I meet so many hypnotists who were trained to believe that suggestibility is a cut and dried proposition of a never changing characteristic that never varies for an individual throughout their lifetime regardless of age, circumstance, or trance event context.

Technically, at least for most people, this belief is on the polar opposite of reality.

While I teach that suggestibility is both an attribute to which one is born with varying degrees if natural propensity and a skill which may improve over time with appropriate practice, suggestibility is also very context-sensitive so that a whole slew if factors may have an effect upon the success of a trance session.

This is rather like a three-edged sword … it can cut in a variety if ways but a skilled operator can make it look like a simple and beautiful dance and a clumsy operator pretty much ends up using a LOT of Hello Kitty Band-Aids.

As hypnotists, we hope for a trance partner who is experiential gifted, a natural high responder or somnambule, but even when working with such an individual we can’t make assumptions that all will go easily.  Of course, the need to play the hypnotist to trance partner feedback loop is very apparent when working with folks who are not quite as experientially gifted . . . the ones who have a very difficult time following a trance guide’s instructions not because they’re daft or anything like that but because they don’t have the experiential memories to understand fully – often despite a very powerful desire to experience genuine trance and an eagerness to follow the instructions despite not quite “getting’ what they are all about.

I do believe that anyone and everyone with reasonable aptitude, desire, and patience can and do experience some form of experiential trance . . . well, actually, I believe anyone and everyone with reasonable intelligence can experience ALL forms of experiential trance, even the things some so-called objective scales claim cannot be experienced except by so-called natural somnambules.

However, having said that, I also grant that some folks need a bit more work and practice and guidance by an experienced competent hand than others and that anyone’s responsiveness may change from context to context and vary from one hypnotist to another (here I do NOT mean to suggest that a hypnotist with whom one person is highly responsive is of necessity more competent than one with whom the same person may be less responsive . . . far from it, and sometimes the vice versa can actually be true, depending upon context).

All the best,
Brian