LottePriant

Me: "Oh damn it, I've forgotten that trigger..."

Her: "Can I help?"

"Ha! That might be difficult."

...

The fact that it's not "real" is important here, a safety net, but the fighting is very real. The losing, just as much. The eroticism of limbs muscles failing you, of insufficient strength, of your body refusing to perform, of screams coming out too weak.

"I am someone with [ADHD, Autism, DID, GAD, MDD, the list goes on and on] and I'm having trouble being hypnotised."

Or like this:

"I'm having trouble hypnotising somebody with [insert mental health here]."

And at this point I'm just going to claim authority.

I have hypnotised literally hundreds of people, including this or that neurodivergence and systems. I have been hypnotised, and I'm nuttier than a sack of squirrels. Hell. I'm aphantasiac (which throws hypnotists who rely on visualisation). Hypnosis works fine.

I've literally never met someone who can't be hypnotised, and I've never encountered a diagnostic group that is generally more difficult to hypnotise.

If you're a hypnotist struggling with hypnotising someone - well, doctor. Heal thyself.

What these questions - and most of the answers to them - are is ableism. Not petty bigotry or malice, but internalised and rationalised prejudice that impacts how we understand the mind and hypnosis.

It's rooted in the assumption that hypnosis is mental and the subject is mentally deviant, so clearly the hypnosis not going as planned is due to their deviance.

But this isn't actually a valid conclusion. While it's true, for example, that ADHD is associated with forgetfulness, that doesn't mean that everything a person with ADHD misplaces is due to that. Everyone misplaces things, and attributing behaviour to the diagnosis like that erases more nuanced understanding. Similarly, an additional language speaker may misspeak, but it is mistaken to assume that this is due to a lack of familiarity with the language, and native speakers misspeak constantly. Assuming competency or capacity based simply on the possibility is misguided prejudice.

When there are apparent trends (e.g., "oh well people with ADHD are better hypnotised by this method"), this is usually an exceedingly narrow demographic: for example, if the poster's conception of "people with ADHD" is limited to a particular milieu like "white, middle class, largely online people with ADHD." The entire person with all of their demographic qualities is reduced to a single label, and that becomes the archetype for all ADHDers. A terrible reduction for all involved.

We can see this well expressed by queer people of colour, and the lament that the "universal trans experience" is typically just the trans experience of white middle class transfemmes. You've hopefully read about that before, so I'll try not to get into the weeds.

As one of those people with ADHD, my primary experience of "oh I'll treat you like this because you have ADHD and that's what works for you" is tremendous irritation and frustration. What works for the archetypal ADHD demographic doesn't work for me. The phrase "oh you didn't seem like you have ADHD" is seared into my mind because, well, sorry but I do. And I really would like to stop hearing educators tell people that the right way to engage with me is something that I don't really enjoy at all.

Most of the body of this text has been trying to show the nature of the problem - enough that I worry the thesis might have been lost up there in the introduction - so I'll repeat myself, and hopefully those who most need to hear it will absorb it better with the context given:

>ask if the clicker training is training kink or hypno kink

>it doesnt understand

>pull out illustrated diagram explaing what is training kink and what is hypno kink

>it laughs and says “it’s a good clicker training maam”

>its owner clicks

As somebody who's been doing hypnosis for a very long time, people pay too much attention to the idea that a hypnotist is "experienced."

Some of the best hypnotists I know are people who I watched learn hypnosis, and some of the worst I know are old hands. Even if we are minding experience, - and to borrow from a friend of mine - 20 years of experience can look like 20 years of growth, or it can look like having the same one year of experience repeated 20 times.

And most importantly, you should plan for that eventuality before it happens! Part of safely being risk aware is understanding how you bounce back from that position when things go wrong. For some people and some pairs or groups, that might look like "I need support and understanding from an external party." For others it might look like, "I need to work through my feelings verbally with you, specifically." You should have a conversation around what aftercare and support looks like when things go well (a widely accepted fact in most kink I hear about), but also when things go badly! "What does my scene partner need if things Go Wrong?" and "How do we prepare for things to Go Wrong?" are questions you should have already answered before you begin. Even if the answer is "my partner doesn't know specifically what they need, but they have agreed to a framework of communication in the worst case scenario and I will support them in the ways they ask for in the moment."