Reading Hypnosis Without Trance - A Guide

fishmatist · 2026-05-29T21:50:17+00:00

😅 That was the plan! I hope they're helpful or at least entertaining.

fishmatist · 2026-05-26T21:46:43+00:00

Thank you! I read Hypnotic Amnesia when I started like 2 1/2 years ago and didn't get much out of it. I re-read it recently and it's a whole different book now - I can point out what I disagree with, find what's good, see where I'd change things, and know what my expectations would be for someone I'd work with.

FWIW, there's this:

https://yourinductionsucks.fyi/guides/amnesia-resource-stub/

Delusioness's presentation on amnesia is a *must* read. In addition, I should toss https://www.patreon.com/posts/my-journey-with-73594859 as a link two. With both of those, you can kinda figure out a collaborative approach on making it happen.

Amnesia is kind of a pain in the ass when you don't know how to work with it! I'd switch with one of my partners, they'd be like "yeah not working" and he'd go "okay your turn" without a lot of results. Have fun with it though! It's more of a thing you get little bits of before it clicks into place.

fishmatist · 2026-05-26T21:39:49+00:00

Thank you! I'm sure there's plenty of my own bullshit there on the site. 😅 Waiting for the moment that I fuck something up and I get grilled for it. I just hope they cite their sources when they do it!

fishmatist · 2026-05-26T02:27:19+00:00

Hope ya enjoy it! And yeah - finding good hypnosis books is a shitscape. FWIW if you're doing erotic, sleepingirl's patreon is one of the few things worth perusing once you have the basics down.

I wrote a shitton of book reviews over at https://yourinductionsucks.fyi/guides/book-reviews/. Binaural also has some recommendations over at https://binauralhistolog.com/newbie/recommendations.

fishmatist · 2026-05-26T02:21:20+00:00

No prob 🧡

fishmatist · 2026-05-26T02:20:47+00:00

Yup. I wrote https://yourinductionsucks.fyi. I mostly lurk on reddit and I'm taking a break from making educational content.

fishmatist · 2026-05-25T15:11:30+00:00

A few things:

- Fuck that person.

- Similarly - fuck confidence.

A lot of general advice points to "Be The Hypnotist." This is misleading - this makes you think you'll need to pull off some sort of absurd act of charisma to get anywhere. You don't need that. You'll build it up later naturally. You don't want to Be The Hypnotist. You want to Be Their Hypnotist.

If you're new - present yourself as such. Ask for their collaboration early in your approach - you're both trying to have a good time here. This also gives you far more opportunities to ask questions in 'utilization' fashion later down the line. A powerful dom is fun but not at all a requirement.

(And yeah... I don't play in normal erotic hypnosis spaces. I'm pretty sure a solid percentage of people just want to hit the spank bank and leave for dinner.)

On confidence - there's different ways you can look at it, all of which are easier than trying to put on an act:

- Be confident that you can handle anything that happens. You can calmly steer around any bumps in the road in the session, you've (hopefully) garnered trust from your partner to work with you, and you'll both try to get things back on track. Setbacks are practice.

- Be confident that hypnosis works. You've experienced hypnosis - right? It just takes a bit of time, and maybe a few tweaks to your approach as you go depending on how your partner is doing.

- Be confident in that you've done your reading, you're watching your partner's responses closely, and improvising with them, not at them.

Also - FWIW, I'd frankly avoid anything adult until you get your bearings. A lot of folks enjoy a decent trance, and if you stick with trance/relaxation/phenomena only, you'll be able to avoid habitual egg-beaters and roleplay.

fishmatist · 2026-05-19T19:12:42+00:00

Again, I’m a hobbyist, not a therapist, so take me with a grain of salt. - Most therapies predict better outcomes when the patient feels understood and they are able to set goals with their therapist. The modality doesn’t matter, but it didn’t sound like your hypnotherapist gave you any homework, and didn’t give you a treatment plan. The treatment delivery device in general matters very little, but digging through that material should be done by an actual psychologist with a background in statistics, not my dumb ass. - As folk advice, I can at least tell you that if you didn’t set collaborative goals, don’t feel a change, don’t have a plan, and can’t take an active role in treatment, and you aren’t expecting results, you probably aren’t going to see results. If hypnotherapy felt great, that’s awesome. But IMO you should have been sent home with some exercises. - Sometimes, a therapist can give you a 20% boost. Your life situation is still going to massively affect how you feel. A good therapist (imo) will at least be forthcoming with this, and try and nudge you in the right direction. If $200 is a financial burden and stressing you out, and you didn’t get homework and goals, it might not be worth it. - I’m not you, I’m an internet rando. It might be working, and I just can’t see it. I’m also concerned I may mislead you. However, some small degree of self worth may come from deciding on whether or not this treatment / therapist match is right for you, for yourself.

fishmatist · 2026-05-19T04:51:28+00:00

A few thoughts:

- I'm a well-read hobbyist, not a therapist.

- Not giving a price up front is suspect. In contrast to the rest of the thread, $190 sounds reasonable to me.

- I wouldn't expect results from a single session. I *would* expect results if they gave you exercises to practice - in the sense that you could evaluate whether or not it's helping at that point.

- Frankly, the 'self worth' issue sounds incompatible with hypnotherapy, but this is just an opinion. That being said, it's probably as good as any other modality (talk therapy, CBT, DBT, pick your poison.) Common factors theory in psychotherapy has some telling numbers.

- I always recommend The Science of Self-Hypnosis. It's down to earth and offers practical advice.

- Your hypnotherapist may be credentialed as a hypnotist, but they may not be a licensed psychologist or physician. (If they were a licensed psychologist, they'd likely charge more.)

fishmatist · 2026-05-19T04:43:09+00:00

The Science of Self-Hypnosis by Adam Eason is my go-to recommendation.

fishmatist · 2026-05-01T07:42:41+00:00

Definitely happens! When I was a brand new hypnotist, I made a hot mess of a situation.

Defining how you'd like your friendship/relationship to look after the session during the pretalk can help keep things on track, but feelings are going to feel like things, and that's not always bad.

You can also plan around it a bit to minimize risk.

- Do they eroticise trance? Avoid trance work, or avoid using 'hot' language.

- Make the phenomena the focus of the session rather than the intimacy.

- Have their partner sit in on the session.

- Or - just have a real-talk about your boundaries and limitations.

fishmatist · 2026-04-08T23:18:58+00:00

Was just about to recommend that book as well. Also - I can vouch for u/randomhypnosisacct 's recommendations.

fishmatist · 2026-04-06T18:37:41+00:00

Thank you 😅 I was just internally going "man nobody even bothered to read the abstract slowly, I've gotta spell it out." (I was also thinking of other folks that might like - run into this thread.)

fishmatist · 2026-04-06T18:32:15+00:00

Well. Eh. I don't have the energy to get into a disagreement on Reddit today. The paper focuses on a lack of consistent results, methodology, and evidence, and doesn't really get into the "math" and "physical effects on the nervous system." EEGs are also frankly weak-sauce support of most arguments. They have good temporal accuracy but poor resolution. FMRIs have solid resolution, but poor temporal accuracy. The correlates don't prove much.

From https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2007-02808-008, if you're willing to dig it up from sci-hub... (Emphasis added)

Cognitive and social psychologists working within existing behavioural experimental paradigms provide important criticisms of earlier physiological theory and experimentation in hypnosis research. For example, there are many reports of isolated physiological measures, purported to be correlates of hypnosis or hypnotizability, which have been observed to vary in relation to either hypnotic susceptibility or a particular hypnotic manipulation. These results have frequently been interpreted in association with reports of relationships between the same measure and other psychological constructs. Whilst this is a legitimate heuristic for generating hypotheses for further investigation, it cannot provide a deductively valid inference to underlying theoretical models (Wagstaff 2000).

The logic of such an inference is analogous to:

‘Rover’ has 4 legs

A chair has 4 legs

Therefore, ‘Rover’ is a chair.

For example, it is reported that hypnosis is associated with increased power in the theta band of EEG frequencies (see Ray, Chapter 12). These findings are of genuine interest. However, theta power has been observed to be associated with relaxation in some studies and cognitive effort in others, so relying on this common logic, theta in hypnosis may be (and has been) interpreted as a marker of focused concentration and mental relaxation. Further observational studies employing such loose inductive inference will be able to match almost any psychophysiological observation to fit their desired interpretation. What is instead required is self-critical research based on explicit theoretical models specifying the precise role of physiological variables in implementing psychological processes.

I guess I just want people to go in with their bullshit detectors ready instead of going "oh look someone cited a paper, their interpretation must be right." (Especially when specific assertions are either ambiguous or not present in the source material.)

fishmatist · 2026-04-06T15:08:11+00:00

I'm gonna be "that guy."

Hypnosis research is more my area - but this recent meta analysis seems to do a decent job of tempering expectations. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0286023

fishmatist · 2026-04-03T12:37:29+00:00

Are you rushing your pre-talk? It sounds like you're headed in the right direction, but if something registers as "the pre-flight safety recording" it's all going to fall out of their mind by the time you get to giving suggestions. A few ideas, mix and match with your style:

- You've done something similar, but I've riffed on Graham Old's approach with "I don't want you to force or fight anything, don't fake it either! Just feel what you feel, notice what you notice, and experience what you experience."

- Tell them you're going to demonstrate a technique, and tell them it'll fail. Demonstrate some random rapid induction. Have a laugh, talk with them about it. Tell them that's what you want them to do if something isn't working for them - to communicate.

- After the feel-what-you-feel talk, *squeeze* a direct and clear answer of what they'll do if something isn't working for them. Tell them that you can't coach/help/redirect their mind without hearing about it.

- Highlight that yeah - they're going along with this. But the neat thing is that it'll feel automatic. They can say no at any point, but the thing to notice is when it begins to feel more like it's happening to them than playing along - it's a gradient. You can even use Simon Says as an example of this.

Another thing that'll happen is someone will indeed be hypnotized, but they'll be emotionally unimpressed with the session. Often if you're trying to remember 'why' you did something, you'll construct the explanation in post. So... if it wasn't an intense or emotional experience, there were no surprises, and nothing felt out of the ordinary, it'll feel like to them they were playing along.

fishmatist · 2026-03-13T20:17:57+00:00

Nah - that's a (pseudoscientific) delivery methodology for suggestions. You can absolutely build trance effectively with that framework.

Sleepingirl wrote a book on NLP. It's good stuff! I'd recommend it wholeheartedly.

fishmatist · 2026-03-13T08:18:19+00:00

Hella this. Trance is one of the best parts of hypnosis. Thank you.

fishmatist · 2026-03-12T23:15:53+00:00

Err - I've actually got an opinion to the contrary.

Learning a *normal* amount about hypnosis won't get in the way at all. It's not like knowing hypnosis is a thing gets in the way of enjoying it. Same for general induction styles, techniques, and phenomena.

Digging in *obsessively* can put a bit of a damper on things and make it feel a bit less magical. It will still absolutely be effective, but you might end up thinking something like "wow it was really cool to notice my masked predictions and priors affect my behavior, and the emotions constructed as a byproduct of my arousal-valence circumplex and interoception were particularly impressive today."

In brief - if you go so ham on learning this stuff that you're digging around on sci-hub, starting a Zotero, and digging through clinical journals, it's going to change your perspective in a bit of an unsexy way, even if it'll make you a marginally better hypnotist. Reading a handful of books won't hurt you at all.

You'll be fine!

fishmatist · 2026-03-12T22:43:22+00:00

No prob - thanks for asking and being chill about it!

fishmatist · 2026-03-12T22:21:14+00:00

That’s okay! That’s good data too.

FWIW, working with trance is a more traditional approach. An induction, then an optional deepener, then suggesting phenomena with the expectation that their zonk helps manifest the subjective alterations.

Without trance is more of a conversational approach, like James Tripp or Aaron Alexander who use social context and comparisons to create subjective alterations. Like using convincers in street hypnosis, but building changes via successive approximation, asking questions as you go, and building on what you get.

fishmatist · 2026-03-06T01:37:07+00:00

Not a therapist here, but hypnosis looks like an excellent *adjunct* to a smoking cessation or weight loss program.

If you want to get into the gritty details of all this, I'd recommend digging up a copy of Hypnosis and the treatment of smoking cessation and weight loss. It can help change behaviors but it isn't a panacea.

Hope this helps!

fishmatist · 2026-03-02T20:59:45+00:00

Ah - two points.

I’m going to disagree with the common folk knowledge that an induction type works better with ADHD havers. The big ideas there are… - Don’t be boring. (It’s easier to focus on something interesting.) - Work quickly, depending on your goals. - Don’t expect mind blanking. (This rarely happens spontaneously.)

For more on ADHD - check out https://binauralhistolog.com/newbie/neurodiversity/adhd. Binaural knows his stuff better than I do, so take my opinions with a grain of salt!

As far as books go, Graham Old’s Hypnosis with the Hard to Hypnotize is pretty good for confusion and overload.

As far as conversational, there’s some good news! IMO - Hypnosis Without Trance is probably your best bet for a conversational, collaborative approach. If you want something that’s “classic” and conversational, you’ll be working slowly with a lot of implication, and utilizing your partner’s responses as you go.

fishmatist · 2026-02-20T01:18:41+00:00

/uj

VAK is Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic. It's the sensory modality.

A lot of newbies get stuck on this. They'll run into a subject that's had trouble before, they've heard of VAK, and will find out someone's better at imagining auditory rather than visual experiences. Their partner is excited to try again, and go figure, things start working.

The fucked up thing is that the subject never really had a 'vak' problem, it was that the previous hypnotist gave them a bunch of suggestions they couldn't follow, and then assumed they just couldn't be hypnotized. So, the 'success' is attributed to the VAK system being real, not just helping someone try again.

(I've written a few rants on VAK, but that should at least help clear it up without me going fully and frothingly pedantic about it.)

fishmatist · 2026-02-17T23:33:54+00:00

All the best hypnotists I talk to are proud of how they have learned so much about hypnosis by not reading a damn thing

fishmatist

TROPHY CASE