When you’re driving your car, I’m betting the odometer and the tachometer barely register to your mind, if at all. I’m sure (I hope!) that you check the speedometer fairly frequently, but that’s the only counter you’re using. The numbers are just there - they mean something, but nothing you are taking into account during your daily drive.
That is the way hypnotists often use numbers - they are meant to be subliminal, flexible, barely noticed or - as in the case of Elman-style inductions - lost completely.
But frequently, that is not what the neurodivergent brain does. At all.
When I studied hypnosis with Jerry Kein and OmniHypnosis (now OMNI Hypnosis Academy, and I’ll say OMNI from now on), I had no idea I was neurodivergent. I knew people thought me odd, that they felt they couldn’t understand me, that I had been bullied and ostracized in my younger years, but the possibility of neurodivergence just wasn’t on the radar. So I was surprised at some of my reactions to my training.
For the first thing, I couldn’t lose the numbers. In fact, I felt my brain hanging onto them tightly, as if afraid of letting them go.
For those unfamiliar with the Dave Elman hypnotic induction, part of the process is amnesia for numbers: the client is told as they count backwards from 100, that they are “losing the numbers” - rather like the way an anesthesiologist has a patient count backwards until they lose consciousness.
“Losing” the numbers freaked my brain out. As I began working with people in the entertainment industry, I found that some of them couldn’t lose the numbers either (it is now my understanding from other sources that it’s quite possible that neurodivergence is common in the artistic community). I finally stopped using that piece of the induction, but I didn’t understand why it didn’t work for me. Or on me.
Then we were told that our subconscious minds could keep far better time than our conscious minds could - the suggestion given was that, without counting, the subconscious mind in trance would let one know when 30 seconds was up.
Unfortunately, they selected me to demonstrate this on.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t relinquish that control. I responded by going very deep instead. Well after the 30 seconds had elapsed, I was given an arm levitation cue to check my trance depth and my arm barely floated up at all. When the instructor running the exercise said, “I bet that feels to her like her arm is WAY up in the air,” I managed to nod in the affirmative. They assumed I went too deep to emerge from the 30-second count. I assumed I couldn’t do it because I recorded radio commercials and it’s hard for me to turn off my internal timer to let my subconscious take over. I don’t know exactly what was happening. I do know that numbers were at the center of it, and I later found a way to work with that.
When I started running group hypnosis sessions, I was using the typical terminology for deepening, like “going 10 times deeper” and “two times as much”. Through talkbacks after my sessions, I found that several people were having issues with these suggestions, as their minds wanted to do the math: “How relaxed am I now?” “Then how much of that is 10 times as much?” “Now what’s my total?” “What is 2 times that?”
To a neurotypical mind, this may sound silly. But to a neurodivergent mind, which is taking things more literally and granularly and building from them (bottom-up processing again), not to mention the constant fear of “doing it wrong” (which will come up a lot in these articles - it’s a really big thing), this makes perfect sense.
I’ve never been much of a numbers person; I’m a words person: love ‘em, know a bunch of ‘em, play with ‘em, puzzle with ‘em. But even “non-numbers person” me could not just let numbers do their thing. Many of us have trouble learning to tell time, as well - I did. Clock faces are fractions and I have to calculate them when I tell time. Numbers are not malleable to me - they are specific.
Unless I am specifically told otherwise!
Now in my pre-talk, I say specifically:
When I deepen your relaxation, I will use terms like “double it” or “go 10 times deeper”, but I’m not speaking in mathematical absolutes - it’s just a general feeling of “more” relaxation - “more” releasing and less tension - and you can let your subconscious take you to the best level for you each time.
And that seems to be all that is needed.
And when I asked for the one-question modified SUDS scale numbers, I said that the numbers could be very “mushy”, because they are about feelings and feelings are “mushy”, to relieve the tension about getting the numbers “right” (although I would still get some ratings on the 1-10 scale of something like 6.8 to 3.45 - but hey, that’s just us and how we function, and that is perfectly okay!)
So, many of us who are neurodivergent - even those like myself who are not “numbers people” - seem to have brains that treat numbers in a special way. But just letting us know specifically how the numbers should be used, can take our focus off the dashboard dials and allow us to enjoy the hypnotic ride.