The Ultimate Hypnosis Glossary

Activate, Dissociate, Associate, Collapse. John Overdurf calls it the meta pattern, because it is a pattern of patterns hiding inside a great many other interventions. You activate the problem state until the client actually feels it in the body, have them dissociate by shrinking a picture of themselves and pushing it down and away with their physical hands, associate them fully into a powerful resource state, then collapse the two together so the stronger state overwhelms the weaker one.

MMHA teaches that this works neurologically rather than by belief, so the client does not have to buy into it for it to land. Take SUDs before and after, and keep running it with fresh resource states until you get to zero.

Mike Mandel’s original guided imagery process, and the direct ancestor of Mindscaping. The subject walks into a vast unconscious art gallery holding an all areas ticket, and finds three draped paintings in turn. The first is framed as the problem they came in with. The second is framed as the real problem. The third is the solution. They study each one and nod when they are ready, then pick up a poster of the solution painting from the gift shop on the way out.

It is bottom up rather than top down, so it can be run entirely content free. The catch is that the whole thing hangs on the surprise of that second painting, which means you only get to use it once per person.

The permissive, deliberately non-specific language at the heart of Ericksonian work. That certain sensation. All those wonderful changes. You may begin to discover. Because nothing is actually specified, the subject fills in the blanks from their own experience and manufactures the meaning themselves, which is far more compelling than anything you could have supplied.

MMHA cheerfully calls this fluff, and then insists that fluff is vitally important. Pair it with covering every possibility, so the hand may rise, or sink, or stay exactly where it is, and whatever the subject does becomes a hypnotic response.

A greeting in Brilli, the language spoken only by the Spangler Iron Merchants of the Harappan River Valley. Bavartsch has over 200 meanings, depending on the context and pronunciation, ranging from "Hello!" to "Not you again…" to "You're a bastard!" Since the rise of the Brain Software Podcast, Bavartsch is a greeting used by clever hypnotists in the know, worldwide.

You’re not done until you remove all test suggestions in a therapy session, and entertainment suggestions onstage or in the street. Never let someone leave your presence without a blanket release, even if the suggestions did not seem to work! It can be as simple as saying: All testing suggestions (or entertainment suggestions) are cancelled and removed NOW! Your subject’s safety and comfort are always the Prime Directive.

Sometimes known as "Brad", Brado is the number one hypnotist in Meaford, Ontario, who contributes regularly to the Brain Software Podcast from Hypno North in his garage in Meaford. Brado has regular listeners in Shallow Lake Ontario too.

James Braid was a Scottish physician widely credited for coining the term "hypnotism". Braid specialized in eye-fixation methods of hypnotic induction and we often refer to the "Braid Induction" when having a subject stare intently at a coin or other small object.

Brain Software is the term used by Mike Mandel to describe the neural programming and habits that run human behavior. By using hypnosis and NLP, individuals can rewrite their faulty 'Brain Software' to eliminate stress, build confidence, and optimize peak performance.

An induction Mike developed that gets its power from involving the subject in generating their own trance, rather than leaving them sitting there like a bump on a log waiting for something to happen.

After a yes set and compliance set, they pick a focal point to stare at, which can be right across the room. Then, as they take a deep breath, they open their eyes wide as though breathing in through the eyes. As they exhale, the eyes close and the neck relaxes. Pace them with that’s right, and deeper each time. Three breaths is usually all it takes, and on the last one you say take that breath, eyes close, and go into a deep trance as you exhale. Change the breathing and you change everything. It also works well for self-hypnosis, lying down, with a point on the ceiling.

The hypnotic application of John Grinder’s Chain of Excellence, which means it installs a chosen state rather than just producing trance. Change the breathing, change the physiology, change the state, change the performance.

Start a compliance set, say eyes close now with intention rather than as a request, then pre-frame before you touch: you are going to lift their hand, and they should rest it lightly on your finger. Do not say relax your arm, because you do not want it heavy. Raise the hand as they inhale, lower it as they exhale, breathing audibly along with them, over an arc of six to eight inches. After several cycles you simply withdraw your finger. The hand keeps rising and falling on its own, because they are anticipating the lift, and you have a cataleptic limb moving in time with the breath without ever suggesting it would float.

You can't see what you're not looking for. You must be able to detect differences to be an excellent hypnotist, or even an excellent communicator. Calibrating a client means getting a baseline experience for what they look like, sound like, etc. Then you'll be able to know when something has changed.

A waxy flexibility of the limbs that is often concomitant with trance. The creation of catalepsy is a great inroad to hypnosis, and will leave hyper-analytical subjects wondering what happened when you awaken them. There’s nothing quite like eyes that won’t open or a floating arm to get your subject’s attention. Catalepsy often occurs spontaneously, so it’s very easy to create.

The granddaddy of the ideomotor tools. A small, heavy, well balanced pendulum, or a couple of washers on a string, held steady above a table. It swings north to south, east to west, or in circles, entirely from unconscious micro-movement in a hand the person believes is perfectly still.

MMHA has students train themselves first, imagining each change of direction without deliberately moving the hand, because once you can produce the signals you have them for life. With a client it becomes a yes and no channel: forward and back is a nod for yes, side to side is no, and a circle means I do not know, or I am not answering that yet. Mike is careful to separate this from radiesthesia, the dowsing of gold, oil and diagnoses, which is not what is being taught here.

Anything that assumes trance causes trance. Named for Clark Hull, Milton Erickson’s teacher, who set it out in Hypnosis and Suggestibility in 1933.

The usual approach is to build a trance first and then ask for a phenomenon. This principle runs the other way. Produce the phenomenon first, most often catalepsy, and the trance arrives by default, because the two are circularly connected. Mike illustrates it with the actor hired to sneeze on cue, who pretended to be hypnotized so convincingly that he went into trance for real.

Mike’s recommendation for the hyper-analytical subject who second-guesses everything, and children love it. It moves them out of their head into the kinesthetic and produces a great deal of catalepsy fast, with convincers built in.

Frame it as fun, then have them grip your first two fingers and stare at their hand while squeezing as hard as they can, while you keep demanding tighter. Partway through, add eyes close now and keep squeezing. After twenty or thirty seconds have them relax just enough for you to slide your fingers out, then tell them that that hand is beginning to lock, dissociating it by never calling it theirs. They awaken only as slowly as the hand opens. Note that the catalepsy is unsuggested, because you only ever said lock, never float. Have them grab the first two thirds of your fingers rather than jamming into the web between them, and take off any large rings first.

The step straight after the yes set. Instead of building agreement you build obedience, by giving three or more small instructions the subject simply carries out. Sit there. Feet flat on the floor. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath.

Once that momentum is rolling, and start to fall into a trance is just the next instruction in the sequence, and it gets accepted without ever being evaluated. Order matters. Compliance is harder to get than agreement, so you always run the yes set first.

The easiest induction in the curriculum, built entirely out of a compliance set, and it needs a subject who actually wants to go into trance. Run three to five yeses, move into compliance, and then simply keep the compliance going. Feet flat. Deep breath. Exhale. Hands apart and face down on your legs. Let your eyes close. Relax your neck.

Then convert the compliance into trance instructions and the subject keeps right on complying. The instructions are chosen so that obeying them produces the external trance indicators themselves, which is Clark Hull’s principle in action. Slow your pace a little at a time, and stay directive rather than suggestive. Let your head get heavy, not your head is getting heavy.

Whatever techniques you use with your client, do it with conviction and confidence. Your words, tone and body language need to be in sync to achieve congruence. Your client will sense it and will trust you implicitly. When all three of these factors are in sync you come across as someone who is authentic – someone who means what they say and says what they mean.

A purely verbal induction with no touch and no props, which makes it work beautifully on a whole room. You deliver a long series of paired contrasts between the two minds. The conscious mind is practical, the unconscious theoretical. The conscious thinks it is in charge, the unconscious knows it is. Logical against intuitive, words and numbers against metaphor and music, seven bits of information a second against millions.

Say it slowly and deliberately, easing into your hypnotic voice as you go. Verbally separating the two minds starts them actually separating, and every repetition of your unconscious carries the embedded command. Finish with eyes closed now, or sleep now.

A convincer is a suggestion (catalepsy, time distortion, etc.) given during trance that you can point back to later, to prove to the subject that she was hypnotized, i.e., Remember how you couldn’t open your eyes? Convincers ratify trance, making it real for the subject, after the fact. Contrast this with suggestibility tests, which are pre-hypnotic, and designed to create heteroaction.

A confusion induction Mike built out of a context-free text message prank. You ask a willing volunteer, with full eye contact and real intention: did you remember to warn Tilly about not going to the Costa Brava?

The extreme specificity with zero context sends the brain into a spin. Who is Tilly. Where is the Costa Brava. Was I supposed to remember something. Trance becomes the welcome way out. Say it once, say it again more slowly and with more intention, then eyes closed now. He first tested it as an induction at an Architecture of Hypnosis training in Toronto in May 2023.

What ignorant hypnotists call the Critical Faculty.

This is the correct term, it is not "critical factor". The Critical Faculty acts as the firewall of the mind, either permitting or preventing us from acting in response to suggestion. Dave Elman taught us that we bypass the critical faculty by establishing something called "selective thinking", which he often did using eyelid catalepsy.

The son of Danny's father. He first appeared in the Brain Software podcast in episode 69. Danny has dreams, the "Still Just Danny" stories inspire you to take control of your own life, not be limited by someone else's viewpoint.

The induction MMHA treats as effectively perfect, and students are told not to modify it. Mike’s rule is that you do not take a screwdriver to a new Porsche.

It runs in two halves. Physical relaxation comes first: yes sets about the fist, eyelid relaxation with a hard test, fractionation repeated until the arm produces a proper hand splat, and then mental relaxation through the number block. Yes sets, compliance sets, fractionation and convincers are all built into it already, which is why it does so much work in one pass. The recurring key phrase throughout is in a moment.

This directly follows an induction (See definition of induction below). It ensures that your client is truly zoned through the floor so that change work can begin. Just like inductions there are various deepeners that can be used to ensure a profound trance state. If an induction is good enough, a deepener may not be needed. It is advised that you use your discretion.

The strangest self-hypnosis method Mike says he ever invented. You sit facing an identical empty chair, imagine another you sitting in it, and then perform a full induction out loud on that imaginary person, watching them go limp and drop deep.

When the double is clearly in a powerful trance, you get up, sit down in that chair, and become them. The trance arrives instantly. Mike reports being genuinely unsettled by how well it worked on himself, and it can be taught to subjects as well.

Offering exactly two alternatives, both of which give you what you want, so the mind settles into choosing between them instead of hunting for a third option. Would you rather go into trance quickly, or slowly? The trance itself is never up for discussion.

Mike’s favorite demonstration was at another trainer’s workshop, where he offered the trainer a choice between the hypnosis chair and the trance chair. The chairs were identical. Making the choice was enough to carry the man into trance.

The opposite of glannative. Ok, we were just going to leave you hanging with that but since so many people ask here's the truth: This is a completely made up word by Mike Mandel. It means "bad".

The standard NLP term for whether a change fits the whole system of a person’s life, and in MMHA the shorthand for its number one rule: ecology first. The subject’s physical, mental and emotional safety outranks everything else, and they must leave in better shape than they arrived. Stage show, street hypnosis, therapy session, it makes no difference.

It extends outward to bystanders, including a theatre audience or a crowd watching a street demonstration, and it extends to the hypnotist’s own legal and professional safety too. It also turns up as a live instruction inside inductions, in the form of look after your own ecology.

MMHA teaches that you are not a person so much as a committee. Ego states, also called parts or sub-personalities, are burned into actual neural pathways rather than being tidy psychological constructs.

They are digital rather than analog. Only one state is executive at any moment, connected to the prefrontal cortex and running the show, and a stronger state can push the current one out. You run somewhere around five to fifteen states in a normal day, with perhaps a hundred more sitting below the surface and reachable only in deeper trance. The governing claim of the lesson is that every problem is an ego state issue.

A short command hidden inside a longer, innocuous sentence, so the conscious mind does not flag it but the unconscious hears it perfectly well. Sink deeper. Sleep now. Fall into a trance.

What makes it work is analog marking: a fractional pause before the phrase, a shift in tone, or a touch on the subject’s arm as you say it. Heavy handed, it is obvious and gets rejected. Subtle, it walks straight past the critical faculty. Mike first tested one on a Sheridan College stage show, where an embedded sink deeper dropped the whole group at once.

The deepest level of trance, also called plenary trance, meaning complete. Named for James Esdaile, the British army surgeon who performed painless surgery using mesmerism in nineteenth century Calcutta. Dave Elman later worked out how to produce it reliably: reach somnambulism with the Elman induction, then walk the subject down escalators to Levels A, B and C.

It is confirmed with four tests in a fixed order, and it is marked by anesthesia and catalepsy that nobody suggested, along with a general unwillingness to respond to anything at all. MMHA is firm that you never call it the hypnotic coma. That is a painted word, and it frightens people.

The observable physical signs that somebody is going into trance or is already there. MMHA teaches these instead of depth scales, because you can see them.

The list runs long: breathing going deeper and slower, postural slumping, the head tilt, a sigh, changes in facial tone and skin color, psychomotor retardation and delayed response, muscle twitches, a slowed or stopped blink reflex, fluttering eyelids, the hypnotic rash in the hollow of the throat, and lacrimation. All of it depends on calibration. You can only see a change if you noticed the baseline first.

Fractionation is a powerful hypnotic technique that involves repeatedly awakening a subject from trance and then putting them back into a trance. Each time the subject re-enters the hypnotic state, they go deeper, bypassing conscious resistance rapidly.

This is the sound someone makes when going into trance. Ok, maybe it doesn't actually happen, and we've just been hypnotized to internally imagine this strange sound.

This is the opposite of dursative (see above). Glannative is the accepted British spelling, while we also accept the American spelling "Glanative" with just one "n". Glannative means good, and is a totally fabricated word that we use with reckless abandon in all podcasts, hypnosis trainings and elsewhere.

MMHA calls this the queen mother of hypnotic pain relief. In trance the subject imagines pushing a bare hand into a snowdrift, or into a bucket of iced beer if snow is not part of their world, until a glove shaped numbness covers the hand and part of the wrist.

Once they signal that the numbness is real, you compound it by transferring it hand to hand to foot to foot and back again, doubling it with each move, then have them place the numb hand where the discomfort is and let it flow in. Mike distinguishes anesthesia, meaning no sensation, from analgesia, meaning touch without pain, and teaches the same process for emotional pain.

Graphology, or handwriting analysis, is the science of determining an individual's personality traits by examining the unconscious micro-movements in their writing. Mike Mandel Hypnosis teaches graphology as a powerful tool to build instant rapport and gather intake information for a hypnosis session.

Mike’s inversion of Erickson’s hand levitation induction, and one of the few places he thinks he has improved on Erickson. The original is laborious because it fights gravity. This one lets gravity do the work.

After a yes set, the subject holds one hand in the air palm down, looks at it, and closes their eyes. You then ask them to imagine, or pretend, that the hand is getting heavier. The imagining matters, because it is not a claim they can inwardly argue with. Each increment the wrist collapses and the hand sinks takes them deeper, and touchdown is the completion of the trance. Never tell them they cannot hold it up. Tell them it is just becoming too much trouble, which offers an option instead of issuing a challenge.

MMHA’s name for the arm drop test inside the Elman induction, and more precisely for the sound a properly relaxed arm makes on the way down. You warn the subject, lift the hand a couple of inches by the thumb, tell them not to help, and let go. A genuinely relaxed hand splats down like a wet dishcloth. It stops dead. It does not bounce, drift or float.

If you do not get the splat, fractionate a few more times before moving on to the number block. Mike formally christened the term mid-lesson while running a group, and it stuck.

A rapid induction usually credited to Milton Erickson, though the hypnotic history suggests the 1940s stage hypnotist Ralph Slater got there first. You extend your hand, and as the subject reaches to shake it you withdraw yours, reach around the thumb, turn their palm toward their face, point at the center of it, tap it, and send the hand traveling toward their face with the suggestion that they sleep on contact.

It works by interrupting a TOTE. Shaking their hand properly afterward closes the loop, and tends to produce spontaneous amnesia for the whole thing.

Andre Weitzenhoffer spoke extensively about this subject, and it’s a good word to know. Basically, anytime you pass a hypnotic task, it increases your predisposition to pass another entirely different one, thus increasing hypnotic response. It’s why suggestibility tests can be useful in some settings. Heteroaction paves the way to trance. It’s also why stage hypnotists can cause stronger and stranger responses as the show develops. Also discussed in our top 10 hypnosis terms post.

Another excellent term from Weitzenhoffer. Homoaction basically states that each time you repeat a hypnotic activity (including trance itself) the response will be stronger, up to a point. It’s the reason fractionation works. We also see homoaction onstage. If subjects feel a pinch when you snap your fingers, it will be stronger the second time, and even stronger the third, etc., until eventually the response levels out when the law of diminishing returns kicks in.

Mike’s name for the residual suggestibility that can hang around for a couple of minutes, sometimes up to five, after somebody is brought out of a deep trance. If you prefer something that sounds more scientific, call it trance persistence or trance residue.

The risk is that anyone with prestige can land an unintended suggestion in that window. Mike’s cautionary tale is the client who was fixed after ninety minutes of work, ran out to her controlling mother, and had the whole thing undone by Are you sure? You don’t look any different to me. The fix is clean states. Deep trance and wide awake, cleanly severed, with an adequate count out and the eyes opening on the way back.

The hypnotic pre-talk is the crucial conversation a hypnotist has with a subject before formal trance begins. Its purpose is to dispel myths, alleviate fears, build absolute authority, and set the expectation that hypnosis will be completely successful.

Sometimes a client is in such a deep state of trance that it is best to have them not speak so as not to disturb the state. In such cases these signals come in handy to help you as a hypnotist assess the way forward. If you do plan to use them though, it is important you remember to establish what they mean before you lead your client into trance. This can be a simple lift of a finger on either hand or the shake or nod of the head to indicate a response.

Taking whatever happens in the room that neither you nor the subject caused, and folding it into the trance as evidence of deepening. A siren, a slamming door, a dog barking outside, a creaking floor. Nothing gets ignored and nothing gets apologized for, because everything becomes part of the induction.

A passing fire truck becomes and as that siren recedes into the distance, your trance can go deeper. The cautionary example is the young hypnotist who told his subject to pay no attention to the creaking floor, and thereby put her entire attention on the creaking floor. Anything you ask a subject to ignore becomes the loudest thing in the room.

The old school would suggest at length that your eyes are getting heavy while an actively minded subject sat there thinking it is not working. MMHA’s position is that you do not need eye closure at all, and if you want it, do not suggest it while the critical faculty is still on duty. Just tell them to close their eyes.

Here the closure happens by increments. Feet flat, deep breath, a focal point up near the ceiling, and on each exhale the eyes close very slightly further while they keep staring. Each exhalation closes them a little more and starts the trance automatically. When the lids finally meet, tell them they can just stick there, comfortable, and say sleep now. The underrated part is that the incremental closure has been producing eyelid catalepsy the whole way down.

The process by which you lead the client into trance. There are a host of methods you can choose from. Use techniques that work best for you. There are inductions that can also be easily done online. Others that need to be done in person can be tweaked to apply to an online session. Ensure that you are constantly calibrating the client as each person is unique and the rate at which they go into trance differs. Calibrating will help you customise your words/session for the person in front of you.

The original event, usually early in childhood, that builds the platform a phobia is later constructed on. MMHA keeps it separate from the activating event, which is the later incident that switches the phobia on, and from subsequent sensitizing events, which are every later encounter that cranks it up.

Mike’s example is the client who dated her spider phobia to a plastic spider at twelve. The actual initial sensitizing event was a centipede in her bed at a family cabin, years earlier. Clear the ISE and the rest tends to collapse by ripple effect.

Erickson’s, and Mike is explicit that he did not come up with it but loves it. Instead of swinging an actual watch you have the subject imagine one, so you carry no props at all.

Set them up with a compliance set, say eyes close now, then have them picture a pendulum swinging back and forth. Enrich the hallucination by asking what it is made of, what color it is, whether a chain or a string holds it. Tell them the swing may speed up or slow down, which is exactly what Erickson’s patients reported, and that all they need do is keep watching and go deeper. Once they are under, stop mentioning the pendulum. Erickson’s variant used a metronome, so let the subject pick whichever they prefer.

Metaphor type two, built in advance so that every element maps one to one onto something in the client’s life: their situation, their problem, and the solution or the insight. Isomorphic means a one to one correspondence.

The mapping must never be obvious, so you change the gender, the age and the setting. Two hard rules come with it. Never pre-frame it, and never explain it afterward. Explaining it bridges the whole thing to conscious awareness and switches the motor off.

He's a real person who told horrendously long and pointless stories. When you catch someone going ON and ON and ON with no clear point, feel free to call them out for telling a Ken Sweatman story.

A catalepsy setup bolted onto the front of an ordinary pacing and leading induction, and it takes five to ten seconds. After a yes set and a compliance set, you ask to borrow the subject’s hand, lift it lightly by the wrist with their eyes already closed, and then release it so gently that they cannot tell whether you are still holding it or not.

That ambiguity is the whole trick. Not knowing makes the hand the focal point of attention, which produces catalepsy on its own, and the trance arrives by default courtesy of the Clark Hull principle. Critically, you never announce that the hand is going to float.

A rapid catalepsy setup taught to Mike by his mentor Derek Baumer around 1998, and a sibling to the Kinesthetic Ambiguity induction. You pre-frame an imaginary little shelf, pick the hand up by the wrist rather than by the hand, rest it there, and carry on with whatever induction you were going to run anyway.

Two mistakes get called out. Dithering with the wrist because you are afraid the hand will drop, and positioning the arm out away from the body instead of keeping the elbow near the waist, which sets you fighting the subject’s own muscles.

A hypnotic word that you use to express shock, surprise or relief.

Mike’s confusion piece, delivered as one long run-on hypnotic sentence stuffed with nominalizations. Partway through he announces that there are three important things about hypnosis, and then never marks what the first one actually was. Later he invites the subject to forget it.

The subject’s brain concludes it has forgotten something, and Mike resonates the amnesia theme until it strengthens itself. It closes with eyes close now. It works one to one or on a large audience, and Mike frames it more as a showcase of hypnotic power than as a workhorse induction.

The Mandel Method is a modernized, principle-based approach to hypnosis that completely abandons the use of written scripts. It focuses on teaching the underlying architecture of human influence, allowing practitioners to adapt dynamically to any situation.

Mike’s metaphorical frame for what is actually happening in a session, and he is explicit that it is a model rather than reality. The client is stuck in a labyrinth, the Greek maze built by Daedalus, complete with dead ends, doors that lead nowhere, looping repeated hallways that map neatly onto addictions, very high walls, and a minotaur somewhere in there. The labyrinth is the present state. The exit is the target state.

The part that matters most: you do not go in and drag them out, and you do not kill the monster for them. You stay detached in observer position, calibrate, hold rapport, illuminate the path, hand them the tools and the weapons, and then future pace to confirm they actually got out.

The Mandel Triangle is a foundational framework as taught in the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy. It states that all successful hypnosis requires three core elements: Congruence, Confidence and Conviction (or Expectation). In the middle of the triangle, we put Calibration, which is always required! If a hypnotist masters these areas, hypnosis becomes effortless.

Mike’s newest ego state protocol, and it arrived by accident. One of his own states, Blurter, was transformed into Presenter, and then kept getting complimented and promoted. Presenter traded his laptop and chair for a control panel of dials and switches, renamed himself Controller, then Master Controller, and now runs most of Mike’s life with a staff of four other ego states and a weekly systems check.

To build your own you use ideomotor signals to invite your most organized and resourceful state forward, ask its name, thank it, and offer it the job. It then recruits helpers and builds a control panel covering every area of your life. Thank it and never bully it. It is you.

Also called the unconscious deepener. It hands the entire job of deepening over to the subject’s own unconscious mind, which knows the terrain far better than you do.

You say your unconscious mind with a deliberate pause in the middle, which embeds you are unconscious, then tell them their unconscious already knows there is a level deeper than this one and ask it to take them there. A descending elevator sound is optional. Mike developed it on stage and watched an entire room of subjects visibly sink at the same moment.

Mindscaping is a proprietary, closed-eye therapeutic technique developed by Mike Mandel. It provides a simple, fast, and highly effective way to create profound shifts in a client's internal map of reality, often resolving deep-seated issues without requiring the client to share painful details.

The Navigator System is Mike Mandel's proprietary framework for lasting personal transformation. It teaches individuals how to bypass conscious willpower and give their unconscious mind direct instructions so they start living the life they want automatically, in five second increments throughout the day.

Metaphor type three, and MMHA calls it the queen mother of all metaphors. Bandler’s name for it is stacking realities. You open story one, segue into story two, then story three, deliver one or two sentences of direct suggestion at the very bottom, then close all the loops in reverse order without a break.

Three loops is the minimum needed to make that bottom suggestion amnestic. Five is better. The content of the stories is irrelevant, because their only job is to occupy the conscious mind. Mike adds one deliciously diabolical trick: close a fourth loop you never opened, which deepens the confusion and pushes the suggestion further out of reach.

Linking pacing and leading statements into a single sentence that never resolves, using connectors like and, and as, and and since. The brain keeps waiting for the resolution, stays with you while it waits, and gets its attention redirected the whole time.

This is why you can never run out of things to say in an induction. MMHA prefers and as over a plain and, because it implies there is an actual reason the two pieces are connected, even when there is not.

The mental relaxation half of the Elman induction, and a very old technique in its own right. The subject counts backward aloud from one hundred, saying deeper relaxed after each number, while you coach them to banish the numbers. Most people are out of numbers by ninety-three or ninety-four.

They only have to disappear for a second or two, and you need a yes or a nod to all gone. Never ask whether the numbers are still there, because asking brings them straight back. For mathematicians and actuaries, who tend to enjoy numbers far too much to lose them, substitute the alphabet.

Nominalization Unspecified Verb Integration. MMHA’s own packaging of Ericksonian artful vagueness into something you can actually be taught. You string nominalizations together with unspecified verbs, joined by simple linkages like and, as, if and when, and build a run-on sentence that never lands.

A nominalization is an abstract noun with no physical substance, and Mike’s test is whether you could put it in a wheelbarrow. A 747 goes in a wheelbarrow if the wheelbarrow is big enough. Empowerment does not. Because the words carry no specific content, the client supplies all the meaning, so nothing you say can jar them out of trance. It was originally Nominalization Unspecified Verb Induction, until the phrase induction induction got silly and Timothy September suggested integration.

Mike’s coinage, punning on the fact that painted has pain right there in it. Painted words are emotionally loaded trigger words that get coded in the amygdala and set people off: agony, horror, nightmare, torture, suffering, torment, grief, misery, heartbreak, and pain itself.

Because trance amplifies human experience, these do real damage to somebody who is already under. MMHA teaches you to downgrade them to softer language, so you get that discomfort, that unpleasant feeling, that upset you experienced. The unconscious knows exactly what you mean. This is the single stated exception to the rule of feeding the client’s own language back to them.

An official sounding phrase originally designed as a confusion mechanism by Mike Mandel. It's very important that you pressit the blotz immediately, and you can find out more on podcast episode 23. Also sometimes referred to as the non-existent "Branson Protocol".

The respect and admiration you earn from your interaction with your client. This is typically based on their perception of your qualities and skills. If you have prestige with a client, they are likely to go into a deep trance very quickly and will be more open to your suggestions.

Rapid inductions are hypnotic techniques designed to bypass the critical faculty and induce trance in one to three minutes. Unlike traditional progressive relaxation, rapid inductions often utilize catalepsy. Rapid inductions are different than so-called instant inductions, which rely on shock or surprise.

This refers to the relationship between a hypnotist and their client. It is that intangible quality that brings your client’s focus front, right and centre to what you have to say. Without building a rapport during your interaction, any direct suggestions you make in your session will have little to no effect on them.

An induction Mike built from Human Givens theory on the logic that if anything which assumes trance causes trance, then building the components of a REM state will produce one.

The subject holds head and body still, mimicking the way the pontine tegmentum shuts down motor neurons during REM sleep, tracks your finger side to side and diagonally for five to ten seconds, then closes the eyes and keeps tracking the imagined finger. You pull them gently forward with a touch at the occiput and say sleep, which fires a PGO spike and drops them straight in.

Bringing a remembered pleasant activity back to life by pacing only what must be, or could be, in that experience. In the MMHA curriculum it is strictly a practice exercise for students, never something you run on a client, and never with an unpleasant memory.

The rules: revive a style of experience rather than one specific event, gather enough detail that you do not jar them, do not direct the action like a film director, and do not linearize it, just jump straight into the middle. Debrief afterward by asking what intensified the experience and what pulled them out of it.

MMHA’s framework for the direct model of hypnosis, and the paradigm that lets a new student start helping people almost immediately. The steps are: demystify hypnosis, suggestibility tests, induction, deepen trance, convincers, change work, and awaken.

Each step ships with a default technique taught alongside it, so a student always has something concrete to run. The steps are modular, which is the real point. Any induction or deepener from the Ericksonian side of the curriculum can be dropped straight into the relevant slot.

Mike’s own induction, and it runs on a piece of misdirection. After a yes set and a compliance set you slide your fingertip under the subject’s index finger, do all the lifting yourself, and ask them to press down on your finger very, very lightly. Then you keep correcting them. No, even lighter. After two or three cycles you stop moving your finger altogether, so the only way left to press more lightly is to back off, and the moment they do, the finger is floating.

The catalepsy is unsuggested, which is why the subject becomes responsive to everything else so quickly, and why you never have to remove it at the end. Use the index finger specifically, warn them before you touch since their eyes are closed, and lift gently enough that the knuckle does not crack.

Somnambulism is the deepest functional state of hypnosis, characterized by profound physical relaxation and high mental suggestibility. In this state, the critical faculty is bypassed, allowing the hypnotist to deliver transformative suggestions directly to the unconscious mind.

A zero to ten self-rating of how bad a problem feels right now, taken as a baseline before change work and checked again afterward, so both of you can see the shift in a number rather than a vague sense that things are better.

MMHA teaches you to write it down and circle it, and to put the person mentally into the triggering situation so you get an honest reading in the present tense. Ask them to make the feeling worse too. Proving they can raise it shows the unconscious it has the power to lower it. Always aim for zero. With small children, have them show you the size with their hands instead of giving a number.

The smaller building blocks inside the representational systems, and the code the brain uses to store every thought and memory. Distance, size, color or grayscale, 3D or flat, focus, framing, sound volume and direction, the temperature and location of a feeling.

MMHA’s point is that we never respond to the world itself, only to these internal representations, which is why shifting the submodalities changes the experience. The general rule: bigger, closer, brighter, more vivid and clearer makes an image hit you harder. Smaller, further away, grainier, grayer and flatter makes it hit you less.

These are exercises hypnotists do with subjects in order to cause the subject to believe he or she is a great hypnotic subject, and in order to build heteroaction (see definition above). They are classically used in stage hypnosis and street hypnosis but can also be used in the therapy room. Many stage hypnotists can completely skip any formal hypnotic induction if they have enough prestige and get good enough results just from the suggestibility testing process. Learn all about suggestibility tests here.

This refers to an unspoken, unconscious contract between two people. It’s like a domino effect, where doing one thing automatically hints at compliance with the other. You can opt to use it at the beginning of your session just as you are inducing trance or tail end it as your client is coming out of trance.

The induction Mike used through the 1990s with children referred by pediatricians, including through Toronto’s Sick Kids Hospital. The child rolls up a sleeve, closes their eyes, and finds a brightly colored tennis ball in a bucket of warm water beside the chair, then pushes it under again and again, feeling the warm water and the give of the ball while you deliver suggestions.

Here is the joke, and the whole point. There is no tennis ball, and there is no bucket. Hallucinating the components is Clark Hull’s principle doing its work: anything that assumes trance causes trance. Mike notes that children never need a deepener.

MMHA’s test for whether a client is actually ready to change, and Mike calls it the difference that makes the difference. The client has to congruently hold all three parts: something has to change, the thing that has to change is me, and it has to change now.

Miss any one of the three and there is no threshold, and the work will be a waste of everybody’s time. This is why technically competent hypnotic work sometimes fails. You never try to drag someone to threshold, and you watch carefully for triangulation, which is a third party booking or pushing the session on somebody else’s behalf.

We use the words "trance" and "hypnosis" interchangeably and don't differentiate between them. You could argue whatever you want, such as trance happens all the time without doing it on purpose. Whatever. Trance is hypnosis.

Mike’s own, invented more than thirty years ago out of attention-shifting experiments with his sensei Gary Fu, and also called the three B induction. Where a double bind offers two alternatives that both get you what you want, a triple bind offers three, which forces the subject to go inside and reconsider.

You fixate on the subject’s right eye with riveted, expectant attention, move them into the kinesthetic by asking what sensation they notice, feed their answer back, then run the bind: is it moving, or intensifying, or are you more aware of it? The mnemonic is MIMA. Place the second or close to the question so they do not answer before you have finished. It works from several feet away.

Taking whatever the subject themselves does and feeding it back as evidence that the trance is deepening. A shift in the chair, a smile, fluttering eyelids, a swallow, a yawn, all of it becomes and that can take you even deeper. Nothing the subject does is wrong, which is what makes the Ericksonian loop unbreakable.

MMHA names two exceptions. Chewing gum and fidgeting cannot be utilized, because telling somebody that the more they fidget the deeper they go produces exactly one result, which is more fidgeting.

Vaded is short for invaded, a term coined by Dr. Gordon Emmerson, and MMHA treats it as central to all change work. A vaded ego state is one that has been invaded by fear, anger, sadness or trauma. It is stuck in the past, holding emotions that stopped being relevant a long time ago, and whenever it becomes executive the client feels that negative emotion all over again.

The rule that comes with it: you have to get the vaded state itself into the executive to heal it, never a bystander state that will happily discuss the problem from a safe distance. And the client has to feel the emotion in the body. Feel it, then heal it.

Another made-up word from the Brain Software podcast. This is the greeting given by Level 42 and higher in the esteemed hypnotic secret society of The Bag Men of Edward the Confessor.

A classic eye fixation induction built on James Braid’s methods from the mid 1800s, and the first induction Mike ever performed, in 1965, on Walter B. Gibson himself. Gibson responded by making his own hand numb and pushing pins through it.

The subject stares at something distinctive: a medallion, a ring, a pen, a penny, even your fingertip. Avoid a bright light, which is simply annoying. Hold it twelve to fourteen inches away and deliberately above their focal plane, because raising the eyes engages the levator palpebrae muscles and starts an alpha wave. Then count them through cycles of eyes closed on one, open on two, feeding suggestions of eye fatigue. The trick is in the timing. Start with even intervals, then make the closed periods progressively longer and the open ones shorter.

Getting a subject to agree three to five times, out loud or silently, before you do anything else. Three is usually enough. It builds momentum and quietly dissolves resistance, which is why MMHA teaches it as the first thing you run when a client walks in.

It is also called the agreement frame, because internal agreement counts every bit as much as a spoken yes. Salespeople use it identically, as Mike discovered when he caught one running a yes set on him at his own front door.