An indirect suggestion aims at the response you want without instructing the person to produce it. Instead of “relax,” it’s “a person might relax deeply, sitting in that very chair.” Same target. Different packaging.
It shows up in inductions, in change work, and in conversational hypnosis, where there may be no formal induction at all. This page covers what makes a suggestion indirect, the forms you’ll actually use, how to build one starting from what the client came in for, a worked passage with every line labeled, and when to drop the soft wording and just say the thing.
What Makes A Suggestion Indirect
A direct suggestion names the response and asks for it. “Your arm is getting lighter.” “Take a deep breath and let your eyes close.”
An indirect suggestion points at the same response and leaves the person room to arrive at it on their own. “You may notice something changing in that arm.” “Some people find their eyes want to close about now.”
The response you’re after is identical. What changes is the grammar around it: the suggestion arrives as a possibility, or as something already happening, or as something that happens to other people, rather than as an instruction with the client’s name on it.
The usual explanation is that this gets past the critical factor, the part of the mind that weighs incoming suggestions and decides whether to accept them. An instruction gives that part something to evaluate and reject. A possibility offers it less to hold onto, so more of the suggestion may reach the part you’re actually talking to without an argument first.
Treat that as the working model it is. It’s how practitioners describe what they’re doing, not something measured, and how much resistance the wording actually saves you will vary from client to client. There’s more on the wider question of what language can and can’t get past in bypassing resistance.
Milton Erickson And Where The Idea Came From
Most of what gets called indirect suggestion today traces back to Milton Erickson, who worked this way and taught it. Erickson and Ernest Rossi catalogued the forms in Hypnotic Realities, subtitled The Induction of Clinical Hypnosis and Forms of Indirect Suggestion.
The language side of it later got sorted into a named set of patterns, the Milton Model, which is where you go for the pattern-by-pattern treatment. What follows here is the working subset.
The Forms Of Indirect Suggestion You’ll Actually Use
Permissive wording
“You may.” “You might find.” “Perhaps.” “A person could.” The smallest change you can make to a suggestion. “Your hand is getting lighter” becomes “you may find that hand getting lighter.”
Presupposition
Build the response into a sentence that’s about something else. “Before your eyes close, notice how the chair is holding you.” The sentence asks about the chair. The eyes closing is assumed on the way past.
That works differently from permissive wording, and the difference is worth having straight. “A person might find themselves relaxing in that chair” is an absolutely true statement. A person might. A presupposition isn’t necessarily true at all. The eyes may close, or they may not.
What it has instead is cost. Unpacking the sentence far enough to argue with it isn’t easy. If you say “close your eyes,” a person can refuse. Say “before you close your eyes, notice how the chair is holding you,” and attention generally goes to the way it feels to sit in the chair. The presupposition slides right in.
Embedded suggestion
Put the direct suggestion inside a larger sentence and mark it out with your voice, a pause, a gesture, a turn of the head. “A person might relax deeply, sitting in that very chair.” The sentence is about a person. The marked-out part is for your client. There’s more on the marking itself in embedded commands.
Truisms and implication
Say something hard to argue with, and let the useful part ride along. “Everybody has had the experience of losing track of a few minutes.” You haven’t asked for anything. You’ve made a thing ordinary, and ordinary things are easier to do.
Covering the alternatives
“I don’t know whether that hand or the other one will feel heavier first.” Whichever happens, it fits. This is the neighborhood of the double bind, where the choice offered sits inside the response you were after either way.
Metaphor
The whole suggestion goes into a story about someone else. It’s the least explicit form there is and it has its own craft, covered in hypnotic metaphor.
Building An Indirect Suggestion, Starting From The Goal
Here’s one way to do it, and it starts nowhere near the fancy wording.
Think about what the client wants and the steps it would take to get there. That includes goals inside the session itself, not just the one they booked for: relaxing, entering trance, staying with you while you work.
Write those out as direct suggestions first. Relax. Go into trance. Drop that old habit. Plain, unglamorous, and exactly what you want to have happen.
Then wrap the indirect wording around them. “You may.” “A person might.” And it’s worth marking the direct part out with your voice as you deliver it, so it lands as an embedded suggestion:
“A person might relax deeply, sitting in that very chair.”
Underneath that sentence is the word “relax.” Everything else is packaging. Get the direct suggestion clear first and the indirect version writes itself; try to compose the pretty sentence first and you can talk for a while without ever having aimed at anything.
An Annotated Passage
A short stretch of it, with the working parts marked. Call the client Dana.
“You don’t have to do anything in particular right now. Some people find the chair does most of the work. And as you listen to the sound of my voice, you may notice your breathing has already changed a little. I don’t know whether that hand or the other one will feel heavier first. A person might let go of something they’ve carried a long while, sitting right there.”
Line by line:
- “You don’t have to do anything in particular right now.” Permissive, and it takes the pressure off performing. The direct version underneath is “stop trying.”
- “Some people find the chair does most of the work.” Third person plus truism. Nobody has been asked to do anything, and letting the chair take your weight has been made an ordinary thing to do.
- “As you listen to the sound of my voice…” Pacing. It’s verifiably true while you’re speaking, which is what makes the rest of the sentence easier to accept. That mechanism gets its own treatment in pacing and leading.
- “…you may notice your breathing has already changed a little.” Permissive wording plus a presupposition. “May notice” asks for nothing; “has already changed” treats the change as done. And breathing usually has changed a little by then, so it’s a fair bet.
- “I don’t know whether that hand or the other one will feel heavier first.” Covering the alternatives, with the real suggestion sitting in the word “first.” Heaviness is presupposed. Only the order is in question.
- “A person might let go of something they’ve carried a long while…” An embedded suggestion, marked out in delivery. The sentence is about a person. “Let go” is for Dana.
Read it back without the labels and it sounds like somebody talking. That’s the point of the packaging.
Direct Or Indirect?
I tend toward direct the deeper in trance a client is. It’s not a hard and fast rule, and here’s the reasoning.
Indirect wording avoids a lot of the challenges a client’s mind might put up. “A person may relax” is harder to argue with than “You. Relax right now!” But trance itself tends to raise the threshold for those challenges, to the point where a client will more likely accept direct suggestions anyway, as long as they don’t conflict with the person’s core values.
So the soft wording is buying you something specific, and the deeper the trance the less you may need to buy it.
Which is the better method in general is an old argument, and I don’t think it has a general answer. Different methods work for different people, which is why I’d rather you could do both and choose. There’s a longer version of that argument in direct versus indirect suggestion.
Where Indirect Suggestion Goes Wrong
The main issue I see students have with indirect suggestion is leaning on it because they don’t have confidence in their work. The thinking runs that they can talk in a loosely Ericksonian way for a while and won’t have to do a formal induction, or test for depth of trance.
And sometimes they can. It does happen.
But I’d view indirect methods as something you sprinkle throughout a session rather than the whole session itself. Your job is to watch how this client responds to indirect suggestions, and how they respond to direct ones, and tailor the work to the person in front of you. That’s also what utilization is for: what they give you back is information you can use.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is indirect suggestion better than direct suggestion?
Not automatically. Indirect wording gives the client less to argue with, which can matter when someone is analytical, guarded, or not yet in much of a trance. Direct wording is clearer and easier to test. Clients differ, and so does the same client at different points in a session, so the useful skill is being able to do both and switch.
What’s an example of an indirect suggestion?
“Some people notice their eyes getting heavy about now” is an indirect version of “your eyes are getting heavy.” “You might find that hand feels lighter than the other one” is an indirect version of “your hand is light.” The response you’re after is the same in each pair; the indirect version offers it instead of asking for it.
Is indirect suggestion the same thing as Ericksonian hypnosis?
They overlap heavily and the terms get used loosely, but they’re not identical. Indirect suggestion is a way of wording things. Ericksonian hypnosis is a broader approach that includes the wording along with utilization, tailoring the work to the individual, and a general attitude toward how change happens. You can use an indirect suggestion inside any style of session.
Write the direct suggestion first, wrap it, mark it, and watch what the client does with it. A lot of the craft is in that last part.
If you want to go deeper on the language side, that’s what the Hypnotic Language Mastery Pack covers.
Enjoy,
Keith
