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Big hypnosis thread!
Hypnotic suggestion is the act of convincing someone to alter their reality on your behalf. This means:
- The subject is ultimately the only one with control over the situation.
- The hypnotists technique only matters as much as it matters to the subject.
Hypnotic suggestion is the act of convincing someone to alter their reality on your behalf. This means:
- The subject is ultimately the only one with control over the situation.
- The hypnotists technique only matters as much as it matters to the subject.
- Hypnosis is ultimately entirely consensual, but not in the way that absolve hypnotists of responsibility.
- Crucially, none of it is involuntary. Trance and suggestion are active efforts from the subject.
- Crucially, none of it is involuntary. Trance and suggestion are active efforts from the subject.
The popular perception of hypnosis is (very broadly) that it's a trick hypnotists can do to make someone do things. The implication is that the subject does not have control over their response, so generally people say 'these tricks don't work if the subject doesn't want them to'
However, I think even that results in framing hypnotic suggestion as something the hypnotist does, rather than something the subject does. Taking trance and suggestion as reactions to a hypnotist's actions rather than the subject's active involvement denies them autonomy.
Understanding hypnosis as an active effort from the subject is obviously not a very popular position, because it undermines a lot of the fantasy, and isn't particularly intuitive, especially within the kink scene where hypnotising someone is almost entirely a dommy thing.
As such, a lot of harm minimization is based on 'don't agree to anything bad' for subs and 'don't fuck anything up' for hypnotists, and other similar principles that suggest a lack of control from the subject once things get going.
And I think this causes a lot of problems, basically. There's no objectivity in hypnosis, because it works as the subject expects it to. So, when even basic practicality and safety talk is done through a lens that doesn't recognize their total control over the results,
it creates expectations that mean a subject can do things to themselves, whether pushed by a hypnotist or not, that result in an unpleasant or unsafe experience. This ranges from 'it didn't work' to all sorts of nasty shit; often, subjects doing things they later come to regret.
This doesn't absolve malignant or careless hypnotists of responsibility. It's just to say that when we talk about hypnosis like it's a power that hypnotists have rather than an agreement that subjects make, subjects are going to adopt that as their understanding of it,
and in doing so, create situations where it does work that way, for better or worse. Part of subjects having this autonomy is that they have the capacity to deny it to themselves, in a sense, especially in situations where that fulfills an aspect of the kink for them.
So, because everyone sees hypnosis as hypnotist-driven, the alternative is seen as fake. Subjects staying safe, adapting to suggestions, or having disproportionate reactions / reactions that the hypnotist didn't expect, is proof that they weren't actually hypnotized.
I think this is really insidious stuff, because it demonizes the act of not just going with what the hypnotist wants, of not validating the perception of hypnosis as some kinda power, pressuring people into accepting the fantasy version as 'real' hypnosis.
It all works to create a culture that is very wilfully misunderstanding how hypnosis happens in order to preserve a very specific aesthetic, often just cause it's the kink thing. The kink thing is great, but trying to shape the process of hypnosis to suit it can cause problems.
I struggle to get across how freeing it is to leave that behind, when it comes to actually doing hypnosis. The subject isn't unprotected during trance, they just need to understand that, and the hypnotist has the capacity to work with the subject during trance in more useful ways
To be clear, like, power fantasies and control and stuff are like, a really fun component of hypnosis that you can still very much do, and people can definitely have nasty stuff done to them, and clear pre-session negotiation will never stop being important.
Starting from the point of 'this is a thing the subject is doing' just means that those fantasies aren't, like, controlling the entire session, and that vulnerability to nasty stuff isn't an immutable part of things, and that negotiation isn't set in stone once trance starts.
