Patterns (Article)

Patterns by sleepingirl

A common induction style that people learn early on is the “pattern interrupt” -- usually shown as involving some kind of surprise and shock to the subject that somehow gets them to instantly drop into trance. But like many often-taught techniques, the repetition of this concept from resource to resource has deeply diluted it. A “pattern” in hypnosis is much more than an opportunity to jump in and say, “SLEEP!”

“Pattern Interrupts” Are Mythological(ish)

The usual lesson goes like this: Engage your subject in a certain repetitive external behavior -- anything from twiddling their thumbs to going in for a handshake. At a certain moment, do something shocking like gently tugging on their arm. Make sure you say “sleep” so that their unconscious mind knows to go into trance, then immediately launch into deepening patter. Voila!

Does this often work? Yes. Is there reality behind this concept? Yes. But we need to acknowledge a few things that are often doing the heavy lifting here -- as well as some things we are crucially missing.

This kind of technique is deeply reliant on several of these concepts:

• Pre-framing: something as simple as “I’m a hypnotist” communicates to the subject of what to expect (hypnosis)
• Societal expectations of hypnosis: hearing words like “sleep” and “deeper” also tell the subject consciously what is happening and what to do
• Someone who would probably instantly go into a trance anyways if you tugged their arm and launched into hypnotic patter (no fancy “pattern” required)
• Surprise/confusion: An unconscious sort of “freeze” response to something surprising, and then being answered: “What is happening??” “Oh, I’m being hypnotized, I must be in trance”

The role that any “pattern” plays in these kinds of scenarios is often overshadowed by these elements. The pattern may serve as a kind of focus or distraction, or a way to get compliance. It can be an effective way to set up for confusion as well. But most pattern interrupt inductions make more of a show of the pattern than anything.

We also need to address the kind of silly talk around the interruption: saying “sleep” in an interruption is certainly not “making space in the conscious mind to directly give a command to the unconscious.” This is of course a shorthand that people use to describe a pretty complex set of concepts: confusion, unconscious search, response to verbal and nonverbal authority, consciously and unconsciously processing speech, telling the subject what their “freeze” or ragdoll response is… We could posit that it could even be more effective if you pause for a split second for the ragdoll response and say, “That’s right.” Shorthand without explaining what is actually happening is considerably less useful as we try to parse through learning hypnosis.

These types of inductions are popular because they are seen as the “fastest,” they are flashy, and because they’re usually sold as something that is highly effective. But we get them by and large from street and stage hypnosis, and we need to think about that: this is almost always in the context of hypnotizing someone who you don’t know, doing it for a crowd, and doing it with someone who has little or no knowledge about hypnosis. When we hypnotize intimate partners, we should certainly be doing a different kind of hypnosis than this.

Pattern interrupt inductions also take focus away from other places -- especially in trance -- where patterns exist and can be utilized for various things. You don’t need to have a bright-eyed, expectantly awake person making repetitive motions to work with patterns, nor do you need to tug on someone’s arm to interrupt them.

What is a Pattern?

A pattern can be any external or internal behavior that someone is engaged in at least partially unconsciously, with some quality of repetition. Saying or thinking a mantra can be a pattern, and so can being engaged in deep thought (such as a fantasy, or even an anxiety spiral).

So many of our human behaviors can be thought of as patterns -- to really understand this, we need to recontextualize our idea of what “repetition” is. We can see how a handshake is a pattern because it is a behavior we have learned to do over and over largely unconsciously. But being engaged in a conversation is also a kind of pattern -- you are in a pattern of listening and responding, a pattern of processing what someone is saying on a conscious and unconscious level and then doing the same to produce your own response.

Bandler (and NLP) thinks about patterns similarly to this, even going so far as to say that all trances are types of patterns, or more accurately that all patterns are types of trances. He would say that that engaged conversation is a trance. He might also say that the quality of focus and attention someone is in when they are being hypnotized is a kind of pattern. Hyperfocus is deeply related here.

We don’t need to follow Bandler exactly, but it helps us a lot to be able to identify elements of habitual or repetitive unconscious behavior when we are doing hypnosis. You can think about behaviors that you do (in your life or under hypnosis) that have these qualities to them. Here are a few examples:

• Responding to a trigger
• Swaying, bouncing, rocking, or unconscious/repetitive body movements
• Wondering, “am I hypnotized?”
• Thinking “yes” or feeling agreement over and over (such as in a yes set or pacing)
• Blinking or fluttering eyelids repetitively
• Listening and processing
• Masturbating
• Expecting a sentence to end a certain way

“Interrupting?”

So what does it mean -- and do -- to interrupt one of these patterns? What is the value of doing this? There are a few main reasons why you might interrupt a pattern: 1) to get value from confusion or surprise, 2) to break the pattern for the sake of breaking it, and 3) to rewire the pattern.

• Confusion/surprise

Interrupting a pattern tends to result in a moment of confusion and shock. The person has a little “huh?” moment and then tries to figure out what is going on. In NLP, this is called a transderivational search -- they go internally to try to produce meaning based on what is happening to them. Part of this is unconscious (a gut reaction that happens first), but it is also partially conscious (they are aware of the surprise and may be trying to figure out what is happening consciously).

This is where that simplification of “you have an opportunity to unconsciously command something” comes from, but we can logically understand it to be much less magical and more complex than that. The person absolutely at that point is having an interesting moment where they are a) having a sort of “blankness” or “stuttery” feeling to their conscious thoughts, and b) processing unconsciously to try to figure out what is going on and how to respond. Understanding this in a more complex way gives us more opportunities to have fun with it.

Interrupting a pattern to induce confusion -- even one in the middle of trance -- is still a chance for us to suggest something to “solve” that confusion. It can be a great time to tell someone to go deeper, or to suddenly freeze and become stuck, or to even build arousal or begin a transformation process. The confusion is dictated partially based on how you set up the interruption in the first place. For example, perhaps someone is in trance and feeling arousal building in a methodical way. They’re deeply focused on it -- it may be a kind of pattern. Likely they’re making small motions with their body, even if they’re not aware of it. If you suddenly tell them to stop moving, you could easily suggest that the arousal suddenly grows -- or, perhaps it disappears -- and this could lead into a kind of doll or drone transformation.

We often think of this happening very fast as in a traditional pattern interrupt induction, and it certainly can be even if we deviate from the usual process. For example, if someone is mindlessly repeating a mantra and you tell them to freeze, they still have this moment.

But there is fun and beauty in letting this process unfold a little more slowly. For example, if someone is repeating a mantra and you instead put your hand in front of their face without explanation. What is going to happen then? The confusion is still present and has time to stew, and very likely the person will have some kind of response that neither of you expect.

This can allow for spontaneous, unconscious creativity. We know that hypnosis can feel very intense subjectively when things happen for the subject that feel like they aren’t being consciously decided on or controlled.

This is a feeling we’re not really used to, so it can take a little bit of guiding and teaching -- we also don’t want someone to be so confused that they’re worried about doing the “right” thing. This means that when you interrupt a pattern in this way, you should pause for just a moment or two as you see them process and begin to unconsciously respond -- perhaps they stutter, or sway, or freeze up, or something changes subtly. Then make sure to encourage: “That’s right,” and moving into talking about the difference in response you observed. (As always, “pacing” or describing to your partner about what you can see and intuit about their experience is an effective practice.)

• Breaking

Breaking a pattern for the sake of breaking it is related to this. We talked about how interrupting a pattern creates a noticeable difference in the way someone’s conscious thoughts feel. It could be very exciting for us to interrupt patterns simply to get that moment of stuttery blankness. For example, if you interrupt a repetitive motion, this is a great opportunity to start to suggest blankness, or a transforming of internal experience: “Stop -- and then right there you have this tiny little moment of nothingness as your mind reels to figure out what’s going on.”

Understandably, that moment doesn’t last very long, but our goal isn’t exactly to make it permanent -- it’s to use it to transform our partner’s experience. This is an opportunity to show our partner that something interesting is happening, and that it’s a sensation we can suggestively play with. We can suggest more moments of this off-kilter blank feeling, maybe as a way to teach their brain to access similar blankness in a more broad sense. We could even keep breaking different patterns in different ways to entirely throw someone off balance. If we do this in a repetitive way, they’ll be anticipating the pattern interrupt (which creates a pattern itself), but if we keep breaking different patterns in different ways you come up with an effect that leaves someone feeling more dazed and unable to expect what is going to happen.

A big part of breaking a pattern can simply be pointing out that it’s happening -- or rather, point out the unconscious aspects of the pattern. This transforms the things they aren’t aware of into things they are aware of and interrupts the pattern itself. A very simple and small example of this is pointing out the rhythm of breath to someone who isn’t thinking about it. Another example might be if you are suggesting a person is heavily focused on their thoughts, they are likely having bodily experiences that they aren’t conscious of.

One of the best uses of this is to break patterns that hinder people from having the trance experiences they want. Sometimes, patterns are things that you actually want to break. Some examples of this are “over-analysis,” or compulsively “checking” to see if they’re hypnotized, or even compulsively thinking “I’m not in trance.”

All of these are patterns and habits that people can get stuck in. Maybe it’s as simple as every time they expect to feel a response, they hyperfixate on looking for it and are too distracted to feel anything. Maybe when they do feel a response, they get caught up in analyzing it, or it signals for them to check: “Am I hypnotized? What about now?” Maybe every time they ask themselves if they’re in trance, the answer is compulsively “no” because they don’t believe it. For a lot of people, it could be as simple as every time they sit down to try to go into hypnosis, they expect failure, and have developed a lot of habitual patterns that make it hard to even enjoy what is happening.

Obviously patterns like these are complex responses that require a lot of nuance. But you can get pretty far even just pointing out to someone that they are happening. This can make them aware that they are happening. Someone may respond strongly to that moment of confusing blankness if you basically break their little cycle for just a moment -- not suggesting to them that it’s trance, persay, but using it as an opportunity to show them that they don’t have to be stuck in it. Whether you say, “Look, I know what your brain does, it’s doing xyz,” or you follow that up with just a simple moment of surprise or interruption, this can be a great thing to do.

This can also happen with people who are very comfortable trancing -- hypnotized people tend to have little moments where they start observing their own experience, and then become aware that they’re observing their own experience. Most experienced subjects either aren’t bothered by this, or have an easy time shifting back into experiencing without as much observation, or even enjoy and use the observation. But these are patterned habits, and you can affect and break them.

• Rewiring

We’ve left a little bit out of our conversation of breaking patterns -- people’s brains are always learning and trying to form new patterns and behaviors. When you interrupt a pattern, the person on some level learns to expect this new process: “Oh, OK; when my hypnotist does this, I do that.” This is especially true if you use this repetitively; you are essentially building a conditioned response. For example, perhaps you are interrupting the natural response someone has to a trance trigger -- you say the trigger and then instead of letting them go through the process/pattern of sinking into it, you immediately snap your fingers to wake them up in the middle of that sinking. Chances are, if you give the trigger again and don’t interrupt them, they’ll hesitate on that edge.

(This is useful knowledge if you are trying to keep someone off-kilter in that limbo/confused place -- interrupting in ways that they aren’t expecting, or “interrupting” the new pattern by not interrupting.)

But if all pattern breaks are ostensibly teaching someone a new pattern, we can intentionally use them as an opportunity to rewire someone’s habits into something that is more exciting for both of us. The subject is looking for an answer to their confusion at the moment of interrupting, and then it is just a matter of conditioning or training the way we might normally.

This is especially useful for patterns that are hindering a person, like getting stuck in over-analysis or obsessively checking if they’re in trance. It’s a matter of first understanding the pattern and where to interrupt it, which we discussed above. Then, you can use a variety of techniques to suggest a new pattern.

For example, if you are working with someone who has expressed over-analytical feelings, it’s reasonable to assume that that analysis crops up when you make a suggestion -- they are going to try to analyze their response to it and especially try to discern if they’re “passing or failing.” So perhaps you suggest something like, “And now you can feel your body start to grow heavier, little by little” -- and that’s the moment that their pattern starts. You interrupt it by acknowledging: “And now I know that there’s a little part of you that is asking, ‘Is it happening? Am I responding enough?’ and compulsively checking over your body, looking inside.” You could even further interrupt by suggesting something like, “And for just a split second, it pauses.”

Working with “parts” language like this is very useful for both interruptions and rewiring because it helps to separate out or dissociate the behavior. At this point, you can redirect the pattern -- here are some examples of suggestion styles you can use (or layer):

• “Every time it [or you] goes to check, it remembers pausing for a moment and it feels just a little bit confused for that split second -- long enough for the rest of you to respond a little bit deeper to the suggestions I’m giving”
• “That little part itself can do its little pattern and analyze inside, but it’s starting to happen in such a way that it gets distracted and fuzzy trying to do it”
• “You can imagine right now and when I give more suggestions, part of your brain starts to check to see if it’s going into trance, but there’s a little whisper I’m putting in your head that gently interrupts that pattern, whispering ‘yes’ until that part of you whispers along with it”
• “You can imagine the analysis getting slower, more sluggish, as though it’s relaxing -- even though it repeats, it’s almost like that analysis also starts slipping into trance, taking the rest of you with it”

As always, when you’re training anything, reinforcement is important. This means later repeating your suggestions and strengthening the pattern.

This kind of rewiring isn’t just about patterns we want to entirely change -- it’s also useful with patterns we want to add a little more oomph to. For example, responding to a trigger that sends a wave of pleasure or submission through the subject. Trigger responses are almost never instant. First there is an initial unconscious response of hearing the trigger before it’s consciously processed, which may be very fast but is a process (not an instantaneous moment in time). Then there is the conscious response -- hearing the trigger, doing a kind of “scan” to see how the response is going, and letting the full process of the response complete. In the pleasure trigger, this is obvious by how the body has a physiological reaction that takes a little bit of time.

This is a pattern that we can interrupt and strengthen. We generally have an intuitive sense of letting a trigger “sit” so it can fully sink in. But you can very quickly interrupt this and give all sorts of different suggestions to intensify the experience. When you see or intuit that initial preconscious response, that’s the time to interrupt the pattern. Here are some things you can play with in this example:

• Saying, “Pause that response -- now letting the parts of the response that haven’t been expressed yet build up inside of you, making the next response so much stronger as I say, [trigger]”
• Saying the trigger, and then at the moment of interruption saying the trigger in a more intense way
• Layering on a different trigger or response; triggering trance at the moment of response, for example
• Pausing the response and explicitly rewiring it using future pacing or other techniques: “Now your brain is in this holding pattern where we’re going to tinker with it, train it to imagine responding more intensely, going through the pattern in your head and intensifying each little part of it, breaking it apart and rebuilding it, connecting it more solidly to your body and mind”

This certainly has big applications for intensifying responses, but also for brainwashing. Think about what patterns are involved in your partner’s brainwashed behavior: thoughts and beliefs that they hold, behaviors that they’ve been trained into, etc. How would you make those stronger?

Creating and Using Patterns to Interrupt

Noticing, utilizing, and interrupting existing patterns that your partner is going through is a very important skill to have. Just like any time we are “pacing” or trying to mind read our partners, we can make pretty educated guesses about what their internal experience is based on: a) what we know about their process, b) their external responses, and c) what we know about human psychology generally and based on our own introspection of our own experience.

But what about times where you want to engage your partner in a pattern for the purpose of using and playing with it? We talked above about the definition of a pattern and some examples -- let’s examine some qualities of patterns first:

• Internal and/or external behavior (thoughts and processes can be patterns; physical activity can be patterns)
• At least partially unconscious (there is at least part of this behavior that feels like it is happening compulsively, automatically, and/or that they are unaware of)
• Some quality of repetition (something habitual that they have done many times before; something repetitive that they are doing over and over right now)

When we’re trying to initiate a pattern, we can think about what kinds of behaviors have these qualities -- especially what can make a repetitive, semi-unconscious behavior. On some level this can be about a behavior that is either a) compulsive, or b) something the person is skilled at to a level that they don’t have to fully consciously pay attention to doing it. For the classic examples in pattern interrupt inductions like twiddling thumbs, that’s a behavior that starts consciously and then becomes less conscious as the person gets used to the motions. But there are so many more.

Here are some examples in this style:

• Following the motion of something (like a pendulum or finger) with your eyes, and interrupting the pattern by changing the motion (like making it faster or doing a hand pass)
• Blinking (like being instructed to blink slower or faster), and interrupting the pattern by telling them to stare or blink at a different speed
• Using kinesthetic touches on the shoulders to “pace” a person’s breathing or swaying, and then changing the rhythm

When it comes to things that are more compulsive, internal experiences can be easy to take advantage of:

• Expecting a sentence to end a certain way (like if you have been repeating a phrase to them and you suddenly change it or pause in the middle of it, or expecting a phrase to follow alliteration or rhyme scheme, or expecting an idiom or common phrase to be said correctly)
• Repetitive thought loops (like linking one concept to another, such as “when you notice yourself listening, you feel a subtle dip further into the words that pulls you deeper into trance, and inevitably your brain shifts back to noticing my voice”)
• Mantras (especially “call and response” types, such as them compulsively thinking or saying a response to a certain word or phrase that you say)

Expectation should be given a little extra attention:

• Doing something like a progressive relaxation methodically, and then suddenly speeding up, jumping to a different body part, or jumping to internal experience
• Doing a traditional yes set with low ball, easily answered questions, and then throwing something wild in there (be sure to immediately acknowledge that this is confusing)
• Teasing someone’s body by dragging your fingertips towards parts that want to be touched, and then suddenly changing course

Physical external experiences can be fun to suggest:

• Gently bouncing, or swaying the head back and forth
• Masturbating rhythmically
• Repetitive sex acts like oral

It can help to acknowledge to your partner that these kinds of patterned behaviors won’t be fully unconscious. Someone will naturally check in to see that they’re still performing the behavior, or try to make sure it is still in a rhythm. You can certainly help by letting someone know that they don’t have to expend effort to keep it “perfect”: “Your brain will sometimes drift away and then back again to watch yourself doing this, but you don’t have to try, you don’t have to do anything; the rhythm you fall into is the one you can do most easily.”

Intentionally trying to make a behavior unconscious can work for some people, especially as a consequence of trances where they have become accustomed to things happening unconsciously. But sometimes this is challenging, especially for people who are very “active” about thinking about their experience. You can also consider aspects of conscious behavior that someone will be naturally unaware of. For example, even if someone is more consciously repeating a mantra, they will most likely be making motions of their body that they lose track of because they are focusing. Even something as simple as their breath falling into a pattern as they speak may be going unnoticed, or slight shifts in their posture.