If you’re new to hypnosis, you *can* get hypnotized by an audio file or a script. But there are some limits. New subjects are mostly driven by their own fetishes and ideas about what hypnosis is, how it should feel and how they should act while under. These representations often come to be unphased with the reality of hypnosis, and as such, your needs/desires and the reality don’t match properly. “I feel like I’m not really hypnotized”, “I think I’m just roleplaying”, or “Something was happening but I could’ve stopped if I wanted to” are often hints for hypnotists to make us understand that something may be wrong in your understandings of hypnosis, meaning we’re facing common misconceptions.
So, I’ll start with something general, and then I’ll come back to your ask specifically. I understand Hypnosis as a form of communication. To be the most efficient, it needs the creation of a feedback loop between you, the subject, and the hypnotist. This feedback loop is often called Rapport, as you are responding to the hypnotist, and the hypnotist analyses your response to deliver a well-fitted suggestion. Rapport is also built on trust, and leads to, when it’s well built, a form a seduction and the impression of a mutual understanding. Building rapport will make you think that what I’m saying is interesting, that you want to follow, read and listen, and it will make you feel an inner sense of acceptance and calmness over what will happen next.
Once the communication get established between you and the tist, it’s the tist’s work to analyze your behavior and guide you into a deeper trance. You can notice that building rapport in itself is already a bit hypnotic, as it can create a more relaxed, focused feeling. Because when you’re reading and learning, you’re already opening your mind to new informations, and having these informations inside your mind by by-passing the critical faculty you can have is already part of how you will, throughout the session, learn the hypnotic process.
The hypnotic process is about letting words have effects. And you can see this as a conscious task : if I tell you to relax, it’s a conscious command. And you’re free to consciously follow, accept, and relax. And that’s perfectly fine, as a conscious command is creating a conscious effect. But I can get you to relax by talking about the idea of relaxing, the idea that, when people relax, they can observe how their breathing pattern changes, how everything slowly slows down, how they can even feel their heartbeats change if they focus on their chest, how the flow of thoughts is also altering itself somehow as they can focus on how their body is reacting to the idea of a calm, relaxed state, slowly taking place as long as they’re reading. And when saying this, I’d use a deep voice to enhance the effects I want to see, and I’d say things such as “relaxing and letting go are some very simple things that you can do unconsciously now. And as you’re letting go of tensions or thoughts, you can notice how you can let everything slip now, and relax deeper, now.” And you, or the subject, would be following at a deeper level. And the effects would take place not only at the conscious level, but also at the unconscious level. And these effects tends to last longer, like there’s inertia, once you’re going into a deeper state. And at some point it even starts maintaining itself : the hypnotic process is going on, and on, and on… With just a few suggestions taking place, at a deeper level, now.
So this is an example of what it’s like to follow an hypnotic suggestion. At this point, there are three possibilities you could’ve been reacting to this “script”, and they are all quite interesting to describe.
1) You genuinely followed the script and now feels more relaxed than when you started reading this post. Hello, you’ve been covertly hypnotized, time to wake up. 1, 2, 1, 2. Hey, nice to see you. Also, did you notice how you read my voice much deeper when I said things in italics earlier ? Wow. I’m really modifying your thoughts, now.
2) At some point you understood what was going on and you reacted to it. The most interesting situation : my suggestions have been more and more obvious, which means that at some point, you first noticed something and you gave me an intention. Something rang a bell in your head and you thought “Ah ! He’s trying to hypnotize me now.”. Your inner monologue shifted from “just reading” to “making a decision” : following (hypnotically) or not. And when you’re facing this situation, this is always a conscious decision. So now, if you followed, you may have felt something or not. And if you did not follow, you just consciously blocked everything, which is perfectly fine because you can always (!!always!!) block a suggestion when you don’t want to follow it. It’s a suggestion.
3) You were oblivious to everything and are not feeling more relaxed. That’s fine. It’s a script. Rapport is bad. You can’t hear me, I can’t see you. I’m only relying on the reactions I think you’ll have while reading, which is like doing stupid and inefficient mind-reading. I’m like, writing a complicated recipe without knowing if you own a frying pan or not. Don’t trust hypnotists who give you some already half-cooked recipe, like a script or an audio / video file. Some of them are very good, but most of them are bad. Try to get a real hypnotist, for a chat / video session, where you can answer and give some feedbacks that will get integrated efficiently into the session. It’s way better, because first of all, it works. :^)
Also, practice makes perfect. Part of being a subject is a learned behavior, conditionned by cultural representations (aka what I was trying to explain at the beggining)
Et voilà ! I hope it answers your questions !
Really interesting and truthfull answer with a fun little punch at the end.
Hypnosis 