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Progressive Relaxation (That Doesn't Suck) by sleepingirl
🕑 Added 2023-04-21 15:58:44 +0000 UTCProgressive relaxation inductions (or “PMRs,” for “progressive muscle relaxation”) get a bad reputation. It’s often seen as the mark of a beginner to lead someone through a lengthy process of focusing on their body, piece by piece, to relax it. We find ourselves also having to remind people that relaxation itself isn’t necessary for (or a given sign of) hypnosis. However, PMR techniques don’t have to be boring at all -- and we can come up with some creative ways to use them as well as understand what role relaxation can play in erotic hypnosis.
Relaxation
Hypnosis is of course associated with sleep -- from the name, to the associations with unconsciousness, to the way we expect hypnotized people to behave. If we use relaxation as part of our induction of trance (as many do), it stands to reason that our partner might respond by relaxing. (However -- especially if a person fetishizes hypnosis, they may respond by getting excited!)
But if relaxation isn’t necessary for hypnosis, then why can it be effective? To answer this, we need to put ourselves in the mindset of a subject and think about what makes any kind of induction effective.
Hypnosis could be said to work best when a subject experiences some sort of convincing change from their norm. We see this concept a lot in Ericksonian theory -- hypnosis being “a change in someone’s reality” which we have covered extensively. Practically, hypnosis is a highly perceptual experience where subjects are looking for signs of trance in their physicality and psychology. We know that someone feeling some easy, nuanced changes when they’re being hypnotized is more open to bigger things, and those nuanced sensations often arise as a product of a more nuanced focus induced by the hypnotist.
To put it into plain words, relaxation:
- Creates buy-in: It’s an easy way for someone to hear a suggestion and feel themselves responding to it, especially since relaxation is a semi-automatic physical experience
- Creates hallucinatory experiences: It’s a direct change in the “norm” of someone’s bodily sensations that can easily (and often automatically) lead to things like catalepsy or a floaty/heavy/disconnected feeling
- Draws on associations and memories: Many people mentally associate hypnosis with relaxation, whether culturally or from previous experience
- Creates physical sensations that feel like hypnosis to many people: Very common signs of hypnosis like eye closure/lidded eyes, heaviness, lack of muscle tone, loss of control, etc can feel like relaxation -- if you suggest someone experiences signs of hypnosis, they tend to feel hypnotized
There are many different ways that we might suggest relaxation, even indirectly. Certainly we can tell someone explicitly to relax, but there are tons of other ways that we can make relaxation happen:
- Metaphor/visualization: talking about a sun setting after a long day, or a string that was held under tension that is slowly being let go
- Breathing: suggesting more natural breathing (explicitly timing deep breaths can be challenging since everyone has a different rhythm)
- Suggesting tension: suggesting a building of muscle tension with the knowledge that it will eventually let go
- Emotional suggestions: suggesting that someone is in a situation where they are letting go of anxiety, somewhere comfortable like in their bed or with someone they trust
Structure/Ingredients of PMR
A “traditional” progressive relaxation:
- Is “progressive” (moves from one part to another, building up)
- Creates bodily focus/scanning (causes a person to pay nuanced attention to their body)
- Can be active or passive (“Now, relax your legs” versus “You feel your legs relax”)
- Is relaxing (creates an expected sensation)
Even without any variation, a progressive relaxation induction (or deepener -- this can easily be done after induction of trance) can be done like this and not be too slow, too direct, or too boring. (Side note: anyone who isn’t doing so to be sadistic has to put a dollar in the swear jar if they intend to “bore” someone into hypnosis.)
Think about how you might maintain someone’s attention when talking about relaxation. What is an exciting, sexy way to talk about it? Perhaps you could remind them how much they want to be hypnotized and how this is giving them what they desire. Perhaps you can relate the feeling of relaxation to the feeling of control or simply the thrill of responding to a suggestion. Perhaps they fetishize hypnosis and you can play into the sensual nature of the trope or relaxation itself. Perhaps you can talk about what could be done to them when they are fully relaxed. Perhaps you can degrade or praise them for how easily they are responding. Perhaps you can remind them that this is an opportunity for them to truly not have to do anything else -- giving them real permission to let go.
There are so many possibilities -- try challenging yourself to do a PMR that doesn’t sound like any PMR you’ve ever heard, using different language or techniques but still staying within the traditional structure.
A note on speed: It doesn’t take most people very long at all to relax a given body part. It doesn’t have to be “completely” relaxed -- simply noticing a change is enough. The more you repetitively linger on one body part to try to relax it more and more, the more you run the risk of getting into “boring” territory. Consider also that as your induction “progresses,” this sensation of relaxation is going to get easier for the subject. You almost certainly don’t need to spend as much time relaxing the fifth or sixth part you address as you did the first. They’re going to feel it faster. Of course, feel free to relax someone as much as you both want, especially if you’re being interesting! Just keep this in mind.
Creative PMRs/Variations
In this section, we’re going to go over a bunch of variations on the theme. Definitely steal aspects from one idea to apply to another -- and come up with your own!
- Fast PMR
What if you really speed-up a progressive relaxation? If we keep a lot of the common elements of a PMR such as bodily focus, we can even highlight the body scanning aspect of this technique. In a lot of cases, body scans can be easier if they are very fast.
You could do this as quickly as saying, “Pay attention to your head and notice your face relaxing -- your eyes, lips, and jaw, then like a wave it moves down your body to your neck, shoulders, the little muscles in your chest, abdomen, legs…”
There are some interesting elements in something even as simple as this. Think about how this does create a kind of wave-like sensation down or up the body more than a slower PMR. Also think about which parts of the body that relaxation might linger -- opportunities for you to mention more specific body parts or the “small muscles” language that might cause a person to feel a more nuanced sensation of relaxing.
Doing a fast PMR like this opens up opportunities to repeat it and create another “wave.” You could repeat the process or change it up -- maybe going even faster, going in the opposite direction, lingering on different body parts, or doing a slower and languid pass (which can be great at showing contrast and intensity).
Something else useful is that this fast PMR can be much easier to anchor than a slow PMR if you want to turn it into a triggered response. Whether you connect this sensation with the word “deeper” or perhaps some trigger that turns them more into a ragdoll even if they’re awake, there are a lot of possibilities.
- PM… Something Else
We use “progressive” language all the time in hypnosis, especially when we’re trying to evoke a sense of totality. Perhaps we transform someone’s body piece by piece, or we want to overwhelm them with arousal.
There are some interesting variations that you can take with this. You can start off with a regular PMR and then introduce another element by transforming the sensation of relaxation: “That relaxation spreading through you starts to tingle, and you realize that it’s turning into…” In a case like this, think about what mimics relaxation: control? Stillness? Pleasure? Trance itself?
It is also fun to just use the ingredients of a PMR to create other effects from the get-go. How would you progressively “hypnotize” someone’s body instead of just relaxing it? What kinds of language would you use if you wanted to make someone feel progressively stiff or encased? The principle of creating nuanced bodily focus helps us a lot here. Would you vary the speed as you might in an interesting progressive relaxation induction?
One of the great things about this technique is that it forces us to get creative with language and concepts and in many cases, identify synesthetic aspects to a given idea. For example, if you wanted to progressively make someone’s whole body feel dumb or have the intelligence drained out of it, you may not just be talking about obvious physical sensations -- you’re borrowing from another modality and asking your partner to hallucinate more abstract feelings. “Your body is getting dumber too, like all that stupidity from your brain is leaking down to your neck, like your neck and shoulders are forgetting things, seeping down to your chest and stomach as they get warm and feel all silly…” For some people, asking them physically to “feel” an abstract idea like this can work very well (and vice versa).
Here are a few ideas you could play with in this vein:
- Doll/bimbo/statue/pet/drone/etc transformation
- Full-body dumbness
- Full-body arousal
- Full-body orgasm
- Full-body control/submission
- Full-body trance
- “My Friend John”/Dissociative PMR
The “My Friend John” style of induction is all about giving someone the experience of imagining another person responding to hypnosis and letting them naturally “mirror” those feelings. We can take from this easily for our progressive relaxation techniques.
You can of course do this in the same style as “My Friend John”: “Once I was hypnotizing someone and it was just so exciting to watch their body relax, piece by piece, their legs settling, their abdomen letting go, their shoulders slumping as relaxation spread all the way through them…” (As an aside: some subjects may like this a lot but be wary of triggering any envy/jealousy.)
Another option is to invent a shared imagination: “Can you imagine the image of a hypnotized person -- the one that you fantasize when you think about someone totally relaxing?”
Yet another option is to simply let someone imagine themselves, as though they were observing from the outside. This can be especially effective to create a sense of passivity -- dissociating the person from their own experience of relaxing. That passivity can easily lead into D/s elements like control.
Think about other ways you might be able to push this -- you could use future pacing with this kind of technique as well: “Can you imagine how you’re going to respond to being hypnotized? The way you’re going to listen to me, and how when you really start paying attention you feel your legs relaxing, your stomach, slowly being overwhelmed by relaxation up to your chest, spreading into your neck and shoulders…” (It’s good in this kind of case of future pacing to “ratify” to your partner that they are responding -- “You can feel it now, can’t you?” -- so that they know they are supposed to or are allowed to be feeling it “now” rather than “later.” This also affords you the opportunity to prove to them that they’re in trance -- “So you must be going deep, right?”)
- Brain PMR
Sure, it’s called “progressive muscle relaxation,” but when we extend the boundaries of what PMR means, we can come up with some really interesting and erotic ideas. One of the most psychosensual ways to do this is by progressively relaxing the mind.
Many traditional PMRs will often conclude with the hypnotist moving the bodily relaxation to the brain: “Now, you can feel all of that relaxation sinking into your head, relaxing your mind…” But we can focus more exclusively on the mind in a way that creates abstract, hypnofetishistic eroticism.
You can do this in a more vague way, for example by telling someone simply that there are all different parts of their mind that they can feel progressively relaxing. You could get more specific, too: “The part of you that’s listening to me is starting to relax… that sensation moving into the part of you that controls your body, the part of you that controls your thoughts all just gently starting to let go… The part of you that’s observing, the part of you that controls your inhibitions, your identity…” (You can see how this might be useful for personality transformations or brainwashing as well.)
If you happen to have some neuroscience knowledge or knowledge about parts of the brain, you can talk more concretely about that -- even including metaphors like the electrical activity slowing down, or “lighting up” less. Even if you don’t, these are great ideas to throw in.
We can easily incorporate some forms of dissociation here by letting our partner observe how their mind is relaxing. This can be especially helpful for people who are “analytical” -- the experience of analyzing is often a sense that they are observing. So telling them outright that the observer part of them can watch their mind letting go, piece by piece, can be very effective. It also lets you culminate in “hypnotizing” the observer part/feelings.
You could even create this kind of effect by using metaphors for the mind. Some people enjoy the control room metaphor -- so talking about watching the inner workings of their mind as though it is a room full of machinery that keeps them going, everything starting to slow down and go dark, shutting off progressively. This also works great for other transformational metaphors for the mind -- if someone is in dollspace, perhaps it’s clockwork that is progressively ticking slower.
Certainly this can be helpful for creating transformational headspaces as well -- someone whose mind is relaxing could be easily led to feel like that is the dumbness of a bimbo or a pet, for example.
- Truncated/Misdirect PMR
Pattern interruptions and misdirections are fun, and they’re great for hypnosis. Someone who is really engaged with progressively relaxing their body could be said to be engaged in a pattern, and there’s various ways you can play with that.
Perhaps you have someone in the middle of a PMR, in the middle of their body. This could be a good opportunity to:
- Speed up/slow down -- if you’re going at a certain pace and you drastically change that pace, you dramatically shift the experience
- “Finish” early -- you could simply suggest that the relaxation sweeps through them in totality midway through; this could open up opportunities for either very fast relaxation or a sort of “ruined” PMR (“Your whole body now sinks all the way down, relaxing completely -- aww, did your legs get jealous of the attention that the rest of your body got?”)
- Switch gears/modality -- quickly changing the sensation or tone of what you’re suggesting (“Suddenly, you realize that this relaxation is actually bringing a feeling of submission, too late to stop it”), or giving someone a shift inwards to their mind relaxing
- Add kinesthetic cues -- if you’re in person with your partner, beginning a PMR without touch and then adding touch midway through can change the intensity and nuance (such as touching the parts you are suggesting to relax, or a trance anchor spot)
- Ambiguous PMR
We can take a little page from Erickson and incorporate a sense of ambiguity in our progressive relaxation. Instead of directly suggesting certain parts relaxing, we can use some classical indirect framings: “I wonder which part of you is going to feel that relaxation first?” “Which part is starting to relax most intensely?” “I don’t know which part of you is going to relax, but it’s happening now, isn’t it?”
You could also do this with slightly more specificity: “Which hand is feeling heavier and more relaxed as I talk to you?” “Which eye wants to relax down first?”
When using ambiguity in this way, you could easily keep things ambiguous for the entirety of the suggestions -- telling them that another part is relaxing, and then another. Or you could eventually get more explicit and tell them which parts are relaxing -- especially after a person has spontaneously felt relaxation at your ambiguous suggestion, they have a good foothold to respond to more direct suggestions.
This can also mesh well with “ambiguifying” the sensations that someone is feeling. “Can you even identify the nuance of those feelings creeping through you?” A great way to do this is to suggest relaxation first, and then allow someone to broaden what that sensation is: “As that relaxation spreads down, I wonder if it transforms as it moves through you, making you feel something else, something a little different…” We know that a key aspect to someone “improving” as a subject is discovering subtleties to our responses and being able to align those with our trance experience, and this is a great opportunity for that. Or perhaps what this kind of suggestion creates is a bigger change.
- Reverse PMR
While this could be listed under creating other sensations progressively, we should give a little extra attention to a “progressive muscle tension” technique, as it has some interesting effects. This can firstly be great for subjects who are already feeling tense or having a hard time relaxing -- either if they are a little nervous or simply very excited about being hypnotized. Telling someone who is already a little tense to build more tension in their body goes with their natural flow and serves to “pace” them.
You can also use this to transform tension that might be a little uncomfortable (like nervous tension) into something that feels better. Making suggestions that the tension you’re suggesting is an exciting, anticipatory feeling can reclaim it and calm it down in a roundabout way.
Another interesting thing of note is that many people associate muscle tension with arousal or orgasm (a lot of people have trouble reaching orgasm unless they tense up, and the experience of having an orgasm is usually one where parts of the body are tense). This doesn’t have to be about physical pleasure either -- someone who is tensed up might simply be having an “intense” experience, and giving someone the permission to feel that can be very effective.
Of course, this is also a semi-sneaky way to get relaxation as the end goal as well. Someone who is intentionally holding tension in their body -- especially if they are consciously flexing their muscles -- will have to release it eventually. That feeling of release, regardless of how relaxed they ultimately become, feels like relaxation. You can include this kind of language in your suggestions: “Inevitably, your muscles are going to grow tired and give in, letting go to a feeling of relaxation…”
You could also suggest relaxation through this with some creative imagery -- perhaps the person’s body is “rewinding time” to before they tensed their muscles. Or perhaps by tensing up they’ve obeyed you and thus will relax at your command.
- Guided fantasy PMR
It’s always fun to incorporate certain fantasy tropes into our play, and we have a great opportunity to do this with PMRs. Giving someone an imaginary reason why they’re relaxing can make that sensation feel very intense (or tropey in a good way).
Think about fantasy scenarios that might lead to progressive relaxation. Here are some potential examples:
- Receiving a massage
- Drugged with a soporific or muscle relaxant
- Stuck in a brainwashing machine or chamber that is controlling them to relax
- Laying out in the warm sun
- Going to bed/sleep
- Post-orgasm relaxation
While playing in fantasy isn’t the only way to play with resistance, people who enjoy CNC roleplay or “trying to resist” might respond really well to a scenario where they’re trying not to relax but inevitably do. Because relaxation (or at least lack of muscle tension) is a sort of status quo for our bodies, incorporating this can be really effective. Generally for some people, telling them to try not to do something or have a response can be a great method for actually achieving it.
Comments
Wordweaver
'While this could be listed under creating other sensations progressively, we should give a little extra attention to a “progressive muscle tension” technique, as it has some interesting effects. ' Pretty underrated. It was a crucial fulcrum with a subject who could have neutral-pleasant kinesthetic hallucinations but hadn't been able to have hallucinated pain physically (emotional bit worked). Actually having a suggestion cause physical pain led to enough buy in for a subsequent suggestion to stick which was actually hallucinated whole-cloth and not just stimulated and emphasized.
