Covert hypnosis is influence delivered inside what sounds like an ordinary conversation. It’s language that occupies the conscious mind and delivers a message to other levels of mind at the same time. The “covert” label may have come out of the persuasion-product world and fitted onto Erickson’s indirect methods after the fact. It promises a secret. It hints at control. But in my mind, that’s not how it works. It’s a series of invitations.
What “Covert” Actually Refers To
The client likely hears every syllable you say, and if you asked them to repeat it back, they could.
What’s covert is usually what the listener doesn’t consciously notice: tonality shifts, metaphors that parallel the presenting issue, ambiguities. It’s fully audible. It just tends not to get flagged by conscious attention as anything other than the way you talk. The work isn’t announced, and it usually isn’t remarked on. That’s the whole of it.
The Story Test
Let’s say you’re working with a client who’s stuck on a decision, and you tell her a story about somebody who solved a similar problem sideways.
There’s nothing hidden about that story. She heard all of it. She knows you chose to tell it, and she probably suspects you had a reason.
The effect on her may still be significant.
What you didn’t do is spell out the mapping. You never said “the person in the story is you, and the thing they were stuck on is your job.” The working model is that leaving that unsaid lets her make the connection herself, and a connection someone makes on their own doesn’t get argued with the way a direct instruction sometimes does. Say it out loud and you’ve converted the story into a suggestion she can accept or refuse.
The story was never hidden. Only the mapping was left unsaid.
Examples of Covert Hypnosis
Here’s a test that sorts this out quickly. Imagine announcing exactly what you’re doing, out loud, in the moment. If the technique still works, it was never covert. If announcing it wrecks the mechanism, that’s the real article.
- Setting one phrase apart from the rest of the sentence. A slight drop in tone, a pause on either side, a turn of the head. “I don’t know whether you’ll relax now or take a little longer.” Say “notice I just dropped my voice on the words relax now” and there’s nothing left to work with. See embedded commands for the full treatment.
- Words that carry two readings at once. “You can feel light as we go on.” Light as in weight, light as in brightness. The idea is that both readings get processed. Point out the double meaning and the listener picks one, which is the end of that. Mondegreens and oronyms are the same effect at the level of sound.
- A story with the mapping left unsaid. As above. The story is open. The connection is the client’s to make.
There’s a second family that gets called covert, and it’s worth separating because it rests on a different claim. With a presupposition or a double bind, the delivery isn’t unnoticed at all. “Would you like to close your eyes now, or after you tell me about your week?” is a perfectly audible question. What tends to go uninterrogated is the frame it’s built on, in that case the assumption that the eyes are closing either way.
So one family is delivery that isn’t noticed. The other is content that isn’t examined.
What Kind of Practice Do You Have?
I remember watching a video of Erickson working with a bunch of doctors. One of the doctors asked a question about working with weight loss and smoking. Erickson looked at him and said, slowly and deliberately, “Well, what kind of practice do you have?”
Watching the video, I could feel the doctor hesitating. He didn’t know if Erickson was asking about his medical practice, or about his level of experience. His practice, or his practice.
In these kinds of situations, the mind doesn’t know which frame to apply. It’s suspended, waiting for clues. Open.
It’s the feeling you get when you’re in a room and someone you don’t recognize looks in your direction, waves, acknowledges you, and starts heading your way. “Are they looking at me?” you might be thinking. As they come toward you, you may be wondering how to act. Maybe you should wave back. Maybe you should act like you don’t know them, in case they’re looking at someone behind you.
In that moment, the mind is looking for instruction. You don’t know whether to bring down the “I know this person” frame or the “this person is looking for someone else” frame. If someone you trusted whispered “wave” in your ear right then, you would probably do it.
That’s the moment Erickson used with the doctor. In the void of framelessness, Erickson continued talking. Pretty soon he was saying, “as a child, you probably don’t know the difference between a small ‘b’ and a small ‘d’, do you?” He liked to use regression. Time passed. Erickson continued with his indirect style. And I, watching the video some decades later, marveled.
But That’s Induction, and That’s Not the Whole Picture
There’s going into trance, and then there’s what you do with it.
A formal, traditional hypnosis session would have an induction, the delivery of suggestions, and emerging. It’s similar with covert hypnosis, which I’m going to call conversational hypnosis from here on out, but the phases aren’t announced and they aren’t as well defined.
In the Erickson story, the doctors were there to learn from him. He conversationally induced trance, started eliciting hypnotic phenomena, which tends to deepen trance, and delivered suggestions, which I didn’t cover here but you can imagine. Then he re-oriented the conversation to the room. At no point did he say, “now we’re going to do hypnosis.”
So Can You Hypnotize Someone Without Them Knowing?
Yes. Depending on how you define hypnosis, trance happens every day, in normal conversation and in therapy offices.
If you get bored during a lecture, the conscious guard isn’t at the gate, and you’re more subject to influence. In the moment right after you get startled, you might be more open to suggestion. The same is true of ambiguity. You don’t know what frame, or what meaning, to bring to the situation, so you could be open to ideas.
These situations can all happen at the office, or at the grocery store. The difference is that in a well-trained hypnotherapist’s office, they’re used with purpose. Your purpose.
Which Makes the Ethics Question a Different One
Because nothing here is concealed, the question isn’t “am I hiding something.” It’s “am I working toward the outcome this person asked me for.”
With a client who came to you for change work, this language sits inside the frame they already agreed to. Saying so costs you nothing, builds trust, and gives you permission. “Would you allow me to use all the techniques at my disposal to help you get to your goals?” goes a long way. The fuller treatment, including where influence turns into manipulation, is in the conversational hypnosis article.
If you want the full set of language patterns, drilled properly, that’s what the Hypnotic Language Mastery Pack is for.
Enjoy,
Keith
