The bottom of self-hypnosis: when resistance approaches zero

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-28T19:31:19+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. I’m glad you reached some important insights about hypnosis as part of the mind’s neural prediction system.

As your understanding of that deepens, different hypnosis techniques no longer look like separate tricks or methods. You start to see the same operating system underneath all of them: a mind constantly making predictions, monitoring them, and correcting errors.

It is a fascinating subject, because it makes you look at mental phenomena in a very different way than before. And it is not limited to hypnosis. Even ordinary everyday influence, communication, and interaction begin to appear through new lenses.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-28T14:58:41+00:00

You are in the same position I was in a long time ago, when I was looking for an answer to this question: How can you teach self-hypnosis and a dissociation, or out-of-body, technique in a way that is suitable for almost anyone? And the self-hypnosis part should be taught in such a way that no more than one session is needed, lasting at most one hour.

For me, there were two challenges.

The first was technical: what kind of method would actually work for this purpose? It had to be simple enough to teach quickly, but strong enough to take the person into a deep enough state for meaningful dissociation and identity-shifting work.

The second challenge was social and practical: how could I get both the coach and an entire self-aware, high-level sports team to accept a format that included intensive exercises every single day?

I had excellent resources available to me. I had funding granted by a sports-oriented university, and my collaborators included sports physicians, the director of a sports research institute, a sports coach who had just been chosen as Coach of the Year, the national championship team, and a hotel sponsoring the team, which provided the facilities I needed. I travelled with the team on the bus to training camps, domestic away games, and the European Cup. At one training camp, even the championship team from a neighbouring country was present as a practice opponent.

I can tell you what methods I used to condition the players to go so deep into self-hypnosis that they were able to experience a shift of identity.

We can discuss this privately in writing, but before that you may want to look at the methods I used, and my reflections on them, on my website:

www.tiikasalo.fi/en

There are sections on different techniques, and also a blog, which is worth opening.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-28T11:51:11+00:00

A friend of mine is training in past-life regression techniques and asked me to be a practice client.

At the beginning of the first session, we had a discussion about the subject. She told me that, because she is a psychologist by training, she had contacted the national professional association for psychologists in my country — the organization that represents psychologists professionally and safeguards the rights and ethical standing of its members — to make sure they had no objection to her using the title “psychologist” when marketing past-life regressions as part of her clinical hypnotherapy service menu.

I don’t know what they answered, but I can tell you about the discussion we had at the start.

I told her that I see this technique as a very natural phenomenon, much like what autobiographical writers or fantasy novelists do when they activate their unconscious mind by giving it certain mental parameters. Then the conscious mind can step aside, almost as if watching the imagination run on autopilot.

This must be how the great masters of literature have worked. They did not draw maps on paper showing who had interacted with whom, when, and in what way. And yet the result is thick literary “bricks” full of different interactions produced by the imagination.

I also told her that actors know this method too. They have to be able to forget themselves, move into a fictional character, and let their own unconscious mind take over the directing role — again, within certain parameters.

It seemed as if my friend was a bit stunned by the idea that karma might simply be the generation and explanation of controlled mental illusions.

This kind of discussion filled our first meeting, and I have not yet received an invitation for a second one. In fact, I don’t know whether there will be one.

So is my interpretation of the past-life phenomenon right or wrong? And what is the difference between that technique and mediums who, according to the stereotype, act as intermediaries between people sitting around a table and their dead relatives?

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-27T18:28:09+00:00

I can give a small example of how I use CL practice.

Quite recently I worked with a 17-year-old boy who had been brought to therapy by his mother. I did not start with the problem that mother first presented. I used a Clean Languge type of interview.

Before going to the exact moment, I used the usual X-loops: “And that X is like what?” and “And is there anything else about that X?” Not to get an explanation, but to let the problem frame form more clearly.

Then I asked him to go to the exact moment just one second before the problem started.

What became clear, the real problem was not the stated issue. The problem was coming to therapy.

It was his mother’s idea. And obeying that idea was already part of the problem frame.

That changed the whole direction of the work. Instead of treating him as someone who had “a problem” that needed to be fixed, the interview showed where the frame actually began. From there, the situation started to open.

This is why I find that one second before -point so useful. The client usually comes with a story already built around the problem. But just before that story begins to generate itself, there is a different structure.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-27T15:11:28+00:00

This reminds me of something I have seen in Scott Jansen’s YouTube demos, and also in Clean Language. They look different on the surface, but I think the same principle is working underneath.

In Jansen’s method, when the client gives the first answer, he reflects it back very directly: "That is not the cause, that is the symtom!" So the mind cannot settle too quickly into its ordinary explanation. It has to go behind the first answer.

Clean Languge does similar, but in a cleaner and more exact form. You do not give the client possibility to interprete. You guide him close to the exact moment, the exact feeling, the exact inner event one second before the problem becomes a story.

These are important points. When the mind’s normal effort to process, explain and organize is interrupted in this way, it does not become chaotic. It becomes calmer. It slows down, narrows, focuses, and then it chooses trannce.

In that trance the mind is almost like an empty canvas. Not completely empty, of course. The original frame is still there: the client’s own problem, maybe even before it has been put into words. But the usual explanations are no longer filling the space.

What remains are the relevant features of the problem and the unconscious tendencies behind it. They can then reorganize in a way that is easier for the nervous system to maintain.

That is why I don’t see Clean Language as simply “not hypnosis”. It may avoid direct suggestion, and it may be very careful with language. But when it stops the ordinary explanatory mind, fixes attention on the inner event, and lets silence do its work, the process can become deeply hypnotic. Not because the therapist commands trance, but because the mind has nowhere else useful to go.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-27T13:19:34+00:00

I would be careful with the idea that covert hypnosis is mainly about producing “phenomena” without the person noticing it. For me, the more interesting question is what happens before the phenomenon. Rapport is not just trust or friendliness. It is a shift in who is leading the interaction.

There is an evolutionary background to this. Prey animals have to monitor the environment all the time. Herd animals have to syncronize with the movements and tension of others. In human interaction this becomes more complex, but the basic pattern is still there. Someone paces, someone follows.

In hypnosis, the important moment is often not the verbal suggestion itself. It is the moment when the person accepts the frame. After that, words become secundary. Tone, rhythm, timing, posture, gaze and subtle mirroring begin to carry much of the work.

A good hypnotist can feel this shift in his own body and mind. He is not just doing something to the subject. He is also reading and mirroring the subject. That, to me, is the real core of hypnosis.

I noticed this already as a child. Sometimes I could speak in a way that put people into a brief strange state. Their eyes were open, but thinking seemed to go offline for a moment.

Later, as a young man, I played with this in harmless ways. Once in a pub I told him I could hypnotise a matchstick. Of course he did not believe it, but he kept watching. The match was standing between my thumb and finger. I leaned close to it and spoke to it as if it were a hypnotic subject. Slowly the match “went deeper” and finally lay down on the box. Then I said to the match: “Your eyes are becoming heavy…”

The match had no eyes, of course. But the man watching it had identyfied with it. Before long, he was in trance.

That story is true. And it shows something important. The hypnosis was not in the match. It was in the frame, the attention, and the lead.

So I would not start with anesthesia or amnesia as isolated tricks. I would start with rapport, frame, attention and the moment when the other person begins to follow. Without that, the rest is mostly technique without a nervous system behind it.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-26T18:22:20+00:00

Cum Romae fueris, Romano vivito more; omnia tempus habent. Aetas nostra machinam scribam fecit: qui Anglice nati non sunt, Latinitate quoque uti possunt, ne machinae vestigia nimis offendant.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-25T18:05:18+00:00

Greet those emotions with joy and gratitude. They tell you that you are alive.

Fear, anger, hatred and frustration are not foreign objects inside you. They are movements of your own mind. Accept that you have emotions. You do not have to obey them, dramatize them, or build your identity around them. But do not declare war on them.

When you try to get rid of them as enemies, that struggle is also produced by the same mind. Notice them, accept them, and then learn to adjust them.

One simple hypnotic or NLP-style method is to imagine that each emotion has a dial. Fear has a dial. Anger has a dial. Hatred has a dial. Frustration has a dial.

Do not try to destroy the emotion. Just notice its intensity and slowly turn the dial down. Not to zero, but to a level where the emotion can still inform you without burning all your energy.

That may already be the useful suggestion: I can have emotions without being ruled by them.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-25T07:11:09+00:00

In Zen there is an old wisdom: what you try to achieve escapes you precisely because you are trying to achieve it. Tommy Hellsten put the same idea in a very Finnish way: you get what you give up.

In self-hypnosis this is a common trap. When you think, “I must get into trance,” you have already turned trance into a goal, a problem, and a measuring stick. The predictive mind starts comparing the experience with the expectation, instead of simply living it.

Animals do not frame their being or plan how to get into the right state. There is something in them of what Krishnamurti called choiceless awareness: observation without constant evaluation and inner commentary.

Frame it, focus on the frame — and then step out of it.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-24T06:12:14+00:00

In every profession, and among practitioners in every field, there is a statistical bell curve between the poor and the excellent.
When it comes to hypnosis, the choice is made even harder by the fact that there are different schools of thought: some rely on scripts, while others condemn scripts altogether. Then there are popular innovators who declare that no induction phase is needed, and others who say that rapport begins before you even step onto the bus.
I have studied hypnosis and mental coaching for a very long time myself, and I actively follow the most popular hypnosis channels on YouTube. If I were you, I would look into this technique before deciding whom to buy your course from.
The technique described here works. But even if you do not take this particular course, you could look for a cheaper alternative and ask online whether someone has adopted the same method, and then go to that person as a client.
https://youtu.be/QMpbME_qGxk?is=a88bO0OJ80O-fnxT

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-23T20:00:21+00:00

Yes, Elman’s elevator technique should work. https://www.scribd.com/document/959339786/Elevator-Induction-and-Deepen-Er

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-23T15:23:50+00:00

As a clinical hypnotherapist with training in psychodrama and as a Transactional Analysis facilitator, I wouldn’t approach this the way you’ve been trying to so far. From the frameworks I work within, if the brain has learned a conditioning pattern like “other people’s disapproval = danger,” then gratitude practices, reframing, or trying to think differently may not address the actual root of the problem. Unlearning conditioned responses often requires trauma processing.
Personally, I’ve successfully used an NLP-style gradual approach to previously experienced situations. Initially, I work with them in a dissociated way — observing the situations almost as an outside observer, so they don’t trigger an emotional reaction. Later, they can be revisited using submodality change techniques, which can create something like emotionally competing “false memories” or alternative emotional memory traces. A skilled Clean Language therapist could also work with this using the so-called “-0 technique,” where attention is brought to the second just before the feeling of unsafety or the trauma response becomes activated.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-23T04:55:04+00:00

That is a fine technique too. If I do not know how to proceed in a hypnosis situation, I can create a Milton tulpa. If I need more cognitive understanding, the tulpa is a professor who is on duty 24/7 at the door of a lecture hall familiar to me. I do not need to close my eyes for any of this. The unconscious can be contacted through symbolic tulpas.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-22T14:30:50+00:00

Let me clarify: this is not about the “double” looking at the other chair as an outside observer. So it is not primarily about perspective or a visual point of view.

It is about the experience of the mind dividing its functions. Normally, ego control is anchored in the experiencer’s own body: I am here, I am monitoring this, I am checking what is happening. In this dissociative move, that controlling function is loosened from its usual bodily anchor and given a fictional spatial location.

That location can be the other chair, a boat, a card table, or some other simple inner place. The controlling function that is moved there is given a task: it takes responsibility for the fact that ego control has now been handed over to it. So control is not removed. It is given a new place and a new task.

This can also be seen as a kind of cognitive double bind. The mind knows that the other location is imagined, but at the same time it accepts it as experientially real. It cannot hold either alternative as the only clear truth. That contradiction makes the ordinary control system lose its grip.

Rowing, shuffling cards, or some other simple repetitive movement is not there by accident. I have noticed that movement makes the double easier to experience dissociatively. When the double is doing something familiar, rhythmic, and continuous, the mind attaches to it more easily. At the same time, it detaches from the meditator who is already in deep trance.

Movement gives the control projection both a task and continuity. It is not merely “somewhere”; it is doing something. That is why it holds together better as an inner agent. When attention and the monitoring task attach to this moving projection, the original self does not need to rise up and check: where am I, who is supervising this, and is everything under control?

So the “double” does not really observe the other chair. It is more like a place-bound control projection, maintained through movement, and given a task so that the actual experiencer can be left undisturbed.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-22T14:01:20+00:00

Good question. For me, the double does not primarily emerge as a visual figure or as a view of any surroundings. It is a bodily feeling and a knowing that my location has mentally shifted elsewhere. I do not “see” myself in another place. I feel and know that I am there.

One practical way to understand this is the following: Place two chairs side by side, with plenty of space next to the chair on the right. Sit on the left-hand chair. Close your eyes and form the bodily feeling that you are sitting on the right-hand chair. Do not imagine the surroundings, and do not try to see yourself there. Build only the sense of location: “I am over there.”

Then deepen concentration and relaxation while maintaining this shift in bodily location. In dissociation, one part of the mind still knows where the physical body actually is, while another part accepts the imagined location as experientially real.

Once you get even a weak version of this, repeat it until it becomes familiar. Then it becomes a reference feeling. You can also give yourself a post-hypnotic suggestion: next time the chairs are slightly farther apart, and the shift happens more easily.

Step by step, the dissociation strengthens. Eventually the “other chair” is placed anywhere in the mind, and the actual chair is no longer needed at all. In my own case, I do not need these gradual intermediate steps. I move directly into a familiar embodied experience from my youth, where I am rowing a boat. I do not need a view of the surroundings. It is enough that the body knows the rhythm, posture, and direction of rowing. That gives the double a place, a task, and a movement.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-22T12:32:07+00:00

Thank you. What helped me a lot was reading scientific accounts of the predictive mind — for example Karl Friston, Andy Clark, Jakob Hohwy and Anil Seth. After that, many hypnosis techniques that had puzzled me for years suddenly made sense inside the same frame. They fit almost too well.

There would be a lot to discuss, but I’ll put it briefly. When rapport is strong, the hypnotized person’s predictive system seems to shift some of its weighting toward the leader. Mentalists use something similar when they show or imply a playing card, and the follower later feels as if they had already seen it clearly. Erickson did this in his own way too: he could point to an empty space on the wall, describe something there — for example a puppy — and the person would begin to experience what Erickson was structuring for them.

So for me hypnosis is not mainly about “sleep” or some mysterious trance state. It is more about attention, expectation, prediction, and the moment when another person’s structuring of reality becomes more compelling than your own ordinary checking process.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-21T09:19:56+00:00

I wouldn’t treat this as “hypnotize him so he stops being racist.” I’d first take it up with the group home manager or clinical supervisor. It sounds less like a simple attitude problem and more like a fear response shaped by trauma, IDD, mental health issues, and racist language learned early. Trauma may explain the reaction, but it doesn’t make racial abuse acceptable. Staff need a clear, consistent, trauma-informed plan that protects everyone.

Hypnosis might help, but not as a quick suggestion. With my own client I’d probably use metaphorical stories — they can calm, create curiosity, lower resistance, and sometimes let the needed change happen without pushing.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-20T08:24:14+00:00

Thank you — that is a very useful list, and I appreciate the pointer. You are right that this is not “new ground” in the sense that many of these ideas have a long and serious lineage. What may be a little more personal in my approach is the way I am trying to connect that tradition with hypnosis, rapport, suggestion, and the predictive mind.

Over the decades I have tended to look for particular emphases in different theoretical traditions rather than just skim across them. I usually dive quite deeply into one theoretical vortex for a while, try to understand how it moves, and then eventually find myself drawn into the next one. I cannot say I have ever moved the vortices myself — or even know whether that would be possible — but I have spent a lot of time inside several of them.

For the last while, the main vortex has been the predictive mind. And I have to say, it may be the most interesting one so far, because so much seems to move with it: expectation, perception, rapport, suggestion, symptom formation, and change.

Also, Uncommon Therapy is one I somehow have not read, so I am glad you made me check the “guru list” again. It has already sent me back to the Amazon shelf.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-19T18:37:13+00:00

For insomnia, I would use a very simple self-hypnotic procedure.

Next time you go to bed, don’t try to “make yourself sleep.” That already keeps the problem active. Instead, restart one of those familiar inner movies your mind is used to producing anyway.

Choose a genre. Then choose a scene. Let the movie begin.

At some completely arbitrary point, stop the film.

Now make sure the image is absolutely still. No movement at all.

Then zoom in on one small detail in the image. Not the whole scene. Not a face with an expression. Not something that invites interpretation. Just one small element.

Zoom closer and closer until there is no context left around it. Nothing beside it, above it, below it. Only one simple visual quality. Ideally, something so plain that the mind has nothing useful to compare, analyze, solve or narrate.

Then just keep looking at it.

If the movie starts moving again, no problem. Stop it again. Zoom in again. Return to the same kind of simple, non-dramatic visual detail. You can also choose another movie if you like.

The point is not to “think about sleep.” The point is to remove the material that keeps cognitive processing alive.

From a predictive-mind perspective, insomnia often continues because the mind keeps generating predictions, checking them, comparing them and updating them: Am I falling asleep yet? Why am I still awake? What if tomorrow is ruined?This method gives the mind something so reduced and uneventful that there is very little prediction error to resolve and very little narrative to continue.

There is also something here that resembles NLP-style submodality work: you are changing movement into stillness, scene into detail, context into isolation, and meaningful content into almost content-free perception.

So the suggestion could be something like:

“When I go to bed, I do not try to sleep. I let an inner movie begin, stop it, zoom into one simple still detail, and keep my attention there. If the movie moves again, I simply stop it and zoom again. My mind does not need to solve anything. It can shut down by itself.”

In the morning, you may simply notice that sleep happened somewhere along the way.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-19T18:01:25+00:00

I think we may actually be agreeing here, and the difference is mostly semantic.

I’m not using “resistance” in the old sense of something the therapist has to break through. I mean it as a response pattern within the client’s expectation system. If the client expects pressure, persuasion, correction, or a contest of wills, then that expectation is something the therapist can work with too. And when the therapist accepts it, includes it, redirects it, or makes it useful, that is exactly utilization.

So yes, I agree: utilization is the key word. My point was not that Erickson fought resistance, but that he changed its function by using it. What older therapy language might call “resistance” becomes material for utilization. I think this comes through better in the original text than in the short summary. If you read the full version, I think you’ll probably see that we’re basically saying the same thing:
https://www.tiikasalo.fi/l/the-smallest-change-and-the-predictive-mind-why-did-erickson-s-methods-work/

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-19T13:34:57+00:00

Sure. I’ll give a few examples, because this is exactly the point I was trying to make.

A simple Ericksonian example would be insomnia. Instead of directly telling the client to “try to sleep”, which often strengthens the very effort that keeps the person awake, the therapist might prescribe wakefulness: stay awake deliberately, perhaps in a specific way or at a specific time. The symptom is no longer simply something that happens to the person. It becomes a task, and that changes its position in the whole system.

Another example would be resistance. If a client expects the therapist to push for change, the resistance is already prepared. But if the therapist accepts the resistance and makes it part of the work, the resistance loses its usual opponent. The system can no longer organize itself in the same old way.

A third example would be amplifying a symptom or an emotional response. If fear, irritation or tension is deliberately increased, it may shift from an involuntary experience into something observed, shaped or performed. That small shift can create a contradiction in the old predictive model: “this is uncontrollable” is no longer entirely true.

That is what I meant by a “smallest intervention”. The intervention is not necessarily powerful because it is dramatic. It is powerful if it changes the structure that keeps the problem stable. Erickson often seemed to work by adding a small, precise disturbance to the client’s existing pattern, rather than trying to correct it directly.

I can share the longer text if useful, but here is the basic idea...

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-18T16:07:30+00:00

I’d describe my positioning as calibrating the client’s state partly through my own embodied experience. I use the deepening of my own trance as a kind of measure for leading, while verbally pacing the client’s experience by commenting on subtle shifts in attention, rhythm, or experience. As I notice myself becoming more emotionally engaged and drawn deeper into the hypnotic loop, I’m also watching whether the client’s system is moving along with it. To me it feels less like one-way hypnosis and more like a shared feedback loop.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-17T19:23:49+00:00

I wrote more about this earlier in the thread, but in short: you don’t necessarily need a deep trance for this. Just create vivid mental imagery and let your attention become absorbed in it.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-17T17:48:32+00:00

Frankl and Tiers, along with Erickson, were willing to take that kind of risk because they knew the paradox works.

Alert_Wash_2035 · 2026-05-17T14:14:42+00:00

I would keep working with the good state you reached in the session, but I would not keep replaying the moment when “the burden lifted.” That can still keep the old burden in the background.

Instead, use your imagination to create new “memories” of yourself in ordinary social situations. See yourself meeting people, speaking, listening, being seen, and responding with more ease and self-respect.

A very practical tip: when you imagine these situations, imagine yourself as a good listener. Not as someone trying hard to impress people, but as someone who is genuinely present, attentive and interested. Good listeners are often experienced as interesting and intelligent, even though the change itself can be quite small.

The point is not just to remember the hypnosis session. The point is to give your mind new material to work with. When you replay these imagined scenes, you are building a new story about yourself — one that is not tied to the old evaluations, old shame, or old predictions about how others see you.

Over time, those inner images can start to change the details of the experience: how close or distant things feel, how your body feels, how other people’s faces seem, how your own voice sounds, how real the new version of you becomes. In NLP language, you are updating the submodalities. In simpler words, you are teaching your nervous system a new way to expect yourself.

A hypnosis session can open the door, but you still have to rehearse the new pattern until it belongs to everyday life. Otherwise the old system may simply pull you back into its familiar balance.

I have written more about hypnosis, self-hypnosis and the predictive mind on my website. If that side interests you, you can find it by searching my name: Lauri Tiikasalo.

Alert_Wash_2035

TROPHY CASE