12: Cleaning up safely

One of the most important parts of hypnosis play is abiding by “campground rules”: taking good care of your partner and leaving them “better than you found them.” For the most part, until you are working with someone with whom you’re in a long-term relationship and you both have some solid experience and knowledge under your belt, this means “cleaning up” the suggestions and play you do when the scene is finishing.

When we engage in any intimacy or kink—or any experience—we can’t really “erase” the effect that that experience has on us or the other person. For this reason, it’s not as simple as waving our hands and saying, “Now, magically, you’re free from any long-term effects!” (It never is! Psychology is very complicated!)

A good place to start—especially with more “involved” suggestions like in-depth fantasies or transformation—is suggesting a reversal or a return to baseline. Like a wake-up but for that specific suggestion—perhaps transforming someone back to their usual self, or waking someone up out of the fantasy.

Here are some more ingredients that you can use for a healthy ethos around this topic:

Boundaries

It’s often a great idea when you are suggesting something that you set some boundaries on the suggestion, especially if it’s something that has the potential to extend past the scene. This means including phrases like:

“Just for this scene…”

“Just while we play…”

“Just with me…”

“Just in this chair/bed/couch…”

…Or whatever you want the boundaries on the suggestion to be.

Hypnosis isn’t magic (mostly…), so including boundaries doesn’t magically mean that some effects will never ever spill over. Hypnosis makes changes to a person’s memories and associations! But this is a great place to start, and one really important effect it does have is making sure you and your partner are on the same page about when to really expect effects to be, well, effective!

Cooperation/agreement

When you’re beginning to clean up your suggestions at the end of a scene, one of the first things you can do is enlist some cooperation from your partner! Express that it’s a mutual desire, and that you’re attentive to their needs as a subject. This means using some language like:

“We’re going to clean up now so that you’re in a good place after the scene”

“We don’t want these suggestions to affect you outside of trance, so…”

No need to mourn

The end of a really exciting intimate time can be sad or disappointing—sometimes in a small way and sometimes in a big way. This feeling or other feelings of not wanting a scene to end can lead to a little desire to “hang on” to parts of suggestions. We just generally want to make this a pleasant process (which will help our suggestions in turn) so some reassurance that the subject doesn’t have to feel like they’re missing out, such as:

“If you had fun with this, we can always do it again”

“This isn’t the end, just a break until next time”

“Even though we’re cleaning up, these suggestions will be part of you and more accessible for the next time you experience something”

Replace/reframe

Saying “Don’t respond to this suggestion outside of trance” is a little bit like saying “Don’t think about pink elephants.” Once an association has been made inside of a person’s head (like the kinds of associations we make in hypnosis), simply removing it is really hard!

Instead, we can transform the suggestions into something that is less likely to be disruptive outside of trance. One of the best ways to do this is to “reframe” their experience into a memory. It’s true that the experience DID become a memory! And we function totally fine with having nice memories all the time. You could say things like:

“And now, you feel this suggestion turning into a simple memory with only as much power over you as any other memory”

“As we clean up, this experience becomes just a normal memory, not affecting you out of trance”

Ratify

The last piece you can include is a chance for your partner to feel how the suggestions won’t affect them out of trance. You can do this by “testing it out” when they’re awake (calling back to the suggestion and reinforcing that they’re not affected by it), and/or you can “future pace” them while you’re doing clean up.

“Future pacing” is a fancy term for when you make a suggestion that makes someone imagine what will happen in the future. It’s a really useful technique in a lot of hypnosis, but one of its most useful places to be is in cleanup—having your partner imagine being awake and not responding to the suggestions you’re cleaning up. Giving them the opportunity to imagine what that’ll feel like reinforces the clean up suggestions! You could say something like:

“You can imagine going about your day, unaffected by these suggestions”

“You can imagine being awake and just smiling to yourself instead of responding to these suggestions”

“Can you see yourself just remembering this scene fondly?”