A few people have asked about covert hypnosis, which they seem to believe might be some sort of seduction magic bullet that gets people to lose all inhibition and jump into bed with them straight away.

However, this notion does seem to be rather too optimistic, because hypnosis is not all about altering someone’s state. In actual fact, the effective element in hypnosis is that you can increase a person’s responsiveness to suggestions.

One of the most regularly suggested ideas is the belief that you can confuse people into a trance. Even though this idea falls at the first hurdle, and is one of the legion of reasons that NLP practitioners are so irritating. These people do not seem to have realized that Confusion is not covert, and most people are not daft – they know that something weird is happening, and they know who is doing it!

If you’ve ever tried confusion techniques, you will notice that subjects tend to retreat. And this is fine if you’re doing therapy in a therapeutic setting, since in this situation there is nowhere to retreat to. The client is caught in a double bind because they choose to be in your therapy room, and so they have no exit. Therefore, they must deal with the confusion at that moment, and this opens the gateway to an enjoyable trance experience.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, people will cite performers like Derren Brown; pointing out that he appears to be using a lot of confusing doublespeak, getting away with it, and producing remarkable results to boot.

So, it certainly is possible to use confusion techniques in public; but it should be noted that to pull this off requires an incredibly charismatic personality. Should you to try to duplicate those effects, and then show any signs of incongruity or hesitation, the chances are extremely high that you will lose all therapeutic rapport, and the subject would decide that you are an escaped lunatic / criminal / sex-pest or some other type of deviant, before trying to get away from you as fast as they can.

Now, if you haven’t already been dissuaded from experimentation with confusion techniques in public, then you need to present yourself as very safe and very friendly, simply because people need a lot of trust in order to stay confused long enough to go into a trance.

Thus, were you to take part in one of Derren Brown’s TV shows, he would most likely appear with a TV camera crew; and as anyone who has ever pointed a home video camera at a friend or family member will attest, that person suddenly comes under intense social pressure, and their higher brain functions and reasoning skills tend to shut down. However, a professional TV camera crew also implies trust because you know that a major national TV network cannot be seen to let innocent members of the public come to harm, so therefore everything must be safe.

To continue, you might assume that there are millions of people watching your every move, and then you may become very compliant, doing and saying things that you wouldn’t ordinarily do or say, because unconsciously you’d like the approval of the audience – This is an old trick of stage hypnotists and TV evangelists.

Next, the very friendly and very charismatic Mr Brown is, amongst other things, a Magician and a Showman; so not everything he does is hypnosis, and much of the language is just for show. Part is psychological, and part is trickery or misdirection – but even in this situation, you know that you are going to be fooled, so it’s a fun and entertaining experience. As an aside, I might also add that he will also tend to play the odds, so that he can be seen to succeed more often than he fails; if necessary, too many failures could even be edited out of the TV show, to make his hit rate even better than it already is.

So, if you want people in trances in public places, then firstly you need to create an atmosphere where people want to go into a hypnotic state. Therefore, it’s much easier and safer (and probably most ethical) just to get their permission first. You could, for example, tell everyone you meet that you’re a hypnotist, and then step back and wait for their reactions – half the people you meet will be intrigued and frightened – while the other half will just be intrigued. Offer people from this second group a demonstration, and emphasise that they’ll be safe – the experience will be fun – talk up how good they’ll feel, and promise not to have them running round with a lampshade on their head, talking to their shoe or pretending to be a chicken.

The reason this idea works well is because you are using the power of expectation, the atmosphere, mood, timing, catching the moment, preparing the subject, and creating a unique condition in the person’s mind – all of which will help make their going into the hypnotic state a breeze. Of course, this isn’t the only way to do it: You just need to set an appropriate context for the sort of trance experiences that you want to create.

If you’re trying to be covert, then you will find that getting people to close their eyes is a problem, especially if they don’t realise what you are up to. Whereas if they knew, they’d go straight into a trance, as soon as they realised something was happening.

When trying to put someone into a trance in a public place, what you will typically see is that they get fascinated and begin showing the classic signs of trance (breathing becomes deeper and more rhythmic, body becomes more rigid, blink rate slows, eyes becomes fixed, pupils dilate and the subject becomes more reluctant to talk, etc.) basically, imagine your co-workers at a really boring meeting. Now, if you try to deepen this state, very soon, just like in the meeting mentioned above, they’ll shake themselves awake and continue to interact with the conscious world.

So, with straightforward hypnosis, you have the problem that public locations set an expectation of conversation, your subject will be expecting to pay attention and contribute something to the discussion, or they will feel like they’re being rude, and therefore it would be completely out of context for them to shut their eyes and drift into a deep trance.

In this situation, your options are to either overwhelm the person; and a few people who are unconsciously enjoying going into the trance you’ve started (even though they don’t realise it) may just slip deeper into that trance, before their social programming can caution them to be good citizens, and rationality kicks them back to consciousness. However, these people are pretty rare.

With other people, especially if they’re already aware that you know something about hypnosis, it’s probably best to follow Milton Erickson’s example, and switch from a covert trance to an overt style about halfway through. This is indirect hypnosis as seen in the available footage of Milton Erickson – The subject knows something is going on, they know who’s doing it, they just don’t know how to respond – so they give Dr Erickson the lead.

You could still keep your hypnotic conversations covert, but then you’ll need to make allowances for the person’s social programming, and fractionate the conversation i.e. you induce a light trance, and let them become fully conscious, create another deeper trance and let them rouse, then continue fractionating until they’re in a much deeper state of hypnosis. If you’re coaching a small group or dealing with a number of people at the same time, this can be particularly useful as you’ll get indirect feedback about their mental state each time they come out of trance.

However, once your subject is in a state of trance, don’t just throw random suggestions at them and hope for the best. When you get to this stage, be kind and give some pleasant, life-enhancing suggestion that they can carry with them for the rest of their day.

Finally, you should also keep in mind that whilst you may be able to reduce someone’s inhibitions etc., if that person didn’t have any desire for you in the first place, then they might only be less inhibited in telling you where to go, if you later suggest something more sexual to them.

You might also enjoy reading:-

• Covert hypnosis: without tears
• The errors of Rapport based seduction systems
• Advanced psychological pickup theory
• Love keeps partners faithful
• Smile, and the Whole World Ignores You

Posted by Jonathan in Psychology, Sociology

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