“If I’m helping it happen, surely I’m just pretending?”
That belief can leave you dismissing a real change in your experience simply because you noticed yourself contributing to it.
Hypnosis does not require you to become a passive spectator inside your own head.
In this video, I explain the differences between ordinary deliberate action, putting on a performance and honestly responding to suggestion—and why those differences deserve more careful attention than whether your hand moved.
We also tackle a common objection: “But I knew I could stop it.”
Stay with me for the questions practitioners should ask instead of “It feels lighter now, doesn’t it?” They can change how we understand a response—and reduce the pressure to produce one.
Honest feedback is welcome. Oscar-worthy hand levitation is optional.
For a real deep dive into this topic, read this article Am I Hypnotised or Just Pretending?
The point that noticing your own participation doesn’t mean you’re faking is useful, since that doubt often kills the experience before it develops. One practical tweak: instead of asking whether your hand felt lighter, note what you expected to happen before the suggestion was given, then compare that with what actually occurred. The gap between expectation and result is more informative than the sensation itself. Doing this once or twice in writing makes the difference between deliberate effort and genuine response much easier to spot.
Thanks for taking the time to write and share that – I cover expectation in great detail in my research, in our protocol, in our teaching and we utilise it greatly (in the psych labs at Bournemouth University we use expectancy measures prior to testing to examine the impact of expectation upon our results) – however, this video was not about expectation or analysing it’s effect. I was compartmentalising the notion of how we perceive our own active participation. Best wishes to you, Adam.