How to Use Hidden Hypnotic Commands in Normal Conversation

In one of Edgar Alan Poe's short stories, a stolen letter was hidden out in the open on the desk of one of the characters. Because it was in an envelope from another writer, the searchers looked at it, but never thought to check inside the envelope. In a similar way, it is possible to hide hypnotic commands and suggestions inside of normal conversation. These commands go unnoticed by the conscious minds of a listener, but they are understood and acted upon as hypnotic commands by the listener's unconscious mind.

The method of inserting hypnotic commands, also known as embedded commands, is very simple and easy to learn. It is something that you are already doing in everyday conversation without being aware of it. To put another message inside of a sentence, simply emphasize the words in your message by changing your voice tone, or volume of the words intended as commands. It is easy for many people not to notice that there is a second message inside the sentence, because consciously they are focused on the content of the overall sentence. You can begin to understand how this process works as you notice the emphasized words in this article.

How it works is simply that the unconscious mind recognizes the emphasized words as a second message. Just emphasizing a few words, however, is not enough. The emphasis needs to be repeated several times for the mind to recognize that there is a pattern inside the sentences. And, the emphasis needs to be consistent. It would be ineffective, for example, to say some words louder, other words softer, and speak yet other words much more s_l_o_w_l_y and expect all of them to be understood as part of a single message. Only the words that are emphasized in exactly the same way will be taken to be part of a single message inside the sentence as a whole.

So, will giving someone hidden hypnotic commands result in their instant obedience to your every whim? It depends on what you are asking them to do. If you ask them to do something as simple as stand up, or scratch their nose, you will get a lot of positive responses. Those are a good types of commands to give someone when you are just learning, because the responses are immediate and easily seen. You might get your spouse to volunteer to cook dinner for you, but you will not get strangers to empty their wallets, take up pole vaulting as a hobby, or buy your junk car for $30,000.

And, be aware that some people, for whatever reasons, will just not respond to the commands. This will be true particularly in the beginning as you are learning. Of course, with more practice and experience, your ability to use hidden hypnotic commands effectively and influence others will increase.

When first learning about hidden hypnotic commands, some people wonder if using them is ethical. One way of thinking about it is that only people are ethical. Tools are neither ethical nor unethical. A hammer can be used to smash a car headlight, or build a house. Another way of thinking about it is that we emphasize words in normal speech already. For example, a small child may say, “Buy me some ice cream!” or an adult might say, “I really want you to listen to this” unknowingly using hypnotic command tonality.

Learning about hidden hypnotic commands allows us to use them intentionally, and to choose to have greater influence in our own communications. And, of course, as we learn about hidden hypnotic commands, we become more aware of them, so we can consciously choose to reject commands from other people if we think the commands are not in our best interests. We may not, for example, want to let an unethical used car salesperson use hidden hypnotic commands to create an urgency to buy just any vehicle the management wants to get off the lot. On the other hand, we may wish to accept suggestions for learning a desirable new skill quickly and easily, or to find more joy in life.

It is fun way to learn by simply practicing using hidden hypnotic commands with the people who you know. In the beginning you can pick simple messages, such as “lift your arm”, or “touch your face”. As you become more comfortable using hidden hypnotic commands, you can begin putting in other types of messages. Perhaps you might begin giving people commands to get into a happy mood, or to choose your preferred restaurant for lunch. You will certainly enjoy noticing people's responses to hidden hypnotic commands when you practice using them.

You may be surprised to learn that even in the beginning when using hidden hypnotic commands seems awkward, very few, if any, will notice that you are doing anything out of the ordinary. That is simply because most people are unaware that hidden hypnotic commands even exist. Emphasizing certain words is normal in conversation anyway. So, feel free to playfully practice hidden hypnotic commands with anyone. Just remember the more you use them, the more powerful will be your influence, and the more comfortable you will become with your new skills.

Will Someone in Hypnosis Take Suggestions From Anyone?

I realized the answer to the question in the title rather dramatically in a hypnotherapy class that I was teaching some years ago.

I was demonstrating a way of using an indirect suggestion to have someone who was hypnotized go back into hypnosis quickly at a later time. That kind of rapid trance induction anchor can be a real time saver for a hypnotherapist.

To demonstrate, I led one of my students into a nice, comfortable state of hypnosis. And then I said, “In a moment I am going to touch your right hand, and that will be the signal for you to open your eyes and rouse your self up completely.” Then I said, “And, you know what that means about your left hand.”

And, what did “that mean about his left hand”? It was an indirect way of suggesting to him that he would back into hypnosis every time I touched his left hand.

So the two posthypnotic suggestions were:

“When I touch your right hand, come out of hypnosis.”
“When I touch your left hand, go back into hypnosis.”

I demonstrated with one of the students. I touched his right hand he came out of trance. I touched his left hand and he went back into trance.

When I had my students practice the technique with each other, I got the answer to the question, “Will someone in trance take suggestions from anyone?”

I went over to a young woman whose eyes were closed, her breathing was slow and even, and her face had that distinctive relaxed look. In other words, she was in a medium state of hypnosis. Out of curiosity, I touched her left hand. She slowly opened her eyes, slowly lifted her head and slowly looked at me for a moment, and never having left hypnosis, she closed her eyes again, let her head relax towards her chest and went back into her deep relaxation.

When she realized that the touch on her hand did not come from her partner, who had hypnotized her, she rejected the suggestion to come out of trance. Even though I was the teacher, I was not in rapport with her inside of her trance.

I could have gotten in rapport with her while she was in trance if her hypnotist had introduced me into her trance indirectly, or through direct suggestion. There are other ways for me to have gotten in rapport with her inside of her trance, although that information is best saved for a future post.

So the short answer to the question in the title is: no. A hypnotized person is not open to just anyone's suggestions.

One Key for Weight Loss with Hypnosis: Change the Unconscious Body Image

An attractive professional woman in her thirties purchased my hypnosis weight control program, because she had decided shed a few extra pounds. When asked what she wanted to look like when she was at her target weight, she said, “I want to be gaunt.” Then she sucked in her cheeks.

So I mirrored that back to her. “You want to be gaunt.” And, I sucked in my cheeks.

Her eyes got wide and she said, “That's really crazy, isn't it?”

I widened my eyes, nodded, and said in a similar tone of voice, “Yeah, it is.”

This was a turning point for her. My client now had to create a new weight/body image goal for herself. The old one was just too crazy to keep.

Then I asked her, “According to whom are you supposed to look gaunt?”

The answer was her mother and her sister, both of whom have thin frames. My client said that they had both been criticizing her weight “all her life”. My client had a heavier frame, and was never going to have the figure of a Vogue model, or of her mother or sister, no matter what she weighed.

So, the logical next question was, who was going to make the decision about what she should look like and how much she should weigh, herself, or her mother and sister? When my client chose to decide for herself, she changed a lifetime habit of responding with feelings of frustration and inadequacy to her mother and sister's criticisms of her weight and appearance.

I had established good rapport with my client's unconscious mind by this time. And, since she had already slipped into a light stage of hypnosis, I directly asked her unconscious mind to show my client's conscious mind what she would look like at her healthiest and most attractive weight. And, it did. My client then decided to make the new, unconsciously generated image her goal. So, from that moment on, she really had something better in mind for herself.

This was an important step in the process of my client transforming herself physically. I was very much aware that if she had kept “gaunt” as both her unconscious and conscious ideal, that because of her heavier frame, she would have tended to always be dissatisfied with her weight.

It is important to have a realistic and healthy goal image to achieve long term success with weight control. And, hypnosis makes it much easier to effectively create and sustain that new and healthy self image.

Interrupting an Undesirable Habit for a Change Or, How Granny Got Polite Again

It all happened some twenty odd years ago, before I ever learned anything about NLP, (NeuroLinguistic Programming), or hypnosis. I was visiting some relatives, one of whom was Granny, a “sweet little old lady” in her upper eighties. One day she walked in and, uncharacteristically, started to tell me what she thought of me and my shortcomings in no uncertain blunt, rude, and unpleasant terms.

Apparently Granny had started hanging out with the wrong crowd at Sunday school, and had picked up some undesirable attitudes and behaviors. Perhaps you have met a few of those elder "bad crowd" types. They are the ones who think that they can say whatever they darn well please, because they are so old that no one would dare challenge them.

I recognized the blunt beyond rudeness oldster routine immediately. And, I thought to myself, “OK, I'll play too.” So, I replied in kind to Granny. I looked her straight in the eye just the way she had done with me. I spoke to her in no uncertain terms in a tone of voice similar to hers.

Granny's response took me completely by surprise.

She sniffed. Her whole body stiffened, and she stalked out of the room without a word, and she never acted in that offensive way again. Granny went back to being a “sweet little old lady” for the last decade of her life. I had no intention of affecting the old lady that way, I was really surprised by Granny's response.

As I reflect back on that incident now, after years of practicing NLP and hypnosis, I realize what must have happened.

By mirroring her rudeness back to her the way that I did, I interrupted her new habit while it was in progress in a way that shocked and startled her. My experience with Granny illustrates one of the principles of NLP and Ericksonian hypnosis. If a habit is interrupted enough times, or if it is interrupted suddenly and dramatically enough, the habit will disappear.

Secrets of Conversational Hypnosis #22.2: How to Respond to the Unspoken “But...”

As a hypnotherapist, I have enjoyed developing as style that lets me do hypnosis in a conversational way. When using conversational hypnosis I am not using what my teacher, Dave Dobson, called “tuxedo”. Dave called “formal” trance "tuxedo", because it was formal. So, of course, I started calling informal trance, "T-shirt".

Formal trance involves using a ritual to guide someone into trance. For example, in beginning a formal trance one might say something like, “Close your eyes, and notice the rhythms of your breathing as you go into hypnosis only at the same rate that I count backwards from 5 to 1...”

Successful conversational hypnosis demands that the hypnotherapist pay close attention to the nonverbal, out of conscious, communications of the client. Recently, for example, I offered a client some ideas, and she agreed verbally, but I detected some unspoken skepticism. So I said, “It seems like there's an unspoken 'but'...” She agreed.

So, I started beginning all my sentences with “But” and finishing them with “yes?” That frequently will short circuit the patterned responses of someone who automatically disagrees with new ideas.

To get things moving, I said something like, “But, you really do recognize the importance of making those phone calls to build your business, Yes?”

She replied, “Yes.”

After a few minutes of phrasing everything that I said to her in the form of “but...yes?” statements, I noticed something interesting. Not only was my client showing signs of hypnosis, complete bodily stillness, reduced blinking rate, and slowed speech, she was actually saying “yes” to my questions before I finished them!

From that point on, it was easy to gradually shift my questions so that they led her into feelings of certainty that she could and would do what she needed to make her business thrive.

“But, you can already begin to see yourself making those calls regularly, yes?”

“Yes.”

“But, you are already noticing that you feel comfortable with the thought that any number of people will inevitably be saying 'no” along the way as you build your business, yes?”

“Yes.”

“But, the old fears of rejection are fading away completely even as we speak, yes?”

“Yes.”

One of the keys to conversational, or regular hypnosis, for that matter, is for the hypnotherapist to notice the client's out of conscious and habitual responses to suggestions. That allows the hypnotherapist to adjust his or her suggestions and hypnotic language to suit the client's unique personality, which leads to a successful session.

Secrets of Conversational Hypnosis #12: Uncle Jesse's Iced Tea with Lemon

One of the best ways to get someone to bring up a memory, or to go into a mental or emotional state is simply to talk about situations or states that are similar to the ones that you wish to evoke. If you want to know about someone else's family history, for example, simply talk about your own family for a while. It is likely that they will start telling you about their family.

Hypnotherapists find it useful for their their clients to start feeling and remembering times in which they were happy, curious, confident and so on, because anchoring those feelings into the problem situations can be part of the solution for the client. For example, wouldn't it be more useful to get curious and creative rather than angry or resentful when a problem crops up at work?

Uncle Jesse was not deliberately using hypnosis when he started telling us about a fond childhood memory. Something in the conversation started him thinking about the first time he had iced tea with lemon. It was so incredibly good! And, the more enthusiastically he described the pleasures, the flavors, his amazement over how powerful his experience was, the more I felt tempted to try some iced tea with lemon.

So how would that be considered hypnosis? I had tried iced tea with lemon before, and did not care for it at all. But, the more Uncle Jessie went on about his iced tea with lemon peak experience, the more attracted I was to trying it again. I even argued with the idea in my mind. I knew that I did not like iced tea with lemon, but the longer Uncle Jessie spoke about it, the more attractive it became. Uncle Jesse had really gotten me curious about whether I would have a similar pleasure from iced tea with lemon as his if I tried it again.

Finally, I couldn't stand it any more. I just had to try some iced tea with lemon. I found out that I still did not care for iced tea with lemon. But, I learned something about how one of the principles of hypnosis can be used to influence someone in a simple conversation. I did not recognize what Uncle Jesse did as hypnosis until almost 45 years later, when something sparked my memory of trying iced tea with lemon again.

How Fred Used Hypnosis to Stop Smoking by Getting a Nicotine Free High

Over my years of practicing as a hypnotherapist there have been a few stop smoking clients who got a little high every time that they smoked. And, I have always thought that if my clients were going to be hypnotized to stop smoking that they should be able to keep any real benefits that they got from smoking after they became nonsmokers.

Given the heath risks, social disapproval, and hazards to clothing and furniture associated with smoking, it may be a bit of a stretch to think of smoking as having any benefits. But, if you were to talk to thousands of smokers, as I have over the years, you would realize that most smokers have different ideas about that. Even smokers who say that there's nothing good about smoking think that smoking relaxes them, or makes them feel more confident about meeting new people (other smokers, that is).

Fred (not his real name) told me that he got a buzz every time he smoked. When I asked him when the buzz started, he replied, “When I reach for a cigarette.” The buzz started before he lit up, or even touched a cigarette! Fred had unknowingly done a nice piece of self hypnosis before he ever got to my office. And, I knew that I could use it to help him become the nonsmoker he wanted to be.

I used an informal hypnosis technique from NLP, or NeuroLinguistic Programming, labeled the “drug of choice” technique. Simply put, with a little mental rehearsal, it is possible to recreate any drug state that a person has already experienced. The key is to remember the sensations that the person felt as the drug first started to affect them. Imagining them in order, over and over again, activates the brain to go back into the drug state without any added chemicals. As an added benefit, the person can sober up immediately at any time, and there are no hangovers, ever.

So, I taught Fred to get his buzz back by simply saying a phrase to himself. That phrase would be called an “anchor” or “trigger” in official hypnosis technical speak. While teaching him, I also had Fred make the buzz more intense than he had ever experienced from smoking. I knew that this would be easy for Fred to learn, because Fred had been using his own anchor to get the buzz already, the sight and/or feelings of his hand reaching for a cigarette.

Of course, as with almost all smokers, Fred needed to address a number of issues to be done with nicotine and tobacco. It was easy to take care of them all after he learned to get his buzz on all by himself. Practicing hypnosis has certainly given me the opportunity to meet interesting and unusual people, and that is one of the reasons I love it so much.

Hypnosis Eliminated Chronic Knee Pain

It is necessary to make sure that someone in pain has taken care of any medical conditions before using hypnosis for pain control. That is because it would be unwise to cover up an issue that needed medical or dental attention. When my client contacted me for the first time, she let me know that that after her knee replacement surgeries she had taken physical therapy. She had consulted with her doctors who had nothing more to offer than continued pain medication. She told me that she was taking heavy duty pain medications daily, and occasionally had a better day. She wondered if hypnosis could help lessen her pain. And, we both wondered if hypnosis could give her more comfort on a daily basis.

Hypnosis has been used successfully for anesthesia for surgery since the late nineteenth century. And, it has proven useful for alleviation of chronic pain as well. So, I told my client that I would offer her unconscious mind some ideas to consider that might prove helpful in increasing her comfort levels. And, she was also told that there were no guarantees. Hypnosis might eliminate her pain completely, lessen it, or increase her experience of comfort and relief intermittently.

Everyone has experienced the kind of pain relief available from hypnosis, although we do not usually think of it as “hypnosis”. For example, most people have had the experience of finding a bruise or scratch, looking at it and thinking that it ought to hurt, but it feels fine. Perhaps we were just too busy to notice the bump or scratch at the time. That is an example of a common, everyday analgesia, or anesthesia.

With hypnotic pain control, the nerves are sending the pain signals to the brain, but the signals never make it into consciousness. So it doesn't hurt. One way to activate the ability of the mind to keep pain out of awareness is through metaphor. The unconscious mind thinks in metaphors, stories, associations, symbols and images. Its logic is very different from the logic of the conscious mind.

So, I guided my client into hypnosis, then told her various stories. I gave her direct suggestions for comfort, and offered her the metaphor of an alarm clock. I asked her to think about pain being like an alarm clock. When it goes off, we wake up to the fact that we need to do something. Maybe it's getting up in the morning. If it's pain, it's something that needs to be dealt with. Once the physical body has been attended to, if the alarm keeps going it just confuses the conscious mind. We turn the alarm clock off because if the alarm were going 24/7 it would be meaningless, and useless, not to mention unnecessarily annoying.

Apparently, my client's unconscious mind made sense of the alarm clock metaphor in a very personal way, and her pain stopped. After our first session, she only had an occasional off day, and took an aspirin to control her discomfort. After her second session, she was able to walk from the Atlanta Airport terminal to the gate on her own. Before she came for her first visit, she had needed to take a wheelchair from the terminal to her departure gate.

Hypnosis can be a wonderful option for pain control for someone who does not get satisfactory relief from drugs, or who just does not like taking drugs. The good news is that hypnosis is safe, has no side effects, and it is a pleasant experience.

Hypnosis and NLP Tip 2 9/8: Taking Care of an Internal Critical Voice

Some years ago, one of my hypnosis clients mentioned in passing that she had an internal voice that was always criticizing her. Apparently, at least according to the voice, she could never do anything right. Understandably, my client sounded annoyed when she described the kinds of things the voice had been saying to her.

Being a helpful sort, I decided to help her out with the voice, even though her reason for the session had nothing to do with changing her negative self talk.

One of the things that my NLP (NeuroLinguistic Programming) training taught me, is that the location of mental voices frequently makes a difference in how they affect the person. The sentence, “The sun rises in the morning” typically has a different location than the sentence, “Today is June first, 1777,” and the sentence “I wonder who will win the World Series in 2020?” will have yet another location than the first two.

As it turns out, my client's critical voice seemed to come from the left side of her head. So I asked her how she would respond to the voice if she were to move it to her left big toe, so that it seemed to be speaking to her from there. As I asked, I made a swoosh sound and gestured with my hand as if I were literally moving the voice physically. The gesture and swooshing sound were nonverbal hypnotic suggestions, by the way.

My client replied that when the voice spoke to her from her left big toe, she could care less what it said.

When I saw her a week of so later, she complained that the critical voice was still there in her big toe. Apparently she had expected to eliminate it completely. When I asked what the voice was saying to her, she replied, “Nothing. It's sulking.”

And yes, it can be just as simple moving the location of an internal critical voice to eliminate the annoyance for good. Frequently however, it is more effective to negotiate with the voice itself. One of the assumptions of NLP is that every behavior, even negative self talk, has a positive intention for the person. For example, most of the time, self criticism is intended to encourage the person to do their best, motivate themselves to get something done on time, or stop an undesirable habit. The type of resolution that a client might come to with an inner critical voice might be for the voice to simply encourage the person in a kindly way to learn from a mistake, feel good about taking the garbage out now, or to get started early on a project instead of waiting until the approaching deadline makes them frantic.

By negotiating with internal voices, it is frequently unnecessary to do formal hypnosis. Simply going through the process of negotiating with ones internal critical voice actually creates a light state of hypnosis all by itself. And, that light state of hypnosis can be enough to allow for positive creative changes.