Constructing Hypnotic Metaphors (Article)

Constructing Hypnotic Metaphors

Metaphors are a famous ingredient in different kinds of hypnosis, especially within Ericksonian techniques and thus, NLP. We’ve talked before about how metaphors permeate our language and processing, and in this article we’ll go more into detail about how they have been used specifically in hypnosis, as well as how we can think about them in order to get comfortable with this kind of technique.

Intro and the “Therapeutic Metaphor”

The entire concept of metaphor in this context is the idea of relating one thing or situation to another, causing us to change our perspective and potentially enrich our understanding of both things. For example, we could relate the idea of hypnosis to the idea of the natural cycle of day and night: inevitably, the sun always goes down and the moon rises. Perhaps if we did an induction or told a story based on this metaphor, it would give the subject a clear expectation that they will definitely go into trance, and also definitely eventually come back out of it. It is easy to associate the idea of consciousness with the sun and daytime, and unconsciousness with the moon and nighttime.

Understanding the philosophy of conceptual metaphor here also allows us to see how concepts that are naturally included in our lives and language play a part here. We associate hypnosis already with things like sleep (which is associated with nighttime) and orientational concepts like “down.” Our lives are centered around day and night being constant and unchangeable aspects of the world, and “mapping” that idea onto the idea of hypnosis could be very intense.

Metaphors have been used in all sorts of forms as teaching tools throughout time. Many mythological stories serve a purpose as guidance on behavior and general human morality, and metaphors have been a part of the general practice of humans offering therapeutic guidance to one another for as long as we’ve been storytelling. “The Ugly Duckling,” for example, is often told as a way to reassure children about their self-image. Metaphors in hypnosis experienced a renaissance in the early-to-mid 1900s because of Milton Erickson, who was known for using them extensively in his hypnotherapy. Metaphors have the quality of creating associations that are easy to remember -- something very useful to us as hypnokinksters.

Therapeutic metaphors are about problem-solving and insight. They are goal-oriented: a client has a clear issue that needs to be worked through, and the therapist uses a metaphor in order to provide them with an expanded viewpoint. The idea is that a different perspective can offer insight. For example, a client who wants to quit smoking might be told a metaphor about an athlete who perseveres and finds success in hard work even after losing competitions. A story like this could highlight the aspects of overcoming difficult obstacles while focusing on the future.

Certainly, we can do an “eroticized” version of this in hypnokink, where we solicit a goal from ourselves or our partner and then construct a metaphor based on that goal. But perhaps this is a bit limiting to us -- why stop there? Our intimate hypnosis does not need to be goal oriented; the only “goal” in kink is to have an enjoyable experience. Over the course of this article, we’ll be discussing how to construct metaphors both from a stricter therapeutic form as well as some ideas of how to flow with them more easily in an erotic encounter.

Transderivational Search and “The” Unconscious

First, let’s see what the conventional hypnosis and NLP wisdom is about the use of metaphors. This comes to us in a concept called “transderivational searches.” As we’ve discussed before, this is a term that often comes up when talking about pattern interruptions (the “surprise” moment), but originally was meant to describe what happens when a person processes ambiguous speech or metaphors (which are, in some senses, ambiguous).

When someone hears a metaphor, they ideally need to be able to make connections about it, find out what it’s referring to, and develop their own personal understanding about it. A transderivational search is simply the short (or long, considering jargon) explanation for that process. The person goes into themselves and produces some kind of conception. Often, there is a bit of a delay because of this, so giving your partner a little bit of space to do this processing can be good.

Many hypnosis sources assert that this process “bypasses consciousness” or is “interpreted by the unconscious.” We know that considering “the unconscious” as a separate part of our cognitive processing is overly simplistic. Besides this, the way that we parse through metaphors does not need to happen outside of our awareness, and often we are forming conscious thoughts to “think through” what a metaphor means. In fact, many of us practiced or learned this in high school English classes with story analysis and comprehension. (What was symbolic and metaphorical in “Lord of the Flies”?)

What you can think instead is that people often have a gut response to hearing a metaphor. They may very well come up with some associations that they don’t have to think about. Many of those associations may be baked into their personal history, language, or culture (thinking back to conceptual metaphor). Those initial interpretations can be quite powerful and often drive additional (conscious) processing -- this conscious processing is also very useful in trance. This is part of the beauty of metaphors -- they can always be expanded or dove further into when we give them more attention.

Construction

When it comes to actually using metaphors in your hypnosis, it can feel like a challenge to pull one out of nowhere to incorporate into your trances. In this section, we’ll break down the process of constructing them to hopefully shed some light on how to do this more fluidly. Not all of these steps are rigid or even necessary -- they are more of a guideline. This form can be used for very simple, quick metaphors that don’t take up much space, or for longer ones that are more like a story.

• Search for Symbols

Metaphors are made out of symbols. A symbol in this sense is any aspect of a concept that can conceivably represent something else. For example, in an induction about walking down a staircase, we can understand that that action of descending down stairs is representative of going “deeper” into trance. (Remember that associating “downwards motion” with hypnosis is one of those conceptual metaphors that is often part of our linguistic and cultural understanding.)

The first step of constructing metaphors is latching onto concepts that you’d like to represent, and then gathering symbols that fit. These concepts can be anything that you want to play with in the moment: Broad ideas like trance, submissiveness, comfort, fear, pleasure, pain, or much more specific ideas like transformative objectification, intense devotion, the sensation of mindlessness, being too dumb to read, etc. Picking these concepts is about what you and your partner desire, and may be something that you choose on a whim as the trance naturally progresses. As with everything, content that is part of someone’s personal history that they’ve shared with you will have particular power to it, as it’s a part of your shared narrative.

From here, you can think about symbols for your concepts. Utilization is remarkably useful here -- again, choosing symbols that are coming directly from your partner will give them extra weight. Thinking back to stories they’ve told you about their life or things that they enjoy that can reflect these play concepts is a great way to do this. For example, if one of their hobbies is taking nature walks, you can play within that realm.

Next is to think about what is involved in the scenario or concepts that you’ve thought of. In the nature walks example, we can consider all sorts of aspects like the temperature and weather, the sensory experience of nature (sights, sounds, smells, etc), the physical experience of walking (how it can be an automatic or conscious action, the kinesthetic experience of muscles engaging or growing tired), the sense of time passing, a feeling of enjoyment or fulfilment, etc.

• Consider Direction

Generally, hypnosis scenes and suggestion involve change and motion: from awake to in trance, from smart to dumb, from moving to still, from brainwashed to more brainwashed, from one perspective to another. We don’t always need to know exactly where we are going with our trances ahead of time -- there is a lot of value in playing on whims -- but having a sense of the general direction that we are heading in is where we can start understanding how our metaphors can function.

Each one of the aspects that we’ve discussed about our metaphor can be potentially symbolic, and our symbols can serve as a way to provide motion to our hypnosis. The easiest way to do this is to consider the most basic sense of transformation within our ingredients and relate it to the change we want to experience in hypnosis. For example, in the metaphor about walking in nature, we could think about the value of change between the beginning of the walk (anticipation, curiosity, excitement, feeling ready) and the end of the walk (satisfaction, tiredness, furthered knowledge). There are many of these sorts of “before and after” elements within scenarios, and this is the most simple way to consider a relationship between two concepts: each of them have a place where they start, contrasted with a place where they end.

The idea is to find parallels between the metaphorical journey and the journey of the play that you’re doing. Consider the narrative arc of any story: while the plot of any two tales may differ, the general form they take will often be shared (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution). The “story” that you tell as your metaphor (whether it is an actual story or just a simple metaphor) will certainly, on some level, share a similar narrative arc to the “story” that you are telling in your hypnosis play.

Driven by looking into novelist Kurt Vonnigut’s work on graphing story arcs, researchers have looked into codifying the most common archetypes that describe stories. We can make use of these archetypes when we’re thinking about the direction and form that our metaphors take. Let’s look at how we can get inspired to use them in our hypnotic metaphors.

• Rags to riches: a rise
• Riches to rags: a fall
• Icarus: a rise, then fall
• Oedipus: a fall, then rise, then fall
• Cinderella: a rise, then fall, then rise
• Man in a hole: a fall, then rise

These archetypes generally serve to describe good versus bad events for a story, but when we’re adapting them in a metaphor for hypnokink, we can apply or understand them more broadly. For example, how can you represent the idea of someone taking a nature walk? Like a Cinderella-style story, does their interest rise, then fall as they find themselves distracted, then rise again as they gain renewed focus? How could that relate to the hypnotic phenomena that they are experiencing?

• Sell Your Metaphor

In NLP sources, practitioners assert that the best metaphors are ones that are processed unconsciously -- that is, the subject hears a story or metaphor and draws their own conclusions about how it relates to their experience. As we discussed earlier, this is not necessarily the best or only option. In fact, if there’s a particular path you’d like to go down, or you want a little more confidence in how they interpret your words, it can be helpful to guide your partner through your thoughts by really selling your metaphor. (This can also be particularly good for partners, neurodivergent or otherwise, who find metaphorical ambiguity challenging or confusing.)

You can do this very explicitly: “This reminds me of…” are sort of magic words that can help jumpstart someone’s processing about the relationship between their experience and your metaphor. The key is to explain why. For example, if you were talking to a partner about their descent into further brainwashing, you could say, “This reminds me of those nature walks you like to take; how you take your first steps into the woods maybe with some expectation of what you’ll experience, but always discovering something new and exciting, finding yourself changed by the end of it, with greater appreciations, with different and new memories.”

This is an opportunity to connect into any of the symbols that you know are present in your metaphor. You could say, “There’s a thing that happens when you go out, where you become really aware of your environment -- like because you’re in a place that’s different from your norm, you process it differently and you even notice your own senses differently when you look at the trees, and the ground, and where the sky peeks through the canopy.” That could stand alone in your patter, or be an extension of the previous statement, and you could leave it as-is for your partner to process it, or you could further sell it: “Doesn’t that seem familiar right now? Aren’t you starting to notice how your processing is changing in this very brainwashed space, how you get more aware of all the little things, and how that awareness changes you -- you’re not the same person who walked into the forest.”

We can coexist with the (false, but not useless) axiom of letting someone process their own interpretation of a metaphor because naturally, there will be connections that your partner makes that are not what you’ve explicitly stated. This is part of the beauty of human processing -- our brains all deal with information differently and uniquely. Using some amount of linguistic ambiguity is one way to do this, and you can also start the metaphor by selling it very explicitly and then move away from that specificity as you continue on. It’s not a matter of a binary -- “Am I telling them or not telling them what this metaphor means?” -- it’s a gradient of how much of your own process you are relating to them as you go through with it.

• Change your metaphors over time

While static, one-off metaphors are simple, we’ve discussed thus far how they often serve to mirror the direction or journey of a scene. This is even more highlighted when we expand them to something longer or story-like. When we use a metaphorical story as part of hypnosis, we can consider more than just the broad-form narrative arc that we’re discussing of the beginning and end. All of the symbols that are available to us are elements that can serve to further the experience. Just as the overarching metaphor itself has a quality of change baked into it, you can consider the individual parts involved as having qualities that can be shifted to suit your narrative.

Continuing our nature walk example, you can consider the changeable aspects of each of the symbols -- how does the sensory experience change? Do images get bigger or smaller, darker or brighter? Do the sounds get louder or quieter? Does the kinesthetic experience of walking get stronger, or fade away? Does time seem to pass slower or faster? Any element (whether a sensory modality or other aspect of the experience) can be changed, and that change itself can be symbolic. For example, you may be talking to them about how as they walk, the imagery in the forest grows more clear and sharp, brighter and more vivid. That change can symbolize a change in their experience of brainwashing as well -- it can serve as an allegory to how much more perceptive they are to their own internal experience, their sense of submission. On the flipside, if you were doing a scene where you were reducing their intelligence, perhaps you would talk about their sensory experience of walking going dull.

There are no rules for what makes a proper symbol, as long as it makes sense, and you feel that it is explainable. If you want, you can always sell the allegory. While perhaps it makes sense for senses to dull in a scene about intelligence reduction, you could very easily talk about their senses heightening -- after all, it also makes sense that someone who wasn’t thinking smartly anymore might be more focused on their physical experience. Learning about submodalities -- the qualities of sensory experience -- can help with creativity here.

• Flow

All of the different parts and pieces we’ve discussed thus far about constructing metaphors are things that you can do as responsive, rather than planned. You don’t need to have a grand story arc pre-formed in your mind -- you can simply choose a topic to explore and think about how it relates to what you are doing with your partner. To use a metaphor to explain this, think about how sometimes one might get in the car and start driving, unsure of the road they will take or their destination. They take cues from their environment and whims of where to go. In this case, we can think about how we simply might want to choose a path and topic in trance, and observe how our partner responds as we go, noticing for ourselves what elements involved therein can be used as symbols to create pleasantly unexpected responses.

Perhaps you start by talking about someone painting. You think about how a painting reveals itself over time -- what does that remind you of? What other things reveal themselves over time? You can even pose that question to your partner and continue based on their answer. You could change the nuance of the question as well: a painting that the painter themself doesn’t fully see until they’re finished, or a painting that the painter can clearly visualize, but no one else can until the canvas is filled. Then: what aspects of that change over time? Losing track of time while immersed? A boost of creativity? The emotions of the painter? What if it’s an erotic painting? “Thinking out loud” and simply exploring a concept is a perfectly valuable technique for hypnotic patter and can reveal nuances in concepts that you or your partner hadn’t considered before.

• Think about ending/insight

A therapeutic metaphor is nearly always based on giving the client some sort of insight into a problem or a new perspective. Metaphors in hypnokink can also have that quality, even if that’s not always the ultimate goal, and it can be helpful to consider this, especially when you’re wanting to exit a longer metaphor or add punctuation to what you’re saying.

Circling back to the aspect of play that you most want to highlight can be a great way to do this. For example, if you’ve talked a lot about the painter who is working on a piece, you can remind your partner very explicitly that there is something that they derived from this. You could even say it very plainly: “Your brain made all of those connections about that idea of them working on something important -- things you might not even be fully aware of right now, but things that changed your past and future experience.”

You as the hypnotist don’t necessarily have to understand all of the thoughts that went through your partner’s mind. You can of course explain your insights to your partner -- “In the same way that a painter takes his time to create art, you notice yourself taking time to work on your submission, and I take my time to work on you” -- but it’s always good to leave room for them to make their own connections and not try to fit them into the exact interpretation that you have.

Article Summary

• Metaphors are about relating one concept to another, and in therapy they are meant to provide insight into a situation by changing perspectives
• Hypnokink metaphors can be goal oriented, but they don’t have to follow such a rigid structure
• Metaphors can create a transderivational search where a person has a gut response and produces their own meaning about the concept at hand
• To construct a metaphor, pick a topic -- it can be good to find one that has meaning to your partner
• Understand that your metaphor overall shows change in some form, like a story arc
• Explore the symbols within your metaphor that can themselves change to provide more elements that your partner can have responses to
• Don’t be afraid to spell out or sell the meaning of your metaphor, including if there is some insight to be gained

Bibliography

Alaie, R. (2020, November 20). How to Make Metaphors: Tips & Best Examples. Happy Rubin. https://happyrubin.com/nlp/how-to-make-metaphors/.

Dardeck, K. L. (1985) "Therapeutic metaphor : clients' perceptions of psychological metaphors they receive in therapy." Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014. 4001.

https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/4001.

Quick, M. (2018, May 25). Every Story in the World Has One of These Six Basic Plots. BBC Culture. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180525-every-story-in-the-world-has-one-of-these-six-basic-plots.