.”

Then, you can make more suggestions around what you’d like to do. You could:

• Intensify the general feeling of desire, lead it into motivation to experience and notice subtler nuances of trances/suggestions that they never have before

• Allow the person to fully explore the belief as a fantasy -- tell it to them like a story, or to imagine it happening to some imaginary person

• Use the belief as a springboard to teach how to achieve the reality -- “if you can feel this so strongly on some deep level, you have strong pathways of expectation that we can exploit to blur the line between fantasy and reality”

We still want to put some amount of emphasis on the idea that these beliefs are malleable -- it’s true that hypnosis isn’t mind control (depending on your definition), and that people should retain agency in trance. Utilizing a person’s motivation while telling them “this belief isn’t fully right, or fully wrong -- it’s a third option you haven’t considered” can help open up a person to new responses that they really want.

• Beliefs can be protective

Some beliefs about hypnosis stem more from anxiety or fear. Someone might be concerned that they won’t be able to express agency, or that they’ll respond in a way they don’t want to. Worries like these don’t always stem from beliefs (like “hypnosis could turn me into a chicken without my consent”), but they can, and in either case, there’s an underlying desire.

In this case, the motivation is useful in a different way, and the belief can be used to be protective. If a person has some anxieties about what is going to happen, that can be redirected into confidence that they will take care of themselves to the best of their ability -- and, that you care about their well-being. Some examples:

• This motivation makes it easier for them to identify when something is happening that they don’t like, as well as when something is happening that they do like (so they can relax more)

• This motivation makes it easier for them to respond when they feel concern, so they can feel more sure that they won’t let bad things happen to themselves

• Acknowledging the motivation makes them feel less guilt over it so that they aren’t clouding their judgment and evaluations

Trust between partners is based on belief -- belief that they will take care of each other and give each other good experiences. Acknowledging and utilizing beliefs like this, as well as following through and working to build agency together, is a big part of what builds healthier beliefs about hypnosis in the long run.