Want to know how to hypnotize resistant subjects who are deliberately trying to sabotage your hypnosis?
Sometimes people will claim that they want to be hypnotized, but will do everything in their power to resist going under. In order to hypnotize resistant subjects, all you have to do is deliberately embed things in your hypnosis for them to track, while the actual hypnosis itself happens on another level. So if you’d like to know how to hypnotize someone even when they are trying to mess up your hypnosis, read on!
All the way back when I first started hypnotizing people, it wasn’t long before I ran into a problem.
You see, after the initial hurdle of actually getting that first subject into hypnosis, things went well for quite some time. I was thinking that hypnosis was amazing, and honestly was having trouble seeing why some other hypnotists would sometimes not get their subject into trance.
Then it happened.
I hypnotized someone, and nothing. She didn’t go into hypnosis. Not only that, but she seemed to be actively tracking what I was doing, and undoing it. At the time, I didn’t have any kind of strategy to deal with this, so I just kept right on hypnotizing her until she dropped. Luckily she was just as keen on experiencing hypnosis as I was on figuring out what was going on. It took weeks.
There had to be a better way, right?
As it turns out, there is!
How many things can we track at once?
But before we get into that, let’s go on a quick journey inside the mind of our subjects.
Not all resistant hypnosis subjects are deliberately resistant.
In fact, the vast majority of them definitely want to be hypnotized. Other than trolls, people don’t tend to ask someone to hypnotize them unless they actually want it. So when they are resistant, quite often they just don’t know how to shut down the part of their mind that is sabotaging the hypnosis.
Read more: How to Have an Amazing Experience of Hypnosis
When people are resistant to hypnosis, it’s often because they don’t know how to shut down the part of their mind that is sabotaging the hypnosis.
The good news is that it doesn’t matter much why our subject is resistant to being hypnotized. Whether it’s because something is going on inside them, or they are a troll trying to mess up your work, either way, the solution is the same.
For decades now we’ve known that human minds can only track between 5 and 9 things at a time. As hypnotists, we can exploit this to guide even the most resistant subjects into hypnosis.
What to do to hypnotize resistant subjects
And as you might guess, the solution here is extremely simple. Simple, but it does require a bit of work to install inside your own mind as a hypnotist. Once it is there though, resistant subjects become a thing of the past, so it is well worth it.
Here’s how it typically works. If someone has an analytical mind and is trying to spot what you’re doing, you give them stuff that is relatively easy for them to spot in order to occupy that part of their mind. And you have to give them enough stuff that they don’t have any of those 9 things they can track left. Then, you do the actual hypnosis itself on an entirely different level.
My good friend Nico refers to these deliberately-easy-to-spot parts of hypnosis as Ducks, and the term has caught on, at least in the circle of hypnotists I hang out with. I can only presume she named them after decoy ducks.
Ducks are things that we do during a hypnosis session that look like hypnosis and are easy for your subject to spot.
When we use ducks like this, what tends to happen is that our subject just drops into hypnosis. The only way they can resist at this point is by not paying attention, and that’s easy to spot.
So how do you actually do it in practice?
Unfortunately, this is where the work comes in.
How to hypnotize resistant subjects
In order to be successful, you potentially have to have 9 ducks running for them to track. And then on top of that you have to also do the actual hypnosis, along with whatever changes and so on you were planning.
You can possibly see the flaw here: How do we track all 9 ducks and our hypnosis and the changes and our subject’s responses when we can only track at most 9 things at once ourselves?
And since we never really know which subjects will be resistant, we have to do it with all of them!
Surely it exceeds our own capacity, doesn’t it?
And those are valid points.
As it turns out though, we don’t actually have to do it all consciously. This is where the work comes in.
Because the fact is that our minds simply don’t have the resources to do it all at once consciously. But we do have those resources unconsciously. So if we want to be able to hypnotize the most resistant subjects, what we have to do is take the time to make a habit out of 9 ducks.
The easiest way to use ducks in hypnosis is to make them into habits so that they happen automatically without us thinking about them.
Use Ducks to Bypass Resistance to Hypnosis
Now this might sound like a lot of work. As luck would have it, we don’t have to do it all at once. Because in reality, most people who are trying to spot what you are doing will be satisfied that they’ve figured it out after the first one or two things that they find.
Ultimately, you want to aim to have at least 9 and probably even more of these ducks built into the way you do hypnosis. And in the short term, adding in even one or two will greatly enhance the effectiveness of your hypnosis.
As I mentioned earlier, ducks can be anything that looks like hypnosis and is easy to spot. So to start with, choose just two things that you can do that look like hypnosis, and practice them.
A lot.
You want to get those two things to the point where they happen automatically when you go to hypnotize someone without you even having to think about it.
So what can you use as ducks?
For a starting point, you might want to try some simple hypnotic language patterns and some words that people associate with hypnosis.
Language patterns might include:
- The more you X, the more Y
- Now you might be thinking X, which means Y
- Any statement at all that is a universal truth
And words that people often associate with hypnosis might include:
- Relax
- Calm
- Deeper and deeper
Each of these has a tiny effect in moving your subject further into trance. And there are so many of them available that all you have to do is make a habit of using a handful of them in your hypnotic patter and your subjects will have plenty to try to take apart.
Once you’ve done that, your mind is freed up to do the actual hypnosis in whatever way you might choose.
Pick just one or two ducks to begin with, and make them into habits, before adding more.
Want a Shortcut to Hypnotize Resistant Subjects?
And of course, when you have enough experience, the entire process of hypnotizing someone becomes a habit and you don’t really have to do a thing.
When you reach that level, all you have to do is go into trance and allow them to follow.
To begin though, pick just a tiny handful of these hypnotic constructs and practice them until they become habits. Then add on more.
You’ll find that you quickly get to the point where you have so many of them embedded into the way that you speak that no-one has enough conscious resources to track everything you’re doing.
And when you do that, hypnotizing even the most resistant subjects becomes effortless.
