#ericksonianhypnosis

I was reading a colleague’s post about the importance of indirect language in hypnosis and NLP. She mentioned that if you’re not careful, you can end up sounding like a Talking Heads song.

And I realized I’m exactly the kind of person who would start swapping synonyms just so everything doesn’t sound the same:

“I’m not going to repeat you may find… I’ll say perhaps you’ll notice… no, better it could be interesting to discover… no, that sounds forced… okay, I’ll just rewrite the whole sentence.”

And suddenly the script becomes a linguistic ritual instead of an induction.

But here’s the issue: changing synonyms doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.

If the pattern is:

Permissive opening

Progressive suggestion

Deepening

More deepening

Surrender

Even if you change the words, the brain still detects the same architecture.

In Ericksonian hypnosis, it’s not so much about avoiding repetition of words. It’s about varying:

Rhythm

Sentence length

Attentional direction

Type of suggestion (sensory, cognitive, metaphorical)

You may find yourself relaxing… You may notice your breathing slowing… You may feel your body soften…

Notice what stays the same:

Same beginning: pronoun (“You”) + permissive verb (“may find/notice/feel”). Same rhythm: stress on “You,” then a two-syllable verb, then the content. Same attentional direction: all suggestions point directly to a specific internal experience (relaxation, breathing, bodily sensation). Same syntax: subject + auxiliary verb + main verb + complement.

The human brain, especially in focused attention states (like the beginning of an induction), is a pattern-recognition machine. When it detects a strongly marked rhythmic pattern, one of two things tends to happen:

Habituation: the brain gets bored, disengages, and suggestibility decreases. It becomes background noise.

Ritual detection: the conscious mind recognizes a technique being applied mechanically. “Ah, I know what’s coming next. They’re trying to relax me.” That awareness can activate resistance.

Repetition, instead of inducing trance, can induce monotony — or at best, a kind of “grandma hypnosis” (someone falls asleep because it’s dull, not because they’re actually in trance).

You can break the pattern like this:

There’s nothing you need to do. Just notice what’s already happening. Breathing takes care of itself. And sometimes the body knows how to settle before the mind understands why.

Ericksonian work wasn’t about avoiding repetition. It was about unstable structure.

Milton Erickson would:

Change sentence length unpredictably

Embed suggestions mid-clause

Shift agency (you → the body → breathing → something → nothing)

Use temporal confusion

Introduce metaphor before resolution

Leave syntactic trails unfinished

The induction becomes less like a staircase and more like walking through fog, where the paths keep subtly shifting.

That prevents the brain from stabilizing a prediction model.

The most powerful inductions don’t just vary language. They vary cognitive load.

Example progression:

Simple observational statement

Slight ambiguity

Mild paradox

Sensory grounding

Open loop

When the mind tries to resolve mild paradox or ambiguity, it consumes executive bandwidth — which weakens critical filtering.

That’s different from repetition. That’s strategic destabilization.

The real danger isn’t repetition. It’s sounding like a script.

When language becomes technique-driven instead of state-driven, the nervous system feels it. People don’t resist words. They resist artificiality.