Can you perform hypnosis

Answer 1

I've hypnotised many people, including all of my past girlfriends, and my wife. In intimate situations it's easy to hypnotise by direct, sustained eye fixation, touch, and direct verbal direction and suggestion. Under such circumstances, where high levels of rapport and trust are well established, all that's usually needed to induce trance is about ten seconds of very intense gazing into the eyes combined with light rhythmical touch of, say, wrists or temples, and a few very gently delivered but insistent commands.

Hypnosis for professional purposes (eg counselling) generally requires more sustained and subtle approaches, and certainly never involves intimate touch! Usually, an indirect, "conversational", approach will be taken, involving elaborate "story telling" (tailored to the client's experiences and expectations) or "guided visualization"/ progressive relaxation. Sometimes a "fascination" (ie a means of "fixing" attention - eg asking the client to look at a dot on the ceiling positioned just above the natural line of sight, which also tires the eyes) will be used, or the client might be asked to count backwards from one hundred, or mimic my hand movements, whilst listening to instructions, but often such techniques are not needed - gentle direct suggestions are enough. Once entranced (easy to spot by posture, immobility, facial expression, eye glazing/ lack of focus etc) it's easy to deepen the person's trance by a variety of exercises designed to convince that hypnosis is indeed occurring and demonstrate its potential as a therapeutic tool.

Hypnosis for fun is different again. Volunteers for such experiences usually have a set of expectations about what will happen, and to some extent it's necessary to conform to these, usually by using a range of "rituals" or "performance" techniques, in order to induce hypnosis. So, in such scenarios methods like "magnetic hands", swinging pendulums/ watches, spinning spirals, and "mesmeric" hand passes might be deployed. Also, most expect to be commanded to "Sleep!", so it's generally useful to do this at some point during trance induction. When hypnotised they are not, of course, asleep, but in a relaxed, hyperattentive, monoideistic (ie attention intensely focused on one idea, that of "being hypnotised") state, but most think they are, so it's helpful to confirm their expectation.

Hypnosis is really nothing more than an elaborate, intensely focused form of interpersonal communication, and as with all forms of such interactions, outcomes are invariably most effective when the ideas, beliefs, and expectations of the person with whom one is communicating are validated, and utilised to meet their hopes and expectations.