He was a poor hypnotic subject…
That's the excuse.
I used to make it too.
When I first started doing hypnosis shows, one of my greatest fears was that one night I would walk onto a stage, invite a group of volunteers up, and discover that I had somehow managed to acquire an entire crowd of bad hypnotic subjects. I had thought, as many hypnotists do, that there were good subjects and bad subjects, and consequently a considerable part of doing stage hypnosis involved finding the good ones, before the bad ones had an opportunity to ruin your evening.
It seems rather ridiculous to me now, but when you're standing in front of an audience waiting for something hypnotic to happen, it can become a very compelling idea. Some people respond immediately, some take longer, some appear to be analyzing everything you say, and occasionally somebody sits there staring at you with an expression suggesting that they have come onto the stage for the specific purpose of proving that hypnosis doesn't exist. When you're young and inexperienced, it’s very easy to conclude that the successful ones are good subjects and everyone else is defective in some mysterious hypnotic way.
What I hadn't properly understood was that hypnosis isn't a spell we weave and hope will happen as planned. It’s something we do.
There are procedures and communication involved. There’s attention, expectation, imagination, and there’s something called heteroaction, which means that one response can make the next response even easier to achieve. Most importantly, the person needs to understand what we are asking them to do. Once I began looking at hypnosis that way, the idea of the bad subject became irrelevant.
Imagine teaching somebody to drive a standard transmission car and deciding after the first five minutes that they are a bad driver because they stalled the engine. We wouldn't do that. We would assume they hadn't yet learned how to coordinate the clutch and accelerator, so we would explain it differently, demonstrate it, let them experience it and give them another opportunity. Yet hypnotists will sometimes give somebody one vague instruction about relaxing, closing their eyes, counting backwards from ten, only to discover that nothing happens, because they’re dealing with “a bad subject”.
Perhaps the hypnotist simply hasn't taught them anything yet.
This is one of the reasons I consider the pre-talk such an important part of hypnosis. Before I hypnotize someone, I want them to understand that hypnosis is not unconsciousness, sleep or surrendering control to me. I don't want them sitting there waiting for me to fire some invisible hypnotic ray at their forehead. I want them involved in the process, because hypnosis is participatory. When I ask them to imagine something, focus on something, allow something to happen or follow a particular instruction, their job is to actually do it.
That sounds ridiculously obvious, but it changes everything.
If I ask someone to press their hands together, they press their hands together. If I ask them to notice a sensation, they look for the sensation. If I ask them to imagine that one hand is becoming lighter, they engage with that idea rather than sitting there wondering whether I possess sufficient hypnotic power to make their arm levitate. Each successful response creates another piece of experience, and those experiences begin accumulating.
This is where compliance is sometimes misunderstood. I am not talking about domination, obedience or making somebody submit to the hypnotist. I mean something much simpler. The person follows an instruction and discovers what happens. Then they follow another instruction and something else happens. Through these layers of cooperation and responsiveness, increasingly interesting experiences become possible.
A good hypnotist builds those experiences progressively.
Suppose I immediately tell somebody that their hand is completely numb and they can feel absolutely nothing. Perhaps they respond wonderfully, but perhaps they don't. If instead I begin by directing attention to the hand, have them notice temperature, pressure, tingling, heaviness or lightness, then allow one sensation to change and another to develop, I am building a sequence of responses. The eventual alteration of sensation is no longer an enormous leap from normal waking experience. We arrived there through a series of smaller experiences that the person already knows they can produce.
The same principle applies to catalepsy, ideomotor movement, amnesia, time distortion and many of the other phenomena hypnotists enjoy producing. One response establishes expectancy for another. The person learns something about how to respond hypnotically, and the hypnotist learns something about how that particular person responds.
This also means that when something doesn't work, I become interested rather than disappointed.
If I suggest that a hand becomes lighter and it becomes heavier, I have a response. I can use heaviness. If I suggest that an arm begins to rise and it remains suspended perfectly still, I have catalepsy. If somebody tells me that they can't visualize, I don't spend twenty minutes trying to force them to see pictures. Perhaps they can feel something, hear something, know something or simply imagine it conceptually. The person is continually giving me information about how their mind organizes experience, provided I'm paying attention.
Milton Erickson understood this extraordinarily well. His principle of utilization was essentially an invitation to stop fighting the person in front of you. Whatever they bring into the hypnosis can become part of the hypnosis. Their breathing, posture, language, skepticism, movements, hesitations and unexpected responses are information rather than obstacles.
This is quite different from blaming the subject.
For years, hypnosis has occasionally suffered from an unfortunate tendency to give the hypnotist credit when something works and blame the subject when it doesn't. If the person develops spectacular phenomena, we admire the hypnotist. If nothing happens, we announce that the person was resistant, analytical, unhypnotizable or simply a bad subject.
That's an extremely convenient arrangement for the hypnotist.
Of course people differ in hypnotic responsiveness, and research on hypnotic suggestibility has demonstrated that consistently. Some people experience particular hypnotic phenomena much more readily than others, and there are people at the upper end of responsiveness who can produce extraordinary experiences with remarkably little preparation. Pretending those differences don't exist would be equally foolish.
But hypnotic ability is not the same thing as being a good or bad subject.
A person who doesn't immediately produce amnesia may develop excellent catalepsy. Someone who has difficulty with visual imagery may respond beautifully to kinesthetic (feeling-based) suggestions. Somebody who initially appears analytical may become an excellent hypnotic subject once they understand that they don't have to stop thinking in order to experience hypnosis. Our job is to discover how the person responds and then work with what they give us.
Stage hypnosis eventually taught me this in a wonderfully practical way. When you've done enough shows, you stop walking onto the stage wondering whether hypnosis is going to work tonight. You know the procedures. You know how to establish expectation, give clear instructions, observe responses, select appropriately for the demands of entertainment, build phenomena and utilize whatever happens.
That confidence doesn't come from believing that you have acquired some extraordinary power over people. It comes from knowing what you're doing.
And I think that distinction matters enormously for anyone learning hypnosis. If you believe hypnosis depends primarily upon finding naturally gifted subjects, every difficult response becomes threatening. If you understand hypnosis as a process involving communication, attention, expectation, imagination, cooperation and progressively developed responses, then difficulty becomes information.
You change what you're doing.
You teach more clearly. You simplify the task. You find a response the person can produce and build from there. You stop trying to make them respond like the last person you hypnotized and start paying attention to the person sitting in front of you.
Because ultimately the person isn't there to demonstrate how good you are at hypnosis. They are there because there’s something they want to experience, accomplish or change.
Our job is to help them learn how to use hypnosis to do it.
There are certainly easy subjects and challenging subjects. There are highly responsive people and people who require considerably more preparation. There are people who follow instructions beautifully and others who need to understand every detail before they will engage with an experience.
But after all these years, I find the label "bad subject" tells me almost nothing about the subject.
Very often it tells me considerably more about the hypnotist.
- Mike Mandel
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