Why Keep Trying with Someone Who is Hard to Hypnotize?

I only get to see Chel (not her real name) at long spaced intervals - she lives over 700 miles away - but whenever I do there's a powerful emotional and sexual connection. She's the first person I ever hypnotized, tremblingly and poorly (from Peter Masters' book). When I saw her recently I was so excited to show her how my skills had grown.

It didn't go well. She busted out of the fixation induction before it was done, and found the Elman induction annoying. I got her just barely under with 7 +/- 2, which I thought would be good for her highly analytical mind - but she said later that even while trying to monitor 8 things at once, she still had left over capacity to question to herself whether anything was happening! None of the deepeners I tried had much effect. I set myself to talking her hand into feeling light and lifting up off her leg, which it did eventually, but not for many, many minutes and only a little way. Then I suggested she would feel frozen in place for 30 seconds when she woke up. This didn't work even a little bit.

Hypnosis play is always sexy for me, and so was this, but at that point I was ready to set it aside for the rest of the visit, and focus on the many other hot and kinky activities we had available to us. But later Chel came to me and said she wanted to try it again.

Why keep going with someone who had told me from the beginning she scored low on tests of hypnotizability - and certainly hadn't had much success with my (still immature) hypnotic skills? I realized that Chel actually has many wonderful qualities for a hypnotee: she has sharp self-insight and a commitment to honesty (she always told me exactly what went well or didn't work at all), and she has a powerful imagination. Most importantly, we have a close, trusting relationship - and she's excited about doing hypnosis.

So we tried it again, but with a very important change: I listened to what she'd been trying to tell me all along, about what she wants out of hypnosis. In fact she had given me a hugely important roadmap, that I had ignored, in her description of her self-hypnosis episode, in the hot-and-heavy email exchange leading up to the visit. She had described lying on the bed and imagining her body becoming heavy and immobile, and how much she'd enjoyed the mental place of being out of control. She had repeated the hypnotic mantra we'd chosen together, and felt helpless and submissive.

Wiseguy doesn't like the progressive relaxation induction, and one of his objections, that it makes it impossible to do active things, certainly seemed to be true with the floating arm test (she later told me she had felt resentment about having to move). But clearly it was called for at this time. I had her undress and lie down, and also started a metronome sound on my phone, since she is auditory and had enjoyed that in the very first trances we'd had. I relaxed the muscles in her body from her feet up to her scalp, repeating suggestions that her body parts would feel heavy and sink into the bed. Finally,  Chel was deeply and pleasurably entranced.

I gave her plenty of the suggestions she enjoys, of being helpless and unable to move, which made her moan in pleasure. I also suggested that her skin would become more sensitive, and she gasped at my hand stroking her body and tweaking her nipples. I took a risk and decided to introduce a reinduction trigger (we had negotiated this as a possibility), something that hasn't worked with every hypnotee I've tried it with. The language I used kept coming back to her trust in me, and how falling into trance is a way that she can submit to me. I also used a touch association, my hand on her shoulder, which I haven't done in the past but which I think can add a lot of power. I also told her to take all the time she needed to incorporate it deeply into her mind, and to give a nod when she was ready (she later said this had been a big help).

I didn't give myself too much time to think about it when she came out of trance, but gave her the trigger quickly. She seemed to consider it for a moment, and then her eyes shut and her head relaxed to the side. I'll never get tired of seeing that. I brought her up and she was just as pleased and amazed as me. We kept going, over and over, in and out of trance, with me quickly deepening her with a stream of relaxation suggestions whenever she responded to the trigger. That busy analytical mind turned out to be a great ally, since it loved to instantly let go, when it felt trusting enough to do so. And it loves the feeling of trance: "I feel so pampered," she said.

Although the suggestions we worked on all had in common that they did not require much body movement, there was still an incredible amount of fun to be had with just a reinduction trigger. So paralysis, sensitization, guided imagery, and repetition of the mantra (her own mind decided that it would get harder and harder to say clearly the more hypnotized she got, which was exciting to listen to) And then later on, the trigger allowed for her to go into a trance sitting in a cemetary, on a bench with my arm around her. This trance turned out to be one of the most beautiful and moving experiences I've ever had. If we don't decide it was too personal, I will probably write a separate blog entry about that.

Every time I get to do an extended hypnosis session with someone, that's my school, more than any workshop I could ever take. There's a lot of lessons I learned from trancing with Chel, but the biggest one is that anyone who is drawn to hypnosis can be a good hypnotee: it's only a matter of listening, experimenting, and tuning into what they want and expect out of hypnosis. And that like D/s, the deeper the trust gets, the more powerful and amazing the hypnosis gets. And that kind of extraordinarily deep trust, where things start getting amazing, is something you're only ever going to get with a few special people over the course of your life.