Me and Hypnosis and Competency Threat

I’m not a very good hypnotist. That’s just true. My wife is getting ready to argue with me on this. And even a couple of other people too. But they are wrong.

How do I know they’re wrong? Because I’m not working to get good.

We’ve been hanging out with some lovely shibari people recently, people on a very high level, and it always hits home the level of commitment that goes into a rope practice. Especially the most spectacular manifestations, like suspensions. I don’t know the number of professional rope teachers and dojos around the world, but I bet it’s staggering. People move to Japan for months just to learn.

The other night, I and another hypno top made ourselves quite grumpy while getting taught an intermediate single column tie. We realized it had been a long time since we were really bad at something. Since we had to work. I found myself pulling back, talking myself out of wanting to learn at all. Our little focus group has a mission of exploring hypnosis and rope bondage, but it’s in danger of going away if I don’t commit to being more than a beginner at rope.

And I thought why should I? In the last week I got to show off hypnosis in front of a couple of groups of people, and it was easy and I got praise. I got to feel like a badass.

But really, people love the feeling of hypnosis, and my partners and their powerful imaginations (and fetishes!) are making the magic happen. If everyone knew how easy it was, if hypnosis was even a fraction of how popular rope is - let alone something like classical music or Super Mario speed runs! - my skills would be seen as mediocre at best. The fact that it feels easy is not really a good sign.

There’s a few things I think I’m right on track with: Working with first timers. Consent conscious negotiation. Some twisty evil scene ideas. Intimate, unhurried scenes with highly motivated and imaginative people. Engineering positive environments for other people to get their hypnoplay on.

But I can feel myself getting cautious with my abilities, as though they are flimsy and wouldn’t stand up to bending or stretching. I’m not watching instructional videos, even ones recommended to me by friends. I’m not reading a book at the moment, and I’m not going hunting for new sources of ideas in various corners of the internet (e.g. reddit, discord). I’m writing less - certainly not keeping up the detailed logs I did at the beginning. Although I hypnotize people several days a week (usually khatsha!) I don’t do hours of hypnosis a week. I’m not following around hypnotists I admire and studying what they do - in fact I’m a bit avoidant and intimidated.

And in particular I’m not doing deliberate practice on specific skills, the kind of practice everyone agrees is necessary for real mastery, like Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours. There are plenty of skills I could use work on. I don’t have a decent hypnotic handshake - I’m often out of my body and not good at using it in general. I’m lacking in almost all the skills that stage hypnotists and street hypnotists have, such as speed, showmanship, and quickly getting attention and rapport. I’m not very fluent - I pause a lot, and have a rough time with intricate wordplay and random confusing nonsense. My voice could be improved a ton. I’m not great at asking people to play. I’m still often so freaked out just to be doing hypnosis with someone that I think I don’t truly connect with them and stay in the moment, give them my authentic self.

I’ve hit a wall that’s all too familiar, when I start to get kinda good at something, enough that my ego gets tied up with my competence. The fear arrives: what if you’re not that good?? What if you’ll never be good? You’ve put so much of yourself into this - wouldn’t it be better just to not to find out? To just keep having “potential”?

On another, more legitimate note, do I really want to make hypnosis about achievement and skill building? This is my sex life. And this is my play: this is about spontaneity and joy and silliness and ridiculous science fictional scenarios. This is my submissive hypnotized to blow me at a single command. This is living the dream. Why should this be work?

Here’s why. I think there’s something there, over that hill: a chance to be part of building something that has never actually existed before, in the form of large-scale hypno community and high level hypnosis skills. A chance to be one of the best in the world at something, however tiny the pond.

Who gets that kind of chance? Besides which, spontaneity, play and creativity are not the opposite of practice and learning - take the examples of fiction writing, or improv comedy. In those you practice and you learn to be able to play better, have a higher hit ratio, go farther into it and sustain it. While still striking out a lot of the time!

The only obstacle is this competency threat, this hangup that is such typical baggage of being raised male. Especially the stirrings of competitiveness, which is so useless: what this is really about is getting to the point where I can jam with the greats, tops and bottoms and switches, have so much fun, be wide open to learning, make so many memories and invent new things together, expand the playground together and fill it with toys.

So that’s why it feels great to say: I’m not very good at hypnosis! I kind of suck! (And I really suck at rope!) But who cares?

There’s specific things I want to do differently, now that I’ve gotten here, but basically I’m going to be a doofus and work and put the time in, just for its own sake. Just for the pleasure of seeing myself growing, for the new territories that open up, and to get to watch other people growing too. This erotic hypnosis thing is going to be big, people. This is going to be bananas. I’m going to be there.