The first person has already received a suggestion, and that suggestion is about you.

There’s an important factor in hypnosis that doesn’t get discussed nearly enough, even though it can influence responsiveness long before an induction begins. That factor is prestige.

By prestige, I don’t mean celebrity, wealth, pomposity, or trying to impress people. I mean the psychological weight one person carries in the mind of another: the sense that this individual knows something, represents something, or possesses unusual authority that makes their words worth taking seriously.

Prestige changes expectation, and expectation can change behaviour remarkably.

About a thousand years ago, Edward the Confessor, King of England, became associated with the belief that the monarch’s touch could cure scrofula, a tubercular disease of the lymph glands known as the King’s Evil. The point isn’t whether royal fingers cured tuberculosis. It’s that people believed the king’s touch was different, wrapped as it was in ceremony, mystery, and divine sanction. The same gesture from an ordinary stranger would have meant almost nothing.

The Power of Context

Several centuries later came Franz Anton Mesmer, a physician who moved in aristocratic circles and became a sensation in Paris. He understood how to magnify prestige. He cultivated an exotic appearance, wore dramatic clothing, and surrounded his treatments with ritual. Incense burned, the glass harmonica filled the room with strange sounds, and at the centre stood his famous baquet, a large wooden tub of supposedly magnetized water and iron filings, with iron rods protruding so patients could press them against their bodies.

Imagine the effect. You’d heard extraordinary stories about this famous doctor and knew aristocrats consulted him. Now you were sitting in that mysterious room, surrounded by strange music, unusual smells and expectant patients, when a man walked in behaving as though invisible forces were unquestionably moving through it. Some people trembled, cried, laughed uncontrollably, or collapsed into what Mesmer called crises.

Whatever we think of his theory of animal magnetism today, he had stumbled onto something psychologically profound: the power of context, and of prestige.

Prestige Isn’t Fixed

Modern hypnotists don’t need robes, incense or a magnetized tub, but every hypnotist carries some amount of prestige in the eyes of the person sitting in front of them. And prestige isn’t fixed. It can be increased.

It begins with competence. When you truly understand hypnosis, explain it clearly, answer questions intelligently, and work without clinging nervously to a script, people sense that you know what you’re doing. It also comes from congruence. If your words communicate confidence while your voice, posture and expression signal uncertainty, people notice.

I saw this years ago at the Ontario Police College. Police officer Cal Smith asked whether I thought I could stop him smoking. I didn’t commit myself either way. Later, he volunteered to come onstage with about two dozen other people during a hypnosis show, and the psychological situation changed completely. He was now surrounded by hypnotic subjects, in front of an audience, watching me work successfully as The Hypnotist.

At one point I turned to him and said, “You will never smoke again.” That was it. No complicated protocol, no lengthy intervention. I simply said it and continued with the show. About two years later, I ran into Cal in Sudbury, Ontario, and he told me he had never smoked another cigarette.

That doesn’t mean every smoking problem can be solved with one sentence. But it shows how dramatically prestige can amplify suggestion. The words were simple. Their power came from the meaning Cal attached to the person saying them.

Prestige can also spill into areas where it doesn’t belong. My MD once told me that patients sometimes ask him whether they should buy gold or where the markets are headed. He freely admits he knows virtually nothing about investing, but he’s a doctor, and some of that trust carries over.

That raises an ethical issue. The more seriously people take what you say, the more important it becomes to distinguish genuine knowledge from personal opinion, and to recognize when the intelligent answer is, “I don’t know.”

Long Before Anything Hypnotic Begins

Remember, too, that prestige is being established long before anything recognizably hypnotic begins. Your reputation, your website, your testimonials and the way you answer questions all contribute. Someone who arrives after being told, “You absolutely have to see this hypnotist, he’s brilliant,” walks through the door with very different expectations from someone who found your name online five minutes earlier. The first person has already received a suggestion, and that suggestion is about you.

So don’t wait until the induction to begin influencing expectations. Your pre-talk matters. Your first few minutes matter. The way you respond to doubt, hesitation, laughter or partial responses matters. If something unexpected happens, treat it as information rather than a crisis.

None of this means pretending to be important. Fake prestige is fragile. Edward the Confessor had a crown and Mesmer had his theatre. You don’t need either. Real competence produces confidence, confidence produces congruence, and people respond differently when they sense that the person in front of them actually knows what they’re doing. When that happens, your words carry more weight, which is exactly why you need to use them well.

- Mike Mandel

The word “friend” should describe a living relationship, not a lifetime appointment.

Over the years, I’ve surprised a few of my hypnosis students and Brain Software Podcast listeners by recommending that they fire their friends. I know that sounds harsh. I’m not suggesting you become cold or trigger-happy with the people in your life. I’m suggesting that a friendship should be judged by what it actually is now, not by what it was twenty years ago.

I like to think of my relationships as a series of concentric circles, with myself in the centre and the people closest to me nearest to it. Those people have earned their position. They’ve stood by me when things were difficult, kept confidences, and shown goodwill in actions rather than just words. Anyone can say, “I’m always here for you.”

The interesting part is whether they’re still there when it’s inconvenient.

Further out are good friends, casual friends, colleagues and people I simply enjoy running into. There’s nothing wrong with any of those circles. The mistake is thinking everyone deserves the same access to your life. One of the great improvements most people can make is learning to distinguish between someone they like and someone they should trust.

Duration Isn’t the Same Thing as Loyalty

Trouble starts when somebody is standing very close to you while behaving in ways that should have moved them several circles outward long ago. Maybe you’ve known them since school. That history can feel important, but duration isn’t the same thing as loyalty.

There are a few reliable signs. Passive-aggressive behaviour is one, because it lets hostility travel under cover: the backhanded compliment, the sulking, the joke that always leaves one person wounded. Then, if you object, you’re told you’re too sensitive. They get to throw the grenade and then critique your reaction to the explosion.

Gossip is another. If someone constantly brings you everyone else’s secrets, it might be worth considering what happens to yours when you’re not in the room.

Success can be the most revealing of all. Some people are wonderful when you’re miserable, because your misery doesn’t threaten them. Let something wonderful happen and suddenly the temperature changes. People get jealous and strange sometimes. But if it keeps happening, pay attention.

A friend doesn’t have to agree with everything you do. A good friend should occasionally tell you that you’re making a terrible decision. But there’s a difference between honest disagreement and chronic undermining, and you can usually feel it. One leaves you clearer. The other leaves you smaller.

People Simply Need to Be Moved

Most of the time you don’t need a dramatic break-up scene. People simply need to be moved. A close friend can become a casual friend. Somebody who mishandles personal information doesn’t get any more of it, and somebody who sabotages your plans doesn’t need advance notice of them.

Sounds too cruel? Here’s your reframe: think of it as housekeeping.

Sometimes, though, it isn’t enough. If someone repeatedly lies about you, humiliates you or betrays your confidences, calling them a friend out of nostalgia starts to look less like loyalty and more like poor judgment. The word “friend” should describe a living relationship, not a lifetime appointment.

Family complicates all this, of course. But being related to someone doesn’t give them unlimited access to your time or your peace of mind. You can love someone and tell them less. You can stop lending money, stop having the same argument, and stop volunteering information you know will be used against you.

And sometimes nobody did anything terrible at all. You simply changed, and a relationship that once fitted perfectly no longer does. We have a bad habit of confusing gratitude for the past with obligation in the present. Someone can have been enormously important to you once and still not belong in your inner circle today. Both things can be true.

The Ones You Could Call at Two in the Morning

This works in the other direction too. If people keep moving you outward, it’s worth asking why. Maybe you interrupt constantly. Maybe every conversation turns back to you. Maybe your jokes aren’t nearly as funny as you think they are.

The rarest people are the ones I think of as super-friends. They’ve proved themselves under pressure. They’re the ones you could call at two in the morning, and before asking for the whole story, they’d want to know where you are and whether you’re all right. My dear friend Brian McDowell has been that kind of friend for over 60 years.

Those people are worth looking after.

The point of firing friends isn’t to become ruthless. It’s to be more selective about who gets the best parts of you, because your time, attention and emotional energy are all limited.

So when somebody repeatedly proves they’re not really on your side, perhaps you don’t need another heartfelt talk about boundaries. Perhaps you just stop giving them a front-row seat and let them discover, gradually, that they’re now somewhere near the parking lot.

- Mike Mandel

When we are too close, the detail becomes the whole picture.

Looking at a target is useful…staring at it is a different thing entirely…

There is an expression from French psychologist Pierre Janet that I have always liked: idée fixe.

It means, quite literally, a fixed idea. But in psychological terms it points to something more interesting than simply having a strong opinion or thinking about something a great deal. An idée fixe is an idea that begins to dominate attention, shaping what we notice, what we ignore, and eventually how we interpret what is happening around us.

Most of us have experienced this in one form or another.

A problem appears, and we think about it. Fair enough. Then we think about it some more. We begin looking for solutions, explanations, causes, consequences and signs that things are getting better or worse. Before long, what began as one issue among many has become the issue.

That is where trouble can begin.

Attention Has a Magnifying Effect

Attention has a magnifying effect. Whatever we focus on tends to grow in importance, at least in our experience. The more attention we give something, the more significant it appears, and the more significant it appears, the more attention we feel it deserves. Very quickly, we can find ourselves in a loop.

The idea starts to organize perception.

Someone who believes a relationship is failing begins noticing every awkward silence and every delayed reply. Someone who believes they are not doing well starts registering every mistake and overlooking the things they are getting right. A person who is angry about a particular issue can begin interpreting almost everything through that one frame.

The fixed idea does not merely sit in the mind. It becomes a lens.

Target Fixation

Years ago, while playing a sophisticated flight simulation, I ran into a version of this phenomenon called target fixation. Pilots are trained to avoid becoming so focused on the thing directly ahead of them that they lose awareness of everything else around them. In a simulation, this could mean concentrating so intensely on the target that altitude, speed and the surrounding environment almost disappeared from attention.

The lesson stayed with me because it applies far beyond aviation.

The problem is not the focus itself. Focus is useful. We need it to solve problems, reach goals, improve skills and get things done. The problem begins when focus becomes narrowing, and narrowing becomes exclusion.

At that point, we may still think we are being rational and thorough, when in fact we are simply staring at the same thing from the same angle.

This is particularly dangerous because the thing we are focused on may be completely real.

The difficult relationship may really be difficult. The financial concern may be legitimate. The health worry may deserve attention. The mistake is not in noticing these things. The mistake is allowing them to become so dominant that they push everything else out of the picture.

What Am I Not Seeing?

That is why one of the most useful questions we can ask ourselves is this:

What am I not seeing because I am looking so intently at this?

It is a simple question, but it can change the entire frame.

If one part of your life is going badly, what is going well? If you are convinced there is only one explanation for something, what are two or three others? If you are locked onto one solution, what would you consider if that solution were unavailable? If one person has become the centre of your frustration, what else is contributing to the situation?

None of this means denying reality or forcing ourselves to “think positive.” I have never found that particularly useful when it simply means replacing an unpleasant distortion with a cheerful one. What we want is not positive thinking. We want accurate thinking.

Accuracy usually requires a wider field of view.

It also helps to create some distance. Imagine that a good friend came to you with exactly the same problem. What would you notice? What would you ask? What possibilities might seem obvious from the outside that are difficult to see from the inside?

Sometimes that shift is enough to loosen the grip of the fixed idea.

A useful image is to think of standing too close to a painting. From six inches away, you see brushstrokes, imperfections and tiny areas of colour. Step back, and suddenly there is a landscape. Nothing in the painting has changed. Only your perspective has changed.

The same is true of many problems.

When we are too close, the detail becomes the whole picture.

So perhaps the occasional mental habit worth developing is simply to widen the frame. Look at the problem, certainly, but also look beside it. Look behind it. Look at what has changed since you first formed your opinion. Look at what other people see. Look at the evidence that does not fit your first conclusion.

And every so often, ask whether the idea that once seemed so important still deserves quite so much space in your head.

The danger of an idée fixe is not that the idea must be false.

It may be completely true.

The danger is that it becomes the only thing we can see.

- Mike Mandel

Before long, we’re no longer dealing only with what happened. We’re dealing with everything the mind has built around it since.

Are you suffering with something?

I don’t mean simply having a problem, because everybody has problems. I mean something that’s moved into your inner life and started taking up too much room, something you return to when you’re alone, when you wake in the night, when you’re driving, or when things become quiet enough for your mind to wander back to whatever’s been troubling you. It may be grief, betrayal, a relationship that ended badly, a frightening health problem, regret over something you did years ago, or something somebody did to you that still feels unfinished. It may even be something that hasn’t happened at all, but which you’ve rehearsed so many times that part of you is already living through it.

The Difference Between Pain and Suffering

I think there’s an important difference between pain and suffering, even though the two are often tangled together. Pain can come straight from life. Someone dies. A marriage ends. We lose our health, our security, a friendship, a business, or a dream we’d been carrying for years. Sometimes there’s nothing to reinterpret because the thing itself is genuinely painful, and I’ve never liked the habit of trying to turn every bad experience into a lesson about growth or resilience. Some things hurt because they matter. Grief after the loss of someone you love isn’t a sign that you need to improve your thinking. It’s part of loving someone who’s no longer there.

Suffering gets more complicated because the mind can take that original pain and extend it, sometimes far beyond the event itself. We replay what happened and imagine how it might have gone differently. We decide what it says about us. We wonder what’s going to happen next and start filling in the blanks with increasingly unpleasant possibilities. We have arguments with people who aren’t in the room, imagine explanations we’ll probably never give, and revisit moments that are already over as though one more inspection might somehow alter them.

Before long, we’re no longer dealing only with what happened. We’re dealing with everything the mind has built around it since.

When Mental Rehearsal Turns Against Us

We’re very good at mental rehearsal, and most people understand how useful that can be. An athlete runs through a performance before competing. A musician hears a difficult passage internally before playing it. Someone preparing to speak in public imagines standing up, finding the right words and getting through it well. We usually think of mental rehearsal as preparation for success, but the same ability can just as easily be turned against us.

You can rehearse being abandoned before anyone leaves. You can rehearse a terrible diagnosis before you’ve been given one, picture the argument before it starts, imagine the humiliation before you make the mistake, or spend hours living through the consequences of a financial disaster that hasn’t happened.

None of this is pretend in the ordinary sense, because the feelings produced by it can be very real. You can be sitting safely in a chair with a racing heart, tight muscles and a churning stomach because of something that exists entirely in your imagination.

That’s one reason fear can become so persuasive. Once the body joins in, it’s easy to mistake the strength of the feeling for proof that the prediction must be accurate. We feel terrible, so we assume something terrible must be happening, or must be about to happen. Sometimes that’s true. At other times the feeling tells us more about what we’ve been repeatedly imagining than it tells us about the future.

One Person’s Pain, Another Person’s Catastrophe

Frames matter here because experience never arrives in the mind completely untouched. We place events in context, compare them with other things that have happened, decide whether they’re temporary or permanent, and draw conclusions about what they say about us and where our lives are going. Much of this happens automatically, which helps explain why two people can go through remarkably similar experiences and come out of them in very different states.

Imagine two people who both lose their jobs. One is frightened, angry and uncertain, but thinks, “I have no idea what I’m going to do next.” The other concludes that this is the beginning of the end, that nobody will want to employ them again, that they’ve failed, and that everything is now sliding downhill. The event is painful for both, but the second person is carrying far more than the event itself.

This is what I mean when I say one person’s pain can become another person’s catastrophe without remedy. From the inside, that catastrophe feels completely real. Telling someone to cheer up, be positive, count their blessings or look on the bright side usually doesn’t help very much, because it doesn’t touch the structure of the experience. If someone has come to believe that what happened is permanent, all-encompassing and hopeless, encouragement alone probably won’t reorganize it.

Taking Apart the Mechanism

It can be much more useful to get curious about how the suffering is being maintained, not in a blaming way, but almost as though you were taking apart a mechanism to see how it works. What actually happened? What did you conclude because of it? What are you predicting now? What scenes do you keep replaying? Which parts belong to reality as it stands today, and which parts have been added by fear, memory, imagination or expectation?

There’s a considerable difference between not knowing how you’re going to get through something and deciding that you never will. There’s a difference between wishing something hadn’t happened and treating it as proof that your whole life has been spoiled. There’s also a difference between knowing that something hurts now and assuming it will always hurt in exactly the same way.

Those distinctions can look small on paper, but they can change the whole experience.

None of this means we should be trying to think our way out of every difficult emotion. Some losses can’t be repaired, and some things leave a mark. If we try too hard to make pain disappear simply because we don’t like feeling it, we can add another struggle on top of the first one. A person may be grieving, frightened or angry for perfectly understandable reasons, and the useful question isn’t always how to get rid of the feeling. Sometimes it’s whether we’re allowing the pain that belongs there without continually feeding it with dreadful predictions and endless rehearsal.

Working With How an Experience Is Held

This is one of the reasons hypnosis belongs in the conversation.

Hypnosis doesn’t alter history, and it doesn’t require anyone to pretend that something painful didn’t happen. What it can do is help us work with the way an experience is being held in the mind. Attention can shift, mental pictures can change, expectations can change, and memories can sometimes be experienced differently. A person who’s learned, without realizing it, to respond automatically to certain thoughts, sensations or images may be able to learn another response.

There’s real research behind this, particularly in the treatment of pain. Hypnosis has been studied in medical procedures, surgery and chronic pain, and many studies have found that it can reduce pain or help people cope with it more effectively. It doesn’t help everyone in the same way, and I’d be deeply suspicious of anybody selling it as a miracle cure, but there’s enough good work behind it to take it seriously.

That makes sense when you think about the nature of pain itself. What’s happening in the body matters, of course, but so does what the person expects, fears, remembers and imagines, along with what they believe the pain means. Hypnosis gives us a practical way of working with some of those processes, and changing them can sometimes change the experience more than people expect.

None of this means hypnosis is a magic eraser for grief, trauma, physical pain or the ordinary difficulties of being human, and I wouldn’t trust anybody who presented it that way. What it does suggest is something much more interesting: our experience of pain is shaped not only by what’s happening, but also by the way we attend to it, what we expect to happen next, what we imagine, what we remember, and the meaning we’ve attached to the whole experience. If some of those things change, the experience itself may change with them.

If there’s something you’re suffering with at the moment, it may be worth looking at it from this angle. There may be a real problem that needs action, a loss that needs grieving, or a situation that simply has to be endured for a while. But there may also be part of the suffering that’s being kept alive by the way your mind keeps returning to it, rehearsing it, predicting what comes next and giving the original event fresh emotional energy every time around.

You may not be able to change what happened, and in some cases you may not be able to change what’s happening now. But if part of the suffering lies in how the experience is being carried, remembered and anticipated, then there’s something there you can work with.

Hypnosis can sometimes help with that very thing.

- Mike Mandel

Resistance isn’t the enemy. It’s information.

If you’re a therapist, counsellor, coach, hypnotist, or any other kind of agent of change, you’ve probably encountered a puzzling situation.

A client comes to you and says they desperately want to change. They want to stop smoking, eliminate anxiety, overcome procrastination, become more confident, or finally get rid of some persistent behaviour that’s making their life miserable.

You do good work with them. You use the techniques you know. You give them your full attention and apply everything you’ve learned.

And nothing happens.

Or perhaps something happens briefly, but the change doesn’t last.

It’s tempting to assume that the client is being difficult, stubborn, or deliberately resistant. But in my experience, that’s rarely a useful way of looking at it. Resistance isn’t the enemy. It’s information.

A Vague Preference Is Not a Decision

People frequently want something consciously while resisting it unconsciously. They may genuinely want the result, but not be willing to pay the price required to achieve it. They might say, “I guess I should stop smoking,” which isn’t remotely the same as congruently deciding, “I’m finished with smoking.”

One is a vague preference. The other is a decision.

Years ago, I had a relative who claimed he wanted to stop smoking. The problem was that he had no intention of actually stopping. It was his wife who wanted him to quit, but he hadn’t reached threshold. He came to me knowing nothing would change, but at least she’d get off his back about smoking. The discomfort of continuing hadn’t yet become greater than the perceived cost of changing.

Every Persistent Behaviour Began With a Positive Intention

Not changing doesn’t make someone stupid or weak, and it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re deliberately sabotaging themselves. Sometimes the behaviour is still performing an important function, even though the person consciously hates it. In fact, every persistent behaviour began with some sort of positive intention. That doesn’t mean the behaviour is positive. It means that somewhere along the line, the person’s unconscious mind discovered that the behaviour produced a useful result.

Smoking might create a pause in the day, a sense of belonging, or a way to regulate emotion. Alcohol might provide access to an entire social world in the local bar. Anxiety may be attempting to create preparation, vigilance, or protection. Procrastination can prevent someone from risking failure, criticism, or overwhelm.

In fact, procrastination can even masquerade as productivity. Someone researches, studies, plans, buys another course, and organizes everything perfectly, but never begins. In cases like that, education may be more useful than therapy. They don’t need to heal a deep psychological wound. They need to learn how to take the first step.

Even physical pain can sometimes acquire an additional unconscious function. This certainly doesn’t mean that pain isn’t real or that every painful condition is psychological. But for some people, pain may also provide protection from an unbearable job, an uncomfortable gathering, or a person they don’t want to confront. Others may carry a deeply rooted belief that they deserve to suffer.

What Does This Behaviour Provide?

If we simply attack the symptom, we may strengthen the very resistance we’re attempting to remove.

The best question is this:

What does this behaviour provide that the person isn’t getting anywhere else?

Once we know that, we can separate the behaviour from the useful result it’s trying to produce. We can respect the protective intention without approving of the old method. That’s the heart of effective reframing and parts work. We don’t attempt to overpower the unconscious mind. We recruit it.

This is also why ecology checks matter. What will the client gain if they change? What might they lose? Who else will be affected? The answers to these questions can be quite compelling.

A sudden increase in confidence or independence might threaten an important relationship. Recovery might mean losing care, attention, or permission to rest. Success may bring visibility to someone who’s terrified of being judged. A person may say they want confidence while secretly fearing they’ll become arrogant.

When Identity and Goals Disagree, Identity Wins

Identity can be even more powerful than goals. “I want to stop smoking” is very different from “I’m a non-smoker.” One describes a desired action. The other describes who the person is.

When a proposed change doesn’t fit someone’s identity, the identity will usually win.

Get the Unconscious Mind Onside

This is why we need curiosity instead of frustration. Ideomotor signals, metaphors, parts work, reframing, and future pacing can all help create internal cooperation. The more the client’s ego states are aligned, the easier change becomes. Sometimes a protective part simply needs to be acknowledged, thanked, and given a better job.

And we must always check our work. Can the client imagine taking the new response into the real world? Does any part of them object? Is the replacement behaviour healthy, available, and enjoyable? Does it preserve the benefit the old behaviour was attempting to provide?

The goal isn’t to defeat the unconscious mind. The goal is to get it onside.

So when someone appears to resist change, don’t push harder. Become curious about what that resistance is trying to accomplish.

If you keep banging your head against the door of the problem, you’ll only give yourself a headache. Find the key that unlocks it, or look for an open window.

You may discover that you’ve been trying to solve the wrong problem.

- Mike Mandel

They opened their eyes. That’s all you actually know.

Years ago, when I was still relatively new to hypnosis, I thought I had to make hypnosis seem impressive. After all, this was hypnosis. Surely people should feel something remarkable. They should “go under”, whatever the heck that means. Once there, they should lose track of everything around them, hear my voice coming from some distant dimension, and eventually awaken with a look of astonishment and no idea what had just happened.

The problem is, that’s a pretty good description of what people think hypnosis should be like. But it’s an inaccurate description of what hypnosis actually IS like, and that distinction can cause all kinds of problems for hypnotists.

“I Don’t Think I Was Hypnotized”

A client can have an excellent hypnotic experience, respond beautifully to suggestions, and even begin making the changes they came to see you about. Then they open their eyes and say, “I don’t think I was hypnotized.” This is where inexperienced hypnotists sometimes make things worse. They start defending hypnosis, explaining trance depth, or desperately pointing out all the signs that proved the client was hypnotized.

And occasionally they panic right in the middle of the session. Imagine you’ve hypnotized someone and everything seems to be going nicely, and then suddenly they open their eyes. Yikes! They’ve come out of hypnosis! Except they haven’t. They opened their eyes. That’s all you actually know.

They might be checking whether they can open them. They might have heard something in the room. They might simply be someone who habitually checks their surroundings, or they might still be completely absorbed in the experience. Your response is hugely important because if you suddenly look concerned and say, “Are you okay? Is something wrong?” you’ve just told them something happened that shouldn’t have happened. Now they may start wondering if the hypnosis failed too.

Instead, you can calmly say something like, “That’s fine. Just close them again whenever you’re ready,” and continue. The hypnotist’s reaction teaches the client how to interpret what just happened, and this is one of the reasons I believe a good preframe is so important.

Why I Keep the Preframe Short

It doesn’t need to be a 20-minute lecture on the history and theory of hypnosis. In fact, excessively long pre-talks can create problems of their own because you start giving people things to worry about that they hadn’t even considered. A minute or two can be plenty. I want clients to know that hypnosis is focused attention, not unconsciousness. They’ll probably hear me throughout the session. They may hear cars outside or people in another room. They can move, swallow, scratch an itch, think thoughts, remember what happened, and yes, even open their eyes.

Most importantly, I want them to understand that hypnosis can feel surprisingly ordinary, because if I don’t tell them that, Hollywood has already told them something else. Popular culture has spent decades teaching people that hypnosis means “going under”. The hypnotist does something mysterious and powerful, the subject becomes essentially unconscious, and later wakes up wondering where the last hour went.

So a client sits in your chair, closes her eyes, listens to you for 40 minutes, hears everything you say, notices a truck driving past outside, remembers most of the session, and thinks, “Well, that didn’t work.” Not because trance didn’t happen, but because what happened didn’t match their model of hypnosis. That’s a completely different problem, and arguing with the client is not the solution.

Ask a Better Question

Instead, I’d become curious and ask, “What did you expect hypnosis to feel like?” Now we have something useful to discuss. The same principle applies when someone contacts you after a hypnotherapy session and says, “It didn’t work.” Don’t immediately defend yourself, launch into an explanation of why hypnosis works, or offer another session for free.

Ask a better question: “What did you expect to be different?” That question can uncover an enormous amount of information. Maybe the client expected a craving to completely vanish, but instead discovered they walked past the thing they normally crave three times this week without buying it. Maybe they expected to wake up overflowing with confidence, but instead they quietly did something on Tuesday that they had been avoiding for six months. Maybe they expected an unpleasant feeling to disappear instantly, when the first actual change was in their behaviour.

Something did change. They just weren’t measuring it.

Of course, sometimes nothing has changed, and that’s useful information too. Sometimes you discover that the presenting problem isn’t the real problem at all. There may be a secondary gain involved, or some other psychological purpose the problem is serving. Milton Erickson famously said, “The problem is the solution.” In other words, what looks dysfunctional may actually be doing something useful within the person’s current psychological system. The first session may not have failed at all. It may have shown you what actually needs to be worked on.

Preframe How They Interpret It

All of this points to something I think hypnotists should be doing before the induction. Find out what the client expects hypnosis to be like, and find out what they expect to be different afterward. Those are two different questions, and both matter.

If someone believes hypnosis only “worked” if they became unconscious, you need to fix that measuring stick before you begin. And if someone believes their problem will only be solved if they wake up feeling completely different, you need to know that too. Otherwise you can do excellent work and have the client dismiss the entire thing because they were looking for the wrong evidence.

So don’t merely preframe what you want your client to do during hypnosis. Preframe how you want them to interpret what happens. Tell them that hypnosis can feel ordinary, that they can hear everything, that they can think, move, remember what happened, and experience the whole thing without feeling as though they’ve been transported to another dimension.

And if they suddenly open their eyes in the middle of the session, don’t panic. Just utilize it and keep going.

- Mike Mandel