Effective Fixation/Focus (Article)

Effective Fixation/Focus

Obtaining focus and fixation is one of the most universal ingredients in hypnosis. Depending on how you define trance, we might say that fixation is even inherent or necessary. But if we try to open up what hypnosis exactly is, we might start to question what the role of intense focus actually is and does -- and that can lead us to start thinking about how to create it and use it more effectively.

What is Fixation?

Fixation is an interesting phenomenon, and we tend to think of hypnotic fixation as somehow different from the fixation we experience in our daily lives. Fixation normally happens when we are absorbed in something.

• Media we are consuming

• A conversation we are having

• A task or activity we are doing/performing

• Internal thoughts/experience

• A sensory focus

The “beginning” point of fixation is particularly interesting. Fixation can happen intentionally, but it still can sometimes take some time to become absorbed -- when we turn on a TV show, we may not immediately become “fixated.” That absorption happens when our focus shifts. While we can consciously commit to focusing on something, for most people, the part where we become fixated happens unconsciously.

Self-awareness can seem like a hurdle to this -- it is difficult, for example, when you know you need to unwind with a good book or meditate and you are constantly aware that you are trying to focus. We also often think of self-awareness or internal monologue as being one of the primary distractions mid-fixation. In reality, we get distracted from fixations all the time in small moments, including in self-awareness. We become consciously aware of our evaluations, feelings, judgments, and bodily experience. But often we may tend to get reabsorbed more quickly or not even notice that we are distracted.

When fixated, we are still processing and thinking, but it is related to the thing that we are focused on, and it may be a different, more abstract quality of thought than what we are generally used to. When you are deeply engaged in a conversation, you may be thinking about what questions to ask next or what you are learning about the other person, but that thinking might feel less “verbal” or conscious.

In hypnosis, we use the term fixation to loosely describe a person’s focus -- it can be this absorbed quality of focus, but it doesn’t have to be. Any time a person is focused on something, whether it’s your words, an object, or their own internal imaginings, we could say they are fixated, even as their focus naturally is dynamic. But keeping aspects of absorption in mind can give us more tools to play with when we are making suggestions about hypnotic focus.

What is the Purpose of Fixations in Hypnosis?

Broadly, we can see that fixation has a connection to a limitation -- or perhaps a change -- of consciousness. It begins in a way that is difficult to be aware of, and it causes a person’s awareness to operate inside a different or more limited framework. It is true to say that limitation or change of awareness is inherently hypnotic -- but let’s see if we can think of a few ways why.

• Limitation creates capability for new/different things

A change in perspective equates to a change in reality -- this holds true when we think about what happens to someone whose attention is focused on something. If you are engrossed in a story, the limitation of your attention allows you to look at the story from inside of it, in ways that you might not if you were trying to analyze it from the outside looking in. Inside a story, you may think more about character identity, relationships, emotions from a closer perspective. Outside a story, you may think about all sorts of “meta” aspects of the story -- how it is being told, objective views of character arcs, etc.

We could say one view of hypnosis is that it is like a story that is happening to someone in real time. Of course, someone analyzing what is happening in the trance can absolutely be used productively to further their experience, even if this is something that needs to be taught/learned. But someone who is fixated more on the experience itself gets to see themselves within its narrative -- a view of their own experience where they are taking what is happening at face value as it happens.

This is the case broadly with someone fixated on hypnosis itself, and also within specific suggestions such as focusing on a spiral or your eyes. One idea is that this visual fixation is a limitation of perspective -- it is a literal limitation of the visual field (less awareness on periphery) that in turn narrows someone’s psychological focus. This can also happen frequently when subjects are hypnotized with their eyes wide open -- there can often be this quality of “not seeing” even though their eyes are not actually closed.

Erickson talks about using eye closure as limitation -- a person who closes their eyes is “losing” something, and that loss of visual field translates to loss and gain of other capabilities. Sighted people often take for granted how automatically they view the world, and how much they rely on vision in order to act “normally.” The idea is that limiting vision can cause them to process and act in different ways, often unconsciously. What we perhaps take for granted (and can do better) is this concept that if we fixate a person’s mind, they will “automatically” tend to fixate more on the hypnotic experience, or otherwise other internal phenomena/processes that are conducive to the trance. I.e., A narrowing of focus onto one thing will translate to all focus becoming more narrowed.

• Fixation on various things allows for nuance of attention

Limitation can facilitate more intensity and capability -- especially in the sense that when someone is focused on fewer things, they are able to notice more detail in them. This is a two way street -- when we are trying to pick out details in a photo or painting, we automatically narrow our focus; and when we are very engrossed in something like a daydream, we automatically notice more details.

We see this in other BDSM such as in any kind of sensory deprivation play -- blindfolds are notoriously touted to heighten a person’s other senses. In hypnosis, we understand that a huge part of deep-feeling trances is having access to the detailed sensations and qualities of trance. Directing a person’s focus onto their own experience is one of the primary ways we do this -- “Focus on the feeling of your body relaxing.”

Again, this is something that can happen indirectly as a result of “deep” trances. Even if you don’t explicitly direct a person’s focus, if they’re having an incredibly rich and detailed experience, they will tend to be fixated on all aspects of it. Suggesting sensory stuff -- such as what trance feels like, or pleasure, or imaginative experiences -- will often create this attention.

• Fixation allows for more unconscious experience

On the flipside of this, limited awareness (consciousness) logically means that more things will happen outside of that awareness (unconsciously). Something happening “unconsciously” means essentially that it is something you aren’t noticing -- you feel like it happened without you being aware of it, without you controlling it, more automatically, etc. Some (especially academic) models of hypnosis see this as a necessary quality for hypnosis, and a lot of newer subjects will feel like they need this too for it to be “real trance.” We know of course that a person can be both hypnotized and feel aware/in control of their experience -- and we also know that many newer subjects ARE having things happen unconsciously, but they aren’t aware of it, or it’s too subtle and unfamiliar for them to really recognize.

One modality to look at here is the difference between internal and external focus. Above, we talked about directing someone to fixate inward to notice more nuance of trance. But we do plenty of other things when directing someone to focus fully outward.

Usually, we use outward focus as a way to “get to” inward focus. “Watch the crystal swing back and forth, notice all of the ways the light reflects off of it, and then notice yourself sinking into that sparkling, refractive light; sparkling sensations in your body.” One way to talk about this is a concept where we narrow focus away from the inner experience in order to heighten things happening inside that a person doesn’t notice. Then, you bring them inward and the change in perspective and greater attention creates contrast and makes those suggestions feel quite distinct. (This is not unlike fractionation -- taking someone between two states in a way that enhances the contrast between them.)

You can do incredibly interesting things with “misdirected” fixations. This is one technique that can be used for covert stuff, or otherwise creating strong experiences that someone doesn’t notice until they look for them. Experimenting with intense, exclusive external focus can yield fascinating internal results. Even if you bring someone through an engrossing internal fantasy, that narrowing of focus can cause them to feel things that seem to happen spontaneously or automatically. One of the best examples of this is narrating an erotic fantasy and seeing what kinds of kinesthetic hallucinations that causes, as well as the general deepening of trance.

This idea of unconscious stuff happening applies even to something that a person is fixated on and should theoretically be able to notice details about. When fixation is very narrow on a rich experience, it is difficult to “hold onto” all of those details -- some things will inevitably happen outside of a person’s awareness. This is a great phenomenon and suggestion to make about someone’s trance -- “Your attention is so fixated on what hypnosis feels like right now, and it keeps changing and becoming more rich and deep, constantly noticing new things and realizing that so many little things are happening automatically, outside of your awareness.” This can be a great gateway to getting someone to feel like trance is happening “to them.”

• Fixation allows for control and utilization of attention

In hypnosis we value the ability for someone to comply with suggestions -- and in erotic hypnosis, this creates opportunities for D/s. Directing attention and narrowing it into fixation is a representation of the influence that hypnosis can have over the mind. Honoring and acknowledging this is an opportunity for hypnotic D/s. This is especially true when we also acknowledge that we as hypnotists are causing a person’s brain to do things more unconsciously -- something that they can’t easily do themselves.

In general, buy-in to this -- that the hypnotist can play with a person’s attention -- creates buy-in to broader suggestions about control over a person’s mind. This doesn’t have to be a D/s suggestion (although it is a powerful one), it can simply be the acknowledgment that someone is genuinely hypnotized and their brain is following suggestions.

Fixation is something we also utilize as a stepping stone to other phenomena. For example, we may get someone to fixate on a feeling of anticipation to broaden that into arousal or tense catalepsy. We could invoke fixation on a person’s desires to utilize that motivation to transform them, or fixation on you as the hypnotist to lead into a compulsion to submit to you and please you.

Types of Fixation

A goal of sensory suggestions is often to create focus and fixation -- when we direct someone to think about a memory, a visualization, or something they are perceiving with their senses like a touch or visual external focus. Just as we make a distinction between internal and external fixations, we want to distinguish between these broad “categories” of focal point and what is happening:

• Imaginative/internal creative experience

When we tell someone to imagine an image, sound, feeling, fantasy, thought, or etc, they are going inside and producing something. It requires conscious and unconscious creativity, and is often dynamic as a person’s internal process shifts and changes. For example, if you ask your partner to imagine a scenario of being lured by a siren song, they will have a response to produce that scenario in various internal sensory hallucinations/imaginations. Certain aspects of the scenario will spring to mind instantly, some things may become fleshed out “consciously” as they try to make the fantasy more vivid, some things may become more vivid unconsciously. The experience will change both as they focus on it more, and as you describe it more or draw them further into it.

Internal creativity can cause a person to dissociate from external experiences or other parts of their experience, as with other internal focuses. Creativity is a process -- when it “feels” conscious it can be like being absorbed in a task. A person can also spontaneously or be led to feel like this process is happening (in part or whole) without their conscious control -- they can feel dissociated from the process of creativity itself even as they watch it happen.

In NLP, “submodalities” describe various details of the senses -- for a visual fixation, this would be things like color, shape, size, perspective. The idea of using submodalities is generally about understanding when one aspect of a thing changes, that corresponds or can be linked to changes elsewhere. For example, the siren fantasy could be later suggested to be put on a movie screen (in a “frame”) instead of something that the subject is “inside.” What does this change about the rest of a person’s experience, especially the parts that they are dissociated from or feel like they are not controlling? For example, what about their trance experience changes, their bodily sensations, their other visuals?

• External focus

An external fixation -- such as on something visible, or a sound -- is not a creative process. It is taking in information as opposed to producing it. It is often not controllable by the subject themselves (this can create opportunities for subtle D/s -- “You can often control what you focus on in your mind, your fantasies, but right now I’m controlling my finger passing back and forth in front of your eyes.”)

In the same way that changing the submodalities of an inner experience can change other parts of a person’s experience, shifts in an external focus will correspond to inner shifts. When someone is watching a candle and it suddenly flickers, they will tend to have an interesting trance response of some sort. Think too about external fixations that are like patterns -- the swinging of a watch, or the ticking of a metronome. Patterns will tend to get someone used to expecting a loop, and will tend to correspond to a pattern of inner experience -- which can be interrupted by a change, resulting in a change in response.

External fixations are often used to facilitate creative internal processes, as we discussed above, and will often result in inner creativity or recall even if no suggestions are made towards it. For example, focusing on the sound of a bell will tend to cause a person’s brain to kick up feelings, images, thoughts, or memories as it processes what it’s making them feel. Subjects who are less familiar with trance may find this to be distracting -- it’s helpful to utilize and acknowledge as part of hypnosis.

• Recall

Recalling something is an internal experience, but a sort of gray area. It is drawing upon existing memories, so in some ways it is not creative, but recalling a memory will always involve some amount of creativity and usually spontaneous sensory experience. (Similarly, unconscious creativity will always be on some level drawing upon memory and transforming it.)

This makes it an interesting fixation to play with. We may use the trick of telling someone to recall a time that they were very deeply hypnotized, and take advantage of how that will unconsciously produce those same sensations -- especially when they are focused on one “sense” of the memory over another. (This is true for all internal hallucinations -- causing someone to focus on a visual hallucination can make the “feelings” part more dissociated or unconscious-feeling -- or, you can emphasize it.)

Memories can easily be led into becoming creative hallucinations. A memory of sex can transform into a fantasy, where the person is recalling physical pleasure but envisioning new and impossible things happening to them. (Some caution: most people will be fine being able to delineate between fantasy and memory, but it is good practice to explicitly say where the fantasy begins.)

• Kinesthetic

Kinesthetic sensation is an extremely complex topic and gray area between what is internal and what is external. Most of our sensory experience is pretty “outside” of us -- seeing, hearing, smelling external things (and taste is always partially kinesthetic). But we “feel” things with our bodies very directly, including the feelings we get from emotions (our nervous system activating in certain ways). We feel trance in our bodies very much, and sensations seem to read to us as very internal.

We could say that sensation is an interesting bridge between what is inside and what is outside. Touch is an immediate, compelling sensory fixation that directly corresponds to internal experience, and internal experience is often felt as something physical. In this way, it can be used as a transition between inner and outer -- for example, your partner focusing on your fingertip which eventually reaches out to touch their forehead.

Physical activity is also included in kinesthetic fixation -- motion and spatial awareness. For a simple example, those inductions where you ask someone to do a repetitive motion with their hands is a kinesthetic fixation -- consider how it begins as a conscious action that becomes unconscious.

(Please y’all vote for the kinesthetic essay sometime I promise it’ll be good lol)

Some Tech

In this section, we’ll explore a few ideas to think about when we are utilizing focus.

• Fixation Housekeeping

There is some “housekeeping” we do in hypnosis to set our partners up to succeed. This usually has to do with co-opting a person’s expectations and responses, and generally suggesting that whatever their responses are, they are “doing it right.” This is part of why it’s so important to understand the general and individual responses a person has -- knowing them allows you to acknowledge and incorporate them.

• “Fixation includes observation” and “It’s OK to shift focus”

It is natural when someone is directed to focus on something that they will also sometimes observe or analyze their experience. This can be a kind of “zooming out” -- they are watching themselves fixate, like a quality of meta self-awareness of “I am focusing.” It could be more evaluative and analyzing -- “Am I focusing?” The reality is that when we focus on something, this observation can be part of that focus -- our inner monologue or processing doesn’t really turn off, just like in hypnosis. They are unconscious impulses and boundary-testing of the experience. Acknowledging to your partner that that will happen sometimes -- and including it or creating suggestions around it (such as it drawing them back into the focus itself) is useful.

Similarly, we can acknowledge that a person will sometimes unconsciously shift their focus to different aspects of a given fixation or to another fixation entirely. You can even play with this and take them on a journey to see how their focus wanders -- making that more unconscious so that they can’t control how it latches on to different things.

• “The way you focus is your own processing”

Just as we teach our partners that there’s no singular right way for them to “feel” hypnosis, we can teach them that fixation doesn’t have to fit some idealistic expectation. Sometimes people have an expectation that fixation in hypnosis means total static lack of awareness or distraction, or that it simply feels a particular way because it is hypnotic. We can draw comparisons to total absorption reading a book, but the reality is that intentional, directed focus in hypnosis feels different from that -- and it’s something they will have to discover. Their brain will have its own way that it responds when they are told to focus on something, and that’s their authentic experience -- they don’t have to fight against it. 

• Change Object/Direction of Focus

Fixation is useful to get a person to settle into focusing on certain things and dissociating them away from other parts of their experience. But as we’ve discussed, a benefit to playing with focus is the capacity to direct and move it around.

We see examples of this in common inductions: 7 +/- 2 style inductions have a person focus on multiple things very quickly -- people tend to do this by going back and forth between them. When you get a person switching between focuses, it can make it harder for them to “land” on any individual one, and you are essentially creating a pattern where they become habituated to not being able to focus on any single thing. You can take advantage of this and create a whole induction out of them not being able to control their fixation -- dissociating the experience of focus itself where perhaps it becomes slippery and difficult to hold onto. Or, you can do the classic ending and interrupt the pattern by suddenly suggesting a singular focus. In a classic 7 +/- 2, this tends to just be “trance,” but think about how you can make this focus more concrete -- perhaps directing someone to their internal trance sensations. Maybe a person felt as though they were kind of “spinning” through multiple focuses, and you land on a sensation of stillness that slowly but inescapably sets in.

We can also bolster inductions like this one by distinguishing the “direction” of a person’s focus. Perhaps the fixations you suggest are all external things and then the final focus is internal. Or you could do the opposite, where someone is very internally fixated and then suddenly externally fixated -- suggesting the contrast of their external awareness being different from how it “usually” is can be an intense trance experience. Or you could cycle through a gradual change where at first the fixations are fully external, then some gray-area kinesthetic fixations, then internal -- causing a person to cycle between inside and outside can create some very interesting effects.

• Holistic Fixation/Mixing and Matching

Individual fixations are useful, whether it is an external one or an internal imagination/hallucination. But there is also value to creating a kind of “environment” of focus that can include multiple modalities beyond the senses.

For example, if you are fixating a person on your eyes, you can “include” more in that focus. Not just what they are seeing, but the idea and concept of a person staring into a hypnotist’s eyes, the way it makes them physically feel, their memories of it as a fantasy or reality, spiraling out into fantasies about what will happen to them if they stare for too long…

In the same way we talked about moving a person through multiple fixations, it can be interesting to make a fixation include multiple directions at the same time. It can be as totally broad as the above example where you turn a person’s entire internal and external experience into their fixation, but it can be more simple. You could just focus on a couple of aspects -- perhaps you are directing your partner to focus on the way they are feeling between their legs, and you tell them at the same time that they should fixate intensely on your voice. This is something we might already do and we can see how it has the effect of linking the two focal points -- when the experience of one changes, when your voice lowers in tone, they feel it in their body. This is also very interesting to do when you are “layering” a fantasy or memory on top of reality -- having someone watch a pocketwatch swinging and at the same time vividly imagining the last time you did the same thing.

You can play with broadening focus within a single fixation as well, such as moving a person’s focus on a single part of their body (such as where you are touching them) to spread through their entire body. This can be useful for transformative suggestions, and often can lead to a “warping” feeling of a person’s body or kinesthetic experience. We are familiar doing this too with hallucinatory/imaginative experiences when we “flesh out” multiple aspects to a particular internal fixation.