Tips for Effective Trance Inductions

How to professionally initiate a trance induction:

• What you say is less important than how you say it. The voice plays a special role in trance work.
• Refer back to earlier trance experiences: Have the person describe exactly how they entered a trance state in the past.
• Spontaneous trance states: Describe everyday trance states—e.g., while driving, during a boring class, through repetition or monotony.
• By systematically matching predicates and then linguistically shifting into another sensory system (leading), clients can begin to perceive the experience in a different (sensory) way.
• Overload: Humans can consciously process about seven (±2) sources of information simultaneously. When more stimuli are introduced, the conscious mind becomes overloaded, allowing information to pass directly to the unconscious. To ensure overload works, involve all sensory channels.
• The power of personal presence: Tell someone convincingly that they can go into trance.
• Nested realities (a story within a story): Overwhelm the conscious capacities. Insert suggestions within a narrative—something the conscious mind might otherwise resist.
• Quoting: When you quote, you frame your behavior as if saying, “I’m not saying this myself—I’m just recounting an experience I had.” Of course, within that story you can embed any induction you like, with full impact.
• Pattern interruption is perhaps the fastest way to knock a client out of their “map of the world.” A fixed behavioral pattern is interrupted before it can complete. Possible methods include sudden shifts in tone, rhythm, or activity.
• Pseudo-orientation in time: Lead the client into a trance, project them into the future, and presuppose that the problem that brought them to you has already been solved. Then ask them to recall in detail how they solved it, what you as the therapist did, and what helped most.

Inducing Trance

Guidelines for Ending a Trance

Tips and considerations for ending a trance—how to bring the client back effectively.

Just as it takes time to lead someone into trance, it is also important to allow enough time for them to return. One option is to use phrasing that lets the client end the trance at their own pace, or to count down from 10 to 1, with the number 1 signaling a full return to the here-and-now.

Be sure to remove all suggestions given during trance, such as feelings of lightness, heaviness, amnesia, etc.

Use closing suggestions like: “When you open your eyes, you can feel refreshed, rested, and alert.”

You can also give post-hypnotic suggestions so that the client can enter trance more easily and deeply next time.

Ensure that the client has truly exited the trance by checking their sensory responses and reactions.

If necessary, the trance observer can assist the client in standing up or leaving the space safely.