#ask fppp

Touch training as I'm playing with it in that post is wholly stolen from animal training. Tangentially, I've also heard it referred to as "medical training", in the sense of training an animal to be handled by a veterinarian.

The kinky version of this is teaching or training someone to accept touch uncritically. That is, to make the relative loss of bodily autonomy and personal space with regard to the handler a non-issue. "Of course my owner is touching me, and of course I love it. Why wouldn't I?"

You could probably write a book or two on how consent and shaping desire interact, but for the sake of this post I think it's sufficient to say that consent regarding assumed boundaries isn't a trivial problem.

I think this kind of kinky version of things is distinct from simply acclimating people who are touch averse to touch. Said simply, there is a significant difference between touch training in my post as a kinky subversion of consent and bodily autonomy and therapeutic intervention meant to address touch aversion. While there's probably overlap, I think it's important to address the distinction.

I do not think there is an inherent problem with or risk of dependency in acclimating oneself or a partner to touch, but this is contingent on framing and context: There is a marked difference between teaching someone that they are only safe with you and teaching someone that they can feel safe in general or with those people they choose to feel safe with.

Generally, I think that doing these things "right" is empowering, and can let you decide for yourself if and when you want - or don't want - to be comfortable with somebody touching you. The kinkier iterations can definitely made disempowering, - and that's something can be very fun in an otherwise appropriate context - but again, the framing and context are critical here. Are we helping you choose how to feel or are we teaching you that you never get a choice?

This dovetails into your question about consent. Personally, I think either the kinky or therapeutic incarnations are things that should be done collaboratively and that consensuality follows from that. I suppose you could nonconsensually try to make someone accept being touched without complaint, but I think this would likely be a traumatic process that leaned on learned helplessness rather than anything I've described. (No shade if you're into that, but it's something different.)

Similarly, - at least in my imagining - I think that the goal is both to build genuine trust and to condition a response, both in a kink context and in an animal training context. Animals let you train them when they trust you, and conditioning (at least, effective and non-harmful conditioning) requires cooperation.

The idea behind unlearning things is probably a big complex mess because terms we use in and around play are usually chosen for sounding fun as hell rather than being The Most Correct. For answering your question, I'll take "unlearning" to be learning not be able to do or not be able to remember something that you otherwise would consider quite integral to your knowledge and self.

Outside of a kinky context, this is actually a really important skill, and we all probably need to unlearn unhelpful things we've internalised in our lives. It's a good thing to unlearn prejudices, harmful habits and ways of thinking, and so on.

In a kinky context, this can blend in with various kinds of play and it can be fun to forget/rewrite things like simple skills (to feel helpless or silly), personal information to feel transformed), semantic knowledge (to feel really brainwashed and manipulated), etc., etc. Of course, the idea that we can misplace who we are and what we want in lieu of what the nice hypnotist is telling us should be scary, so let's look into that a little more.

The way your memory works is a whole thing (and I think I have some further writing on this in my pinned), but we'll focus on two things today: how your memories are stored and how sneaksy hypnotists make a person "forget".

Your memory isn't like a computer file or a piece of paper that you can just delete or throw away. Short of failing to store a thing in memory when it happened or physical damage to your brain, your memories will stay in your head just fine. Where most "forgetting" happens is in the process of recall - i.e., finding and thinking about that memory.

What we're able to easily remember is very much affected by context as well: I know my old school friends' names, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you most of them without something to help me make the connection in my foggy old brain. Does that mean I've forgotten them? Depends how you think about it.

All of that is a bit further complicated by the fact that - while our memories are quite durable in that one sense - they're quite malleable in another: depending on how we go about recalling a memory, we can intentionally or accidentally alter it. There's a lot of ways this happens and more than one way to think about it, but a good and simple one is to treat it a bit like interference: when you remember something, you're kind of creating a new memory of yourself remembering the old memory, and any little errors can get amplified as you keep adding new versions of the same memory. This doesn't mean all of your fond old memories are inaccurate, it just means they aren't necessarily fully accurate, either.

There is a lot to dig into in the why and how of things here, but the takeaway for today is that while memories stick around in your head pretty reliably, sometimes they change what they look like over time or are difficult to dig out.

Now that we know a bit more about memories and recall, let's talk about unlearning and play.

Probably the most common and effective way to change a behaviour is to practice doing something desirable that interferes with the undesirable thing at the time when we'd normally do it. If that sounds like something you've read before in an animal training context, then that's because it is. It's very difficult to teach someone not to do a thing, but it's very easy to do the old switcheroo and get them doing or thinking something else instead.

So when we talk about "unlearning", usually we're talking about trying to set you up so that, when you would normally try and succeed at remembering something or acting on a strongly held belief, suddenly your mind is like "oh I know what to do here!" and does something completely different. The process of "forgetting" how to count might look like getting caught up on the tip-of-the-tongue feeling of trying to remember a thing, then marveling at how fun/hot/exciting it is that you were confused by something as simple as counting, and ending up completely derailed into thoughts and feelings that interfere with what you originally set out to do. We didn't erase numbers from your brain (though it might feel like that), we just distracted you from getting them out. Or maybe we even just distracted you from noticing you did remember. Brains are weird, so there are options.

Critically, what we're doing with almost all amnesia play is not actually removing a memory, but encouraging and rewarding behaviours that interfere with you being able to reach that memory. Similarly, with memory play that involves altering memories, what we're doing is creating an alternative memory that we're encouraging your mind to reach for instead of the original. It's usually possible to recall either without some tricksy hypnotist weighing down the scales, but for some people this takes a bit of practice because they're not super used to those feelings in their head.

Memory play is made easier by the fact that humans as a rule are really bad at judging the accuracy of their own memories. It's really easy in certain situations to accidentally create false memories that feel very real. I don't want to make this post much longer than it already is, but you can probably find decent overviews with the keyword "confabulation" and some dramatic examples in the work of Elizabeth Loftus.

In summary, memory play isn't going to mess up your mind forever. It's fun as hell, but it can be disorienting and should be approached on the same basis as other intense play. It can also be light and fluffy and not disorienting or intense at all, and it's going to be up to you and any partners to figure out what you want to do and how you'll be best to each other in doing it.

As to unlearning things, if you're happier with yourself after practicing to feel or act one way or another, then there's no reason not to keep doing the thing that you're happier with, but you also don't have to.

And as I'm not one to leave low-hanging fruit untouched, there's a fun answer:

[…] if someone is in a trance, can they get themselves out on their own if they so choose? Does how "deep" the [trance] is matter?

The short answer is "yes", but as with most of these, the real answer will be "yes, and".

Trance can feel a lot of different ways, and a lot of more "traditional" approaches will produce a trance that can feel lethargic or comfy in ways that might make you reticent to drag yourself up out of it in the same way that you might not want to get out of bed in the morning. Conversely, trance might be disorienting and you might not be sure how to get yourself "out" as it were. This is especially true if you strive to feel mindless or helpless in trance, as those feelings can interfere with your thinking in a way that might make shifting yourself difficult.

Trance will fade over time if it's not maintained in some way, but you don't have to wait for that. It's absolutely possible to quickly remove yourself from a trance. This can feel as simple as just doing it, but because we're playing with the mind it can help to think about how this actually has to happen:.

First, you have to recognise that you are in this state and would like not to be.

Second, you have to choose to do something about this (e.g., "waking up")

Finally, you have to do it.

This isn't actually that difficult, but recognising where these steps can be interfered with can help you identify where things might go wrong.

Usefully, these are all skills that you can practice and develop. Put your feelings, desires, and concerns into words before you play, and I strongly encourage people to practice - for example through roleplay or dry runs - interactions like telling their partner "no" and waking themselves up from trance. You might, for example, start your practice with hypnosis with some simple instructions to teach you how to wake yourself up. After that, you can practice what it's like to need to communicate safety and consent information, exercise a 'no', and so on.

There's a lot of practical advice here, some of which I've probably written before, but I hope the broad idea there is accessible.

Similarly can you resist a trigger? How about a trigger you don't know about, how much does that even matter?

You can think of hypnosis as a tool that helps us elicit behaviour from our own minds that is normally not consciously directed. For example, our minds are perfectly capable of hallucination and imagination, but doing so on command is usually quite surprising for people.

In this sense, hypnosis is quite literally mind control, but that doesn't make it magic. A "trigger" is a thing that can be understood, albeit messily, as living somewhere at the intersection of a conditioned response and a previously agreed-upon cue. Where precisely it lives will depend a lot on how the trigger was installed. It can be a lot harder, for example, to resist a classically conditioned response than it is to ignore a strictly verbal post-hypnotic suggestion encountered in an inappropriate context. A lot of how you respond to suggestions in general is going to be mediated by your own preconceived notions and feelings.

As will be a theme, I don't think that hypnosis is specially harmful to volition. You can get into a situation where you feel unable to resist an impulse or where your ability to choose is compromised, but my belief is that this would be true even if you weren't using hypnosis. In this context, hypnosis is more like a lever that we use to make the work we're already doing easier.

To me, that's a good thing because it means that the kind of habits and techniques we use to protect ourselves from coercive control in normal settings will also apply in a hypnotic one.

Regarding hypnotic phenomena that you are unaware of, this can absolutely complicate things. Sleight of hand and gaslighting are integral parts of the bad kind of non-consent and, while very very fun to play with, can be abusively taken advantage of.

There's a great deal more that can be discussed in regards to safety and memory play, but I think the most obvious answers are that yes, it can be a complicating factor in one's ability to identify the need to assert a boundary, and that that risk isn't impossible to mitigate.

I guess my questions boil down to if there is a danger of losing my ability to meaningfully consent?

Continuing in the theme, I think that any abusive relationship can compromise your ability to meaningfully consent. The concern with hypnosis should probably be whether or not this might happen without your noticing that it's starting to happen in a way that you don't want and removing yourself from that situation.

That said, people do things all the time that compromise their ability to meaningfully consent and that's perfectly OK. I'm compromising my ability to consent, for example, if I go drinking with my mates. However, I am not making myself unsafe by doing so.

Because hypnosis can take so many forms, I don't believe and don't want to say that hypnosis categorically compromises consent. A hypnosis scene can be collaborative, rather than authoritative or permissive. When playing with hypnosis, we can emphasise feeling free to communicate and embrace our own agency over feeling controlled or manipulated. The idea that hypnosis is inherently comprompising, in my view, only holds water if you only practice hypnosis in ways that compromise.

I appreciate that I've mostly said "It Depends", here, but I'm hoping that I'm also giving some insight into what it depends on and how to navigate that.

Or will I just have to trust in the decency of the person I choose to explore that with?

I think that, by practicing healthy communication, maintaining your own boundaries, and checking yourself against friends and loved ones, that you are perfectly able to keep yourself safe - at least insofar as any of us are able to do that.

You're absolutely going to to get into a situation where you need to trust people - I honestly don't think it's possible to live life in a way that doesn't need that -, but letting someone hypnotise you isn't going to be a make-or-break decision where you're offering up your volition to some stranger. You can think of it like any other new relationship: having a good sense of yourself and keeping boundaries is always important for keeping shitty people from taking advantage.

Is there a point where it doesn't matter anymore?

I think this is absolutely possible. For some people, it's The Goal. I think that you only reach that point through practice and repetition, however, and no behaviour is so robust as not to be extinguished by a sufficiently disruptive change in environment .

How much I read on here about free will is fantasy to kink on and how much is real?

I have some Thoughts on the concept of Free Will that ought to be a whole other post, but I think the answer to these questions depends on what you want to do and how you characterise your own capacity for choice. I think I've mostly addressed the practical elements, but I'd be happy to have a longer conversation as well. (Given the nuance one has to run into with discussions of free will, I prefer to have those in conversation rather than by correspondence so we can iron out what we mean.)

Ultimately how much autonomy am I really giving up and can I get it back on my own?

Ultimately, how much autonomy you're giving up depends on what you're doing and how you're doing it. This is all, in a lot of ways, in our heads. That's not to say that it isn't real, just that our own beliefs and feelings factor in immensely to how we experience things. I think that, if you don't want to give up a great deal of autonomy and are conscientious that, that you aren't likely to do so unwittingly.

Even if you do find you've misplaced some of your autonomy, you can always pick it back up. It might be a long and difficult road if you give a great deal of your freedom up, but it's never really gone. It's just something that you might not be exercising at that moment.

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Thanks for writing. Even though I feel like I skipped over a lot, I know that was a lot. Feel free to ask more or shoot me a message. I find talking in real time to be much easier than through asks, but I totally appreciate if you'd rather not.