Making Online Hypnosis Safer

Foreword and Trigger Warnings

TW: This blog posts contains discussions of hypnosis in a non-kink setting, potentially dangerous practices in the hypnosis community, consent and a brief and non-specific mention of food and dieting.

tl;dr: hypnosis file creators often don’t have transcripts or a list of triggers and hypnotic suggestions available for their files. These are important features that enable the listener to make safe and informed choices.

This blog post isn’t intended to accuse anyone of wilful wrongdoing or to direct hostility towards any groups or individual artists. Rather my intention is to highlight a common and potentially dangerous oversight in the hypnosis community.

I’ve made the choice not to mention any specific groups or creators in this blog post but I still feel it important to mention that I don’t have any ill will against any of the hypnotists I’ve engaged with nor their files. If you decide to engage with any hypnotists after reading this blog post please be constructive and excellent, especially if you happen to know any of the groups I’m referring to specifically.

An oversight doesn’t make a bad person or group.

Making Online Hypnosis Safer

I’ve personally been interested in hypnosis for almost as long as I’ve had unsupervised internet access. Some of my first memories of the internet are of me staying up entirely too late listening to the fantasy hypnosis files on YouTube offered by one of the more prevalent hypnosis channels of the time.

For the most part these experiences with hypnosis were constructive; they offered me a fun way to relax and left me with a lifelong interest in a fascinating subject. These experiences also no doubt helped in my journey of self-discovery (avidly listening to MTF hypnosis is one of the earliest memories of gender divergence I can recall).

Unfortunately though, these early experiences with hypnosis were potentially unsafe, and some safeguards to mitigate that were much needed.

This glaring problem came back into my mind yesterday while I was listening to some hypnosis files that I remember from my childhood that were designed to make you feel as though you’re a specific species in both body and mind.

For the most part I found the experience relaxing and therapeutic. Unfortunately though I found one suggestion quite upsetting: a suggestion designed to make you desire generically healthy food more in line with what that species would eat alongside your usual diet. I’m sure that the author meant well well when including this suggestion but unfortunately food is a potential trigger for some people and a forewarning in the file’s description would have helped with this.

So how can hypnosis authors authors help to keep their listeners safe?

One major issue with many of the hypnosis files that you’ll find on the internet is that transcripts are not available for them. This means that a listener is unable to know exactly what’s in any given hypnosis file before they actually listen to it.

It’s certainly possible that somebody could investigate a hypnosis file by listening to the file first in a “dry run” (i.e: listening to the file without entering trance), but that puts the onus on the listener to ensure their own safety, and there’s every incentive for the average listener to skip doing this (especially since some hypnosis files can extremely long, the one I listened to recently was 40 minutes long, for example).

Though, I do understand that there exist barriers preventing every hypnosis file from having a transcript, even if it would be better if they did.

For example, some hypnosis files are ad-libbed by their author, or the script used to produce the file have been lost to time. In that case a providing transcript for the file would be a lot of additional labour for the hypnotist.

Regardless of whether a transcript can or can’t be included a list of triggers and hypnotic suggestions included in the file is still important. That is, a list of what the file aims to do to you and a list of potentially triggering subjects covered in the file. The latter being important even for people who intend to do a “dry run” first.

Such lists would enable people to make sure that they’re comfortable with the contents of the file and everything it will try to do to them, and that their experience with hypnosis is safe, sane and consensual.

Even though somebody can’t be hypnotised against their will, and can actively reject hypnotic suggestions, it’s also true that hypnosis is a very vulnerable state for a person to be in. This makes safeguards all the more important.

To use the previously mentioned species transformation file as an example: the file would be much safer if it included a list of all the physical changes it suggests and the mental changes it makes (i.e: a desire to engage in certain behaviours typical of that species and installing a trigger to make you fall into a trance when it’s safe to do so) and that these suggestions are activated and deactivated with a phrase that the listener can say to themselves. The file should have also included a specific trigger warning mentioning that it includes suggestions around food.

I’m also aware that other similar files attempt to change your personality with both positive and negative traits. This is fine for a consenting adult looking for a highly immersive experience, but specific details about this absolutely need to be provided to the listener before they engage with the experience.

I’m sure that most people creating hypnosis files don’t mean any harm. Furthermore, many people creating hypnosis files actually do include transcripts and a list of suggestions (I’ve come across a number of great files like this myself!). But unfortunately oversights tend to be self-perpetuating. People uploading files without transcripts and a suggestion list leads other people to believe that not providing these important safety features is normal, and that providing them is abnormal.

I myself even have experiences of being chastised by members of the hypnosis community for asking for these safeguards so I could make a safe, sane and consensual choice about whether I should listen to a file.

Ultimately, if hypnosis implemented some extremely important safeguards, and their listeners asked for them, then hypnosis would be more enjoyable and safer for all of us.