The Secret of Conversational Hypnosis: the Piggy Back Hypnotic Induction

In the art of Conversational Hypnosis you will begin to file away many different ways of inducing trance in your clients.  These are great to keep on hand as skills that will assist and guide you as you need new techniques for new people that you come across and want to help. 

The Piggy Back Hypnotic Induction is of course closely related to the piggy back principal which is the process of attaching a suggestion on to ideas or thoughts that have already been accepted and granted passage through the critical factor.  In the piggy back principal a suggestion is attached to an accepted idea the suggestion just slides riding on back of the information that the listener has already accepted. 

When speaking of induction you know that they must all include the 4 Stage Protocol.  That is they must absorb the attention of the listener, bypass their critical factor, cause an unconscious response and lead that response to the agreed upon outcome.  The piggy back hypnotic induction does all these things and will be an important tool in your tool box of hypnosis.

Using the piggy back hypnotic induction mainly relies on direct experiences, which are things you can see, feel or hear.  This can also be used with taste and smell at times but those are a little more complicated and less likely as they are sense less used in hypnosis. 

In this induction you will use these senses to draw attention to unconscious things and this in turn brings them to your conscious.  You will use words like notice, feel, hear and see to draw attention to things that are already in existence but the listener is not being consciously aware of. 

For example if you ask someone to notice the rate at which they are breathing, you will be redirecting their awareness to a process that is happening unconsciously, you will be bringing it to their conscious attention.  The second thing this type of statement or question does is it allows you to take control of their attention. 

Keep in mind that the first stage of the 4 Stage Protocol is to absorb attention, if the person in session is listening to you at all you have just completed the first stage.  The word notice itself requires you to make some kind of comparison and you can not do this without accessing the feeling behind whatever it is you are comparing.  You cannot compare something you are not aware of.

And that is where you start to see the happenings of the piggy back principal; there is no way to argue with your own experience.  If you are noticing or comparing a thing you are experiencing it, every time without fail.

It is now that you can see in doing this suggestion you will have already bypassed the critical factor as well.  This is most likely to happen because you have made a statement that is true simply because it is their experience, they will be breathing and so to notice it is a suggestion, the fact of breathing and noticing it both usually get by the critical factor on the sole principal that the first is agreeable.  They are breathing, there is no denying that.

Now it isn’t a guarantee that the suggestion will get in, it is not inevitable.  But there are no guarantee’s in hypnosis.  If you use the piggy back principal correctly and to its full potential you will be making it increasingly more difficult for someone to resist the statements you make, in that you are actually building a yes set.  The more yeses you get the harder it is for the listener to say no.

The more time you can coax your subject into saying yes the better.  The more yeses you get the less likely you will get a no as it will interrupt the flow of things, people like to do what is easy and fighting a statement that is easy to say yes to becomes a lot of work in these situations.

When your subject is caught in the yes set and continues to follow the loop you are leading them in their unconscious will begin to make your statement true for them.  The key factor here in this induction is that you are attaching suggestions to these yes sets.  

The suggestions you are attaching need to be strong enough to provoke a response but subtle enough that they will not stop to say no to them.  This is a fine balancing act that you will need to learn.  The suggestions you piggy back need to require less work to put into action than saying no to the suggestion altogether.

A great example of this in action would be if you said
“Close your eyes and relax”
“Every time you hear me say relax you will get heavier and heavier until you are completely relaxed.”

In these two statements is a piggy back, a yes set and an experience.  The yes set comes at the beginning.  The simple act of closing your eyes is easy to respond to it is something your subject will likely say yes to. 

The word relax will automatically be spoken because you have the control to say it, whether or not the person you are speaking to complies will depend greatly on how strong your yes set has been up to this point. 

However you must notice that the word ‘relax’ is the piggy back in these statements.  It is attached to the original statement and therefore will more than likely get past the critical factor and become a part of the experience the listener is having.

Now in just these few steps you can see that you have absorbed the attention of your listener by using one of the key words to draw attention and make a comparison.  You have successfully bypassed the critical factor by attaching your suggestion to a true statement that has already been granted passage in. 

You have also drawn out an unconscious response in the experience you are relaying to them then again with the piggy backing of a suggestion you are creating an action to go with that response.

 It all seems to happen very quickly here and it will be better understood when you really get to practice a piggy back hypnotic induction for yourself.

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