Took a long time to learn out way out of this box because we were raised up in the wild west of the early internet/hypno-community where consent was not taught even a fraction of how it is these days (every time I think about what our first hypnotist Teishu did with us we get SO upset, man was a serial-abuser and we are always on the lookout to ensure he never comes back)
The thing that makes "safe and appropriate" so bad is that it basically tells the hypnotee that their safety is their own responsibility and works on the same logic as "no one can do anything in hypnosis that they didn't want to do"
The thing is? People can be coerced and tempted to stretch their limits and when someone is in a suggestible state they cannot be trusted to have unguided discretion on what is or isn't safe, especially when their perspective is in an altered state.
The correct way, from our experience, is to encourage subject agency not by saying "you can and will keep yourself safe" (itself a little better than the "safe and appropriate" language) but by informing them that no matter how far we go into scene, you'll remain aware enough to keep yourself safe.
Lotte's post is right when it says that a hypnotist should not treat agency and safety as gifts to be given. Subject agency is a hypnotee's responsibility and it's important to emphasize.
One of the things that we always brush into in our teaching is that we are HUGE advocates for "keep reality in the room" - people we trust, like and have played with in the past have criticized us, noting that our dissociative disorder skews our ability to be objective in this regard. So with the note that I do have a bias-- I want to reiterate.
Keep reality in the scene.
Trust on both sides of the watch relies on both people engaged in the play being able to safe word AT ANY TIME and that means that a hypnotee needs to specifically be told and taught to break scene and self-advocate at the first sign of discomfort. That alone causes some people to dry up because they want their brainwashing fantasies to be completely mindless... and I do think that CNC and edge play scenes can be aspired to but they should 1000% be after a rapport and routine has been built up enough that the hypnotee will know their limits and be able to break scene without thinking about it.
But like any conditioning that has to be trained. You can't just "safe and appropriate" your way into someone automatically breaking out of a deeply involved scene.
What one of our partners does with me is remind that I am a good girl when I take care of myself and that a good girl listens to their body when it tells them things, it informs their partner when their mind is wandering, it knows how to wake up when something distracts its attention and knows not to compromise its own safety by being altered in situations where full attention is required.
And that requires a level of training too. "You'll only go into trance when it is safe and appropriate" does not have the same guidance that "and if you're in a situation that requires your full attention, such as needing to drive or someone else outside of this scene needing your attention, you can just take a breath and draw yourself up, remembering to be alert and conscious before engaging in any tasks" like that's MINIMAL but it gives instructions that are not "don't do the thing"
Especially as hypnosis does not work with negative instructions.
"Don't think about a pink elephant" being the best example.
You need positive and directed instruction. You need to build a framework of self-advocacy and safety before you start taking that away and you need both sides of the watch to be on constant vigilance until that awareness is second nature.
We tend to be a little preachy with scene safety and as mentioned before-- not everyone shares our opinion-- but like-- at the very least, hypnotee agency is not something GIVEN, it's something trained and established <3
