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Building Subject Agency: The Blog Post!

blog Aug 13, 2025

Every day, someone asks me when I'm going to teach Building Subject Agency again. I'm proud of the class, and glad it helps people, but truly there's only so many times a year I can teach it. This is my attempt at converting the class into a blog post.

What is Subject Agency?

What is this wonderful thing that we want to build? You've possibly heard much about it, sometimes with an insinuation that you should know what it is already and that it's just so intuitive and easy.

Well, sometimes it's not so intuitive, or not so easy. Let's start by breaking down the concept into smaller pieces and we will build up from there.

What is a Subject?

Traditionally, we think of the subject as "the person being hypnotized by the hypnotist." Lately, some people have been promoting terms like "hypnobottom," which I think is fine; and "hypnotee," which I dislike.

I like subject the most because it evokes classic hypnosis tropes, and mad science vibes, and I like my hypnosis kinky. More importantly, terms like "hypnotee" frame the subject as a passive participant. The appointer appoints the appointee. The adopter adopts the adoptee. The hypnotist hypnotizes the hypnotee.

How we frame hypnosis shapes our experiences of hypnosis. If we frame hypnosis as something done to the subject by the hypnotist, if we frame the subject as passive, then we encourage subjects to experience hypnosis as a passive experience.

The word "subject" does not need to imply submissive or passive. Let's reframe. A subject is the central topic of a book. In linguistics, a subject is the primary argument of the verb. A subject, grammatically speaking, is active.

Instead of: "The hypnotist hypnotizes the subject;"

I want you to think: "The subject enters trance."

What is Agency?

Agency in the context of hypnosis is fundamentally the same as personal agency in everyday life. Here is an explanation that I really liked:

Personal Agency is one's ability to control their actions and interactions with others. Personal Agency in life is really simple and something most people do naturally. You exercise personal agency when you decide what to have for dinner that day or what clothes you want to wear. In some cases, you might only choose things appropriate to your circumstances (such as work appropriate clothes[...]), but in every case it is still your decision and you have the ability to decide to do what you want over any external requirements ([...] like when lactose intolerant people still eat dairy.) — Astrid Zigliotto, "Personal Agency," Discord post dated April 25th, 2024.

Not everyone always has agency. Captives and prisoners are denied agency when confined to a locked cell. Patients in a hospital might be denied agency and disallowed to leave until discharged. Children and adolescents, in our society, frequently are denied agency, and act in extreme ways in an attempt to exert agency or butt up against the restrictions placed on them.

Think about the child in the grocery store. The grocery store is a loud, chaotic, and stressful environment which the child did not choose to be in and does not have the agency to leave on their own. Think of how many times you have seen a child throw a temper tantrum or have a meltdown in a store? Faced with a stressful situation and unaware of any options for how to handle it, the small human becomes emotionally dysregulated and fights their caretaker.

Adults, in our society, are generally permitted the agency to enter or leave the grocery store whenever they want. Adults do not have meltdowns in grocery stories with the frequency and intensity of children. The adult knows that they can simply use their own two feet (or wheels) to leave and nobody will stop them (so long as they are not carrying unpaid-for produce with them.)

In linguistics, the agent of a sentence is the one that is performing the verb, even if it is not the subject of the sentence. When we say "the subject is hypnotized by the hypnotist" or frame a subject as the "hypnotee" we are grammatically placing the hypnotist as the agent of the sentence.

But in the sentence "the subject enters trance," we are placing the subject as the agent. If the subject has agency, and has entered the trance, then the subject also has the agency to leave the trance.

Agency in Hypnosis

Subject agency is the ability of the subject to influence their own experiences of hypnosis. Indeed, all these things and more are completely under the control of the hypnotic subject, who could choose to do them at any time:

  • Wake up out of trance, independently, without the hypnotist.
  • Re-enter a trance, without the hypnotist.
  • Reject or stop following hypnotic suggestions, independently.
  • Interpret and modify suggestions, independently.
  • Understand the intentions of the hypnotist and context of the BDSM scene, and follow suggestions appropriately and safely.
  • Communicate with the hypnotist while in trance, including using safewords.
  • Participate in enhancing and strengthening hypnotic experiences.
  • Move their body as needed to avoid falling over or straining a joint.

Thinking about someone without agency: Truly, the child could have tried to climb out of the shopping cart and ran out of the store—but they do not attempt this because they are smart enough to know that every step of the way someone bigger and more powerful will try to stop them and likely succeed, and where would they go? They can't drive a car or take the bus. The child truly lacks agency, and can feel that, and so does not even attempt to leave the store independently.

But what about a hypnotic subject? Why does the hypnotic subject not simply leave the trance as an adult leaves the grocery store? What is stopping them?

Why subjects don't exert agency

The truth is, you already have subject agency, you just might not know it yet.

The way many of us were initially taught about hypnosis often teaches us to see subjects as lacking agency. What you think and believe is what you will get, when it comes to hypnosis and other perceived reality-warping practices.

The erosion of a subject's sense of agency begins with cultural depictions of hypnosis as mind control in the cartoons and movies that likely gave many of us this bizarre and beautiful fetish. It was further perpetuated when the Hypnosis 101 class focuses entirely on what the hypnotist can do, and nothing for the subject.

Even when a subject knows subject agency exists, and wants to exert agency, sometimes we still struggle.

Here are some contributing factors to subjects struggling with their sense of hypnotic agency:

  • Being particularly good at dissociating, possibly due to a dissociative disorder.
  • Being motivated against exerting agency dues to an attachment to erotic fantasies of mind control, or fears that exertion of agency would mean hypnosis is "fake" or would stop being arousing.
  • Erosion of felt personal agency within a relationship dynamic, implied suggestions, or certain techniques of manipulation.
  • Erosion of felt personal agency due to past trauma.
  • Struggles with personal agency in daily life, such as having trouble saying "No" to people.
  • Feeling a pressure to "perform" for the sake of the hypnotist.
  • A strong truly held belief that hypnosis actually is real mind control, or that a separate "Subconscious Mind" is exerting its own agency overriding the conscious mind.

The attachment to erotic fantasies in particular is possibly the most common reason. There are many mind control fetishists and hypnophiles who would rather continue to follow an unpleasant hypnotic suggestion that they do not enjoy than to risk breaking the illusion of hypnosis being real mind control.

Dear reader, I hate to break the news to you, but mind control is not real. Our perceived experience of reality is remarkably plastic and we can simulate an experience that feels like mind control, and through abuse and manipulation you can certainly erode someone's sense of personal agency and exert control over them that way, but true mind control like we see in the movies simply is not real. The American government tried very hard to invent true mind control and while it did give us LSD, it never resulted in real mind control. Just another disappointing failure to deliver from our elected officials.

Disputing Common Misconceptions

Mind control isn't real. Disappointing. What else isn't real? Santa Claus? Homeopathies? Morality? The Subconscious Mind? Correct. None of these are real.

The hypnotist is not programming the subject.

A lot of people in the kinky hypnosis community work in computer programming or IT; and think of subjects as computers they are programming. Computers take everything literally. Computers do exactly as they are told and follow every instruction they are given and only the instructions they are given. 

Humans are not computers. (Sorry, drones!) Brains do not work this way. Hypnosis does not work this way. More on this later.

On “All Hypnosis is Self-Hypnosis”

I don’t like this phrase. It’s slightly off from the truth and doesn’t communicate agency. Being slightly off from the truth is even worse than being wrong. Do we say that all emotions are "self-emotions" or all arousal is "self-arousal?" How about your desire to drink a cool and refreshing Pepsi on a hot summer's day, poured slowly into a chilled glass of ice. Did you do that to yourself?

Why do people use the HeadSpace app if all meditation is self-meditation? Why do people want to go to war with countries they've never heard of?

We are influenced every day all the time by an uncountable number of things. Personal agency is not the same as everything that we feel or experience being our own choice or fault.

When we exert agency, we are exerting our own influence upon ourselves, which often can be stronger than any other influencing factors, including hypnosis. This does not mean that nothing else ever influences us, or that we can simply choose not to feel unwanted emotions.

I will provide an alternative slogan to "all hypnosis is self-hypnosis" later.

What Agency is Not


‘Subject Agency’ is not an excuse for ignoring someone’s limits or consent. There are some who have used “they should have used their subject agency” as a victim-blaming excuse in cases of abuse or consent violations. Let it go on record that I fundamentally reject the notion that the existence of subject agency obsoletes the necessity of good consent and negotiation practices in any intimate setting whether BDSM or vanilla sex.

Agency can be built, but it can also be eroded.

Abuse in a relationship is about power and control. The abusive dynamic denies agency. Whether it is "I am the parent, and you are the child" or "I am the husband, and you are the wife," the abusive human has claimed power over the human experiencing abuse. Some types of abuse could be understood as methods of eroding someone's sense of personal agency, or taking their agency away by force. In many abusive dynamics, the person experiencing abuse truly could use their own two feet and just leave the dynamic at any time, but being trapped in an abusive dynamic leaves someone feeling unable to leave. They do not feel a strong sense of agency.

Learning to rediscover and utilize one’s agency is a part of healing from an experience of abuse. Survivors of abuse must learn how to feel safe saying no, make their own decisions with confidence, and take responsibility for their own life rather than focusing entirely on people pleasing. Healing from abuse can be about rebuilding the ability to use your own two feet to leave a bad situation.

The trauma of a sexual assault or other consent injury in a BDSM context is less often about experiencing sexual intercourse and more about experiencing one's agency being overpowered and denied. A feeling of powerlessness, or a fear that anyone at any time could use your body in that way again. It's dehumanizing in a not-hot way. Sometimes the trauma is just the breaking of trust, or the shock that someone does not care about your own desires or well-being so long as they can use your body to pursue their own urges.

If a hypnotist I play with tries to use hypnosis to coerce me into something I do not consent to, that breaking of trust alone is injurious to our relationship whether or not I actually feel compelled to participate in the act against my consent.

If someone tells you that you injured their consent, before you try to litigate what happened and justify yourself, consider this: Perhaps they felt unable to use agency or communicate at the time, but they do now. So now is the time to be responsible and responsive to what is being communicated. If you care about this person, and if you are doing BDSM together then I hope you care at least a little, then healing your relationship means responding to this pain first and foremost. Do not tell them "you should have just used your agency."

Why Should We Want Subject Agency?

Some of you may have gotten to this point and already feel motivated to build your subject agency in yourself or your play partners. Some might even be able to stop reading here and already find that their subject agency has totally improved simply by learning about the concept.

But others may be asking: "Why would I want myself/my subject to exert agency in a mind control-themed BDSM scene?The hot part is the mind control!"

There are many benefits to subject agency, even for the mind control fetishists who want hypnosis to feel like mind control.

For one, it's simply safer. Empowering the subject to protect their own safety regardless of what the hypnotist says or does can only make your BDSM scene safer. Having this ability to add safety to your scenes also means that you can have more intense, flexible, dynamic, or exciting scenes.

When playing without strong agency, you must add caveats to every suggestion: "Obey me only when it is safe and reasonable to do so." Were you told this in your first Hypnosis 101 class? That you must always say the magic words "only when it is safe and appropriate to do so" after every post-hypnotic suggestion? Is that fun for you?

When your subject has the agency to understand your shared intentions, then you can just phrase your suggestion as "you are going to obey everything I tell you to do" without adding the caveat. How do we ensure that the subject only obeys commands that are safe, appropriate, and desirable to follow? Because before the trance you have an entire BDSM kink scene negotiation discussing consent, boundaries, limits, etc. and come to a mutually shared understanding of how far this suggestion is meant to go. There is no reason these things have to be established while in a trance state rather than before the scene begins.

Personally, I think it is a lot hotter to hear "you are going to obey everything I tell you to do" than "you will feel a desire to obey me within reason, if you want to, if it's safe, when nobody else is in the room."

When your subject is an active participant, the hypnosis can be stronger, as the subject can assist the hypnotist in creating the desired experiences of hypnosis. The subject can collaborate with the hypnotist, and be more creative in what kinds of scenes are possible. Communication improves in and outside of trance. The subject is able to get exactly what they want from every trance by participating in shaping their own experiences.

Remember the child without agency who exhibits extreme emotional behavior when confronted with an experience they do not wish to be having and have no power to leave? Many so-called abreactions are more-or-less a similar type of emotional dysregulation experienced by someone who is having an unpleasant experience they feel unable to stop participating in without the help of a hypnotist to tell them the magic words that give them permission to stop experiencing the unpleasant thing.

Panic attacks are cyclical. Once dysregulated, the recognition that one is having a panic attack further perpetuates the panic attack. In the context of hypnosis, this can look like the recognition that you are experiencing something unpleasant due to hypnosis reinforcing the reality that you are creating through hypnosis, the very reality that you do not wish to be experiencing. Sometimes, just like a panic attack, the thought "I am having an abreaction" reinforces the creation of the negative experience.

Now imagine that you feel a strong sense of agency over your experiences of hypnosis, and you experience something unpleasant. Knowing that you have the ability to end the experience on your own, if needed, can in itself be a relief valve that slows down the process of approaching a panic attack. Some subjects will feel able to simply stop the experience and wake up immediately, without panicking or having an extreme response, while others might choose to move through the experience feeling safer in their ability to stop at any time. Some subjects may be able to use their agency to slow down the experience long enough to speak their safe word and signal to the hypnotist to assist in ending the experience, without having to panic to get there. More subject agency, means fewer abreactions.

A subject with strong agency is less dependent on the hypnotist. What a huge relief of the burden carried by hypnotists. Subjects with strong agency can transfer suggestions, feelings, or trigger phrases from one play partner to another—if desired—without needing to create the suggestions all over again with the new play partner. A subject with strong agency can cleanup their own lingering suggestions at the end of a scene, or if a scene ends abruptly and unintentionally. A subject with strong agency will be able to access their full submissive and trancey feelings with any play partner at any time, as they recognize that they own those feelings, and won't need every new play partner to create those feelings from scratch. Subjects with strong agency will also have better subject skills in general, and will be better at manifesting tranceless suggestions or other often-considered more "advanced" styles of hypnosis.

Are you convinced yet? Subject agency sounds amazing, doesn't it? So how do we get started?

Reframing Hypnosis

As I've said a few times above, the way you frame and understand hypnosis is how you will experience hypnosis. If you experience hypnosis in a way that does not allow you to exert personal agency, then it is likely because your first introductions to hypnosis gave you an understanding wherein you lack agency. To build up subject agency, we must first change how you understand hypnosis at the fundamental level.

What is Hypnosis?

Hypnosis is a way for subjects to alter their perceived experiences of reality. (Delusioness, lecture at NEEHU 2025). For the sake of understanding hypnosis, let's divide reality into two.

When a tree falls in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? There are two answers to this question, and they represent our two realities.

In perceived reality (also known as the "Phenomenal"), the tree makes a sound.

In material reality (also known as the "Noumenal"), the tree does not make a sound. It never makes a sound. All it does is vibrate the air particles.

Sound is a sensory experience created by our brains. Sound is a perception of vibrations in the air. Sound exists exclusively within the realm of perceived reality.

Material reality is real, but you're not living in it. It's fundamentally impossible for anything alive to experience material reality. We can only experience the reality created by our brains via our senses. (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1781).

Furthermore, the reality our brains create is merely "inspired by true events." It would take too much time and energy to create a perfect depiction of all the sensory data that we gather from moment to moment. By the time we experienced a moment, it would be radically different. Instead, our brains rely on heuristics and past experiences to make educated guesses, filling in gaps and re-using information whenever possible. Some cognitive scientists have even suggested that the majority of our perceived reality is constructed from our expectations, with new sensory data only being used to course correct. (Andy Clark, The Experience Machine, 2023)

The result of this is that our perceived reality is fundamentally flawed and highly malleable. This might sound scary at first, but good news! That means we can fuck with our brains on purpose for horny reasons.

"Hypnosis" is simply a culturally constructed and gathered collection of techniques and rituals, loaded with cultural baggage, that we can used to empower our imagination and mess with our expectations so hard that our entire experience of reality is warped. Nothing about material reality has changed, only our perceptions of reality.

Hypnosis does not require a trance state. A trance state is simply a useful tool in achieving hypnosis.

What is Trance?

"Trance" is ultimately a colloquialism with no single fixed definition. What we call trance in the context of hypnosis is usually dissociative hyperfocus.

Hyperfocus (AKA Absorption) is tunnel vision. Hyperfocus is getting in The Zone, tuning in, losing hours and hours to one singular project. Ever play a video game for ten hours without realizing it? Ever spend all day rewriting your class on Subject Agency as a blog post and be shocked when the sun begins to set? A lot of neurodivergent people experience hyperfocus as a symptom of a medical disorder, but hyperfocus itself is a natural part of being human, it's only a "symptom" when it's disruptive to your life.

Dissociation (AKA disassociation) is detaching mentally. Dissociation is zoning out. Daydreaming is a type of dissociation. Compartmentalizing your feelings is a type of dissociation. Some people dissociate at the level of their very identity, while others dissociate from certain memories, or fail to form memories because they were dissociating at the time. Have you ever finished using the restroom and realize you cannot remember washing your hands, only to find your hands are still cool and damp? Have you ever commuted home from work, and it felt like you went on autopilot, arriving home without any thought? This is dissociation. Like hyperfocus, dissociation is completely natural and only unhealthy if it's disrupting your life.

If we put hyperfocus and dissociation together, we get trance. One theory of hypnosis is called Cold Control, (Zoltan Dienes, Lecture at the University of Sussex, March 2015). According to Cold Control theory, when you are in a state of trance, you are hyperfocusing on following the hypnotist's instructions while dissociating from the part of yourself which is doing the following of instructions, so you feel as though it is happening on its own without your control. Post-hypnotic effects remain compartmentalized but active.

Cold Control is not the whole story, but for the sake of discussing hypnotic agency, it's a good-enough theory of hypnosis for us to work with. According to Cold Control, when you are in a trance state, it is still you doing everything, you just don't feel aware of it. When you arise from trance, you continue to dissociate from the part of yourself that continues to choose to follow the suggestion. Hypnosis is not something being done to you. Hypnosis is something that your brain is doing.

Hypnosis is not the hypnotist programming the subject. Hypnosis is a dance between hypnotist and subject. In partnered dance, the lead is not actually moving the follow's body very much at all. The lead simply raises the follow's arm, to suggest a twirl, and the follow twirls themselves under the raised arm. This is the sort of dance we do in our kinky hypnosis scenes.

You Have One Mind, Not Two

It's the 21st century. We don't use Freud anymore in the cognitive sciences. Your conscious and unconscious are the same thing. What's conscious is just what you are actively aware of right now. What's unconscious is simply the parts of yourself that you are not actively paying attention to or presently aware of. There is not an entirely separate Subconscious Mind that you are never aware of, or which could overpower you. Anything unconscious could become conscious, and vice versa.

Scientists in Beijing have even potentially identified which part of the brain controls which thoughts we become aware of and which thoughts remain unconscious. It's called the thalamus. Say "thank you thalamus, for allowing me to experience erotic hypnosis."

CT Scan of a brain, with a red arrow pointing out the thalamus deep in the center.
The Thalamus, identified with a red arrow

You are your brain, your mind, and your body. Conscious and unconscious are a present and changing status, not distinct entities. It is all unified with yourself. It is always you, always one system. Mindfulness and intentional focus and thought can influence this process of creation. You might learn some ways to do this in therapy as coping skills. We use these same techniques to create hypnotic effects. We can regulate our awareness any time we want. The thalamus is a part of you, not something controlled by the hypnotist.

A diagram of a grey cloud labeled "unconscious" and a small yellow sunspot labeled "conscious" contained entirely within the grey cloud. There is a wavy purple box in the gray part of the cloud labeled "suggestion" elsewhere in the cloud, not-overlapping the sun.

Here is a visual diagram. The large gray cloud is your unconscious, or rather what is presently unconscious. The small yellow sunburst is the spotlight of your consciousness, shining the light of awareness down upon a small part of your mind. When you are more grounded and present, that spotlight might be larger, and when you are more dissociated, such as in a trance state, that spotlight might be smaller. Elsewhere we see a hypnotic suggestion, hidden away in the shadows of unconsciousness.

But this is your mind. You can move the spotlight, shrink it, or expand it.

The same set of shapes as before, but the yellow sunburst has now expanded to fully encapsulate the purple box labeled "suggestion."

If you direct your awareness to the suggestion, you can turn that which is unconscious into something conscious. You can become aware that it is you actively choosing to follow the suggestion, and make a decision to stop following that suggestion. Some people may find this to be totally intuitive to do, while others may need to spend some time learning how to control and direct their awareness like this.

How I stop following a suggestion, when it feels outside of my control: I close my eyes, bring myself into a mild state of self-hypnosis, and I think about the suggestion. Often, I find that there is some part of my body that physically feels odd, like the suggestion is hiding itself in my shoulderblades. I shift my attention internally to that part of my body and continue to move my attention and focus "towards" wherever I feel that suggestion coming from. Maybe a sense-memory arises of hearing the hypnotist give that suggestion, or maybe I feel in my stomach a strong desire to follow that suggestion. I continue to pursue it until I feel like I have "found it" and gained an awareness of it. I imagine it in my mind, what does the suggestion look like? Does it have a texture? Is it shiny? Does it have a color? Perhaps it takes the shape of a lever, backstage in the theater of my mind, and all I have to do is reach past the curtain of dissociation and pull the lever to turn it off. Sometimes it's more abstract, like a floating ball of shiny black slime. I reach my hands around it and visualize compressing it down and down into a smaller and smaller little object, making it denser and denser, until it's nothing but a smooth stone sitting in the palm of my hand. I shape it into a flat skipping stone, and imagine looking out onto a lake. I throw the suggestion off into the lake, and feel it be gone, and then it skips, and then it's gone, and then it skips, and skips, and then it plunges down into the water, off the horizon, completely out of sight and totally gone.

Exercise: Take some time to notice the boundaries of your awareness, externally and internally. Direct your attention around everything that you are aware of, every sound, every light, and also everything internally, how hungry you are, the weight of your body, your emotions. Try to notice where your awareness stops. Start with a sound too far off to make out what it is, or something too far away for you to see. Then see if you can find where your awareness stops internally. What thoughts are skittering about in the back of your mind that you've been ignoring? Contemplating what to have for dinner? That work assignment due tomorrow? Now trace the outline of that awareness and if it helps, you can visualize that awareness as the spotlight on a dark stage, and imagine yourself growing and shrinking that awareness, ignoring things until you don't perceive them so much, or trying to become aware of as much simultaneously as possible. Practice reshaping it. Play around.

All hypnosis is something you do in your brain

This is my alternative to "all hypnosis is self-hypnosis." Even though the hypnotist is guiding a dissociated part of yourself into doing it, it is still something that your brain is doing and you are your brain and you can exert influence over your brain with or without the guidance of a hypnotist.

You can reach past the dissociative curtain, find the switch that is a suggestion, and turn it off. You can pull it to center stage and be very aware of it while still following it. You can remember, when it matters, that you're the one following the suggestion, and therefore you're the one who can stop. You can use your awareness that you are following the suggestion to follow it even more intensely. You can choose to dissociate from that part of yourself that is even aware that you're the one following the suggestion, and make it all feel like a compulsion, temporarily ignoring your own agency. And you can set an intention to always remember, when it counts, the reality that you are in control.

All language is interpreted in context

Since you are the one following the suggestion, you can exert agency over how you interpret that suggestion. You can choose to interpret what people say in “good faith” or “bad faith.” You can use context and shared intentions to interpret suggestions within the bounds of what you both consider desirable and reasonable.

So you can know intuitively that your hypnotist wants you to have fun, and be safe, and that running out into the street as a hypnotized puppy is not actually what either of you wants, and is not how the suggestion was meant to be interpreted. The hypnotist doesn't need to tell you not to run out into the street.

You can choose to believe that the hypnotist would never try to do something to harm you or cross your boundaries, so if it sounds like they are suggesting something that would harm you or cross your boundaries, you can reinterpret or reject the suggestion as having been a misunderstanding and find new meaning. For instance, you can find a way to follow the suggestion that isn't literally what they said, but is within your comfort zone. You can also tell yourself "I simply must have misheard what was said" or "the hypnotist must have misspoken" and completely reject the suggestion.

Now, it may turn out later, after you leave trance, that the hypnotist was trying to cross your boundaries, but with good subject agency, you can work on bleaching that person's influence from your mind to the extent you feel is necessary. If you're playing with someone you don't trust, you could wake yourself up and say "nope, you fucked up, I'm out of here."

Subject Skills and Suggestions Belong to You

Doing hypnosis more and more strengthens your trance muscles, making it easier for you to experience hypnosis. That’s yours. You own that. That’s not the hypnotist making you super well conditioned. They were a coach. That’s you having super rad trance muscles you can flex whenever and however you want for whoever you want. When you start with a new coach at a new gym, you don't have to start from square one all over again. You're still stronger for your past experiences with your old coach. This is also true for hypnotic effects you have created with a hypnotist. Once you learn how to experience something once, you now know how to experience it with anyone, or even completely on your own. Personally, I can't self-hypnosis myself into having an orgasm, but some people I know can, and they do even physically respond, and have to clean up after. It's just a mental muscle that they have made very strong.

Developing Subject Agency as a Subject

Portions of this section are adapted from a class taught by Dragontize in 2022. It has been integrated into the section enough that I can't attribute specific elements, so I feel it's best to just acknowledge here the genetic descent from Dragontize's class.

Here are a variety of exercises and tools you can use to build up your subject agency skills, as the subject.

Self-Hypnosis

One of the best ways to develop your skills as a subject and your agency.

  • Practice self-trancing & waking up on your own
  • Trance yourself and practice speaking safe words confidently and clearly
  • Suggest to yourself that you will exert agency and use safe words
  • “Cope Ahead” (DBT Skill): vividly imagine scenarios where you’d need to exert agency and imagine yourself doing it.
  • Indulge in erotic fantasies where you then use a safeword and end the scene.
    • (is this tease and denial?)

The more you make it feel natural and easy as a prepared response to use a safeword or wake yourself up, the easier it will feel in the moment when it counts.

Grounding & Regulating Dissociation

People who are good at dissociating (intentionally or unintentionally) are more susceptible to hypnosis. Regulating your degree of dissociation allows you to amplify or diminish hypnotic experiences and your sense of agency.

A common question I get when I teach this class at conventions is "I always experience amnesia of trance, even when the hypnotist says to remember, how do I make myself remember trances?" Often these people have dissociative disorders, such as dissociative identity disorder. The solution is to learn how to regulate your degree of dissociation, and dissociate less while in trance so that you are forming memories.

Grounding exercises are one tool for helping yourself dissociate less. Grounding exercises are about not using your imagination and being present in the world around you. They make great post-hypnosis scene aftercare. When you can feel the shift between your dissociated starting place, and your grounded state, you may find you intuitively develop a sense for how you might use that same mental muscle backwards and dissociate more. Move yourself back and forth along that slider, and you will get very good at utilizing subject agency.

Some Grounding Exercises:

  • Name objects in the room in alphabetical order
  • Describe surroundings in detail, one sense at a time
  • Narrate your actions neutrally, in detail, as you do them
  • Breathe through alternating nostrils
  • Journal regularly instead of pushing everything down

Daily mindfulness practice, as taught in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) will also help, but that is outside the scope of this article.

Practicing with Hypnosis Audios

Hypnosis audio files, such as the ones on my website, do not have feelings. There is no social pressure to perform and no exciting plans or expectations to tarnish. You can use hypnosis files as practice dummies to practice your agency.

Ways to use hypnosis files as practice dummies:

  • Practice listening to files without trancing.
  • Practice waking yourself up mid-file and stopping the file.
  • Practice substituting words in files with ones you like better
    • I imagine “backspacing” over the “typo” on an old typewriter.
    • “My slave” -> “Someone’s pet” is common for me.
    • I imagine being an editor with a red pen striking out suggestions I want to reject entirely. For instance, “you will listen to this file every day” is something I strike out with my red pen, and write a note that says "yeah, no, I won't be doing that."
  • Trance to files you know you’ll hate and practice safewording and waking up.

I would be remiss not to mention my trilogy of hypnosis files aimed at helping develop your subject agency skills: Mind Prep

Self-Talk in Shared Spaces

Some people, who particularly struggle with agency, sometimes find themselves drifting into a trance while in shared spaces where other people are doing hypnosis. Remind yourself, when you witness others doing hypnosis, that this trance is not meant for you. You can even say to yourself, "this is not for me."

When Alfred tells Denise that her hair looks good today, would Brad say "thank you?" No, because Alfred was complimenting Denise, not Brad, and Brad knows it's not for him. Apply this same logic to witnessing hypnosis.

A lot of hypnotists, myself included, are uncomfortable when someone non-consensually trances to a scene we are doing in a shared space that they are merely observing. The hyping up of "splash damage" in some spaces has set the expectations that this is a fun or hot thing to happen, to "accidentally" fall into a trance. Please, use your agency, this trance is not for you, and do not choose to enter a trance without the consent of the person whose voice you are trancing yourself to.

Remember the intent of the hypnotist. They're not trying to hypnotize you. Language and intentions are interpreted in context. The words are not a magic spell, they're communication. Be confident that you will stay awake. Expect to stay awake.

Developing Personal Agency in Daily Life

Ultimately, your hypnotic agency is only ever as good as your personal agency across all social contexts. If you have trouble saying no to your partner in general, why would it be easier under hypnosis? We've all done something we didn't want to do at some point because we didn't feel comfortable saying no. It's a normal part of life. But we can set a personal goal and intention to get better at exerting personal agency in everyday life.

Ways to Improve Personal Agency:

  • Learn to say no in life, in general, to people you love, when you need to.
  • Learn to set and enforce healthy boundaries
  • Unlearn codependent behaviors and “steering”
  • Trust that people worth keeping around won’t leave you because you said no
  • Trust yourself and trust in your agency and resiliency.
  • Learn to be in touch with what you want and don’t want and how you’re feeling in the moment.
  • Overcome your insecure attachment style and escape samsara while you’re at it. Transcend all trauma. Become a flawless neurotypical sane person. (This one is sarcasm)

Each of these bullet points is an entire self-help book or perhaps two years of therapy (or one trip on shrooms?). These are not easy things to improve and sometimes these are very set patterns that we will unlearn on a non-linear path. Many times, I find myself saying "Oh no, I'm being codependent again, aren't I" and recommit to improving on this pattern of behavior.

Ultimately, though, improving at these skills will do more than any other tool for improving your subject agency.

Reframing Your Motivations

This section is heavily inspired by a portion of Evelyn Evy's "Hard to Swallow: Willing Suspension of Disbelief" class taught at NEEHU 2025, which I highly recommend.

When we are motivated against using our subject agency, it will naturally make it harder for us to exert agency. Many of us are emotionally attached to erotic fantasies, or do not want to "ruin" a scene with our play partner.

Let's do some reframing and set new intentions that are more compatible with exerting agency.

Some new motivations:

  • “I want to be hypnotized” -> “I want to have a fun time with my [person]”
  • “I want to be mind controlled” -> “I want to indulge in erotic fantasies”
  • “I want hypnosis to be real” -> “I know hypnosis is real, and agency over my mind’s creations is a fundamental part of how hypnosis works! Which is actually really cool and interesting!”
  • “I want my brain to be shut off” -> “I want to shut my brain off”
  • "I don't want to disappoint my dom" -> "My dom cares about me and would be disappointed if I didn't get to enjoy our scene too because I didn't safeword."

Building Agency in your Play Partners as a Hypnotist

Often times, the hypnotist is teaching the subject how to be a hypnotic subject. The hypnotist might have more knowledge or more experience. The hypnotist might also feel a responsibility to take care of a submissive partner, or simply wants to ensure all of their play partners are empowered to protect themselves and play safely.

Hypnotists play a big role in helping a subject build their agency up, and many hypnotists unfortunately also play a big role in eroding their subject's agency down in the first place.

The Disobey Me Exercise

An easy place to start with building your play partner's subject agency is the Disobey Me exercise. It's quite simple. Hypnotize the subject to stick their hand to something, like a table, and then tell them you won't disable the suggestion, they have to do it on their own. You can even briefly walk away and come back. It's not real bondage. You can tell your subject that you believe in them, that you know they have the ability to disable the suggestion on their own, but you must not use any hypnotic language or frame disabling the suggestion as obedience, submission, or in any way following your suggestions. This is a challenge to teach your play partner how to revert their reality back to baseline, and they will intuitively figure it out if given no other choice. Though, probably, you should get consent before doing this exercise together, or at least ensure something like this is within the bounds of your negotiated consensual dynamic.

Remember, subjects often feel like if they use agency or disable a suggestion that it means hypnosis is not real. We want hypnosis to be real, so we resist doing things which contradict our understanding of what hypnosis looks like. Your subject might feel bad about going against the suggestion.

The subject needs to understand that hypnosis is real, even if they use their agency to take back control. You can reassure them, hypnosis will still be real even if they use agency to exert control.

Reframe this thought: “Hypnosis is a real thing that has been done to me” 

New frame: “Hypnosis is a real thing that I am doing” 

You can advance the Disobey Me exercise to bigger suggestions, particularly suggestions that the subject really enjoys or wants to follow even more. The more sexy and desirable the suggestion for the subject, the more agency will be required to disable it.

I first learned this exercise from HypnoStory and PandaPet at a class taught at the Nest in Philadelphia in 2023. I since learned more about it and different versions of it through a conversation with my friend Monday (CasuallySo) who had done this exercise with their partner Jordan Kai.

Pre-Talk, Expectation-Setting, Framing

Remember! How we expect hypnosis to work is how it will work. Tell new subjects that they have agency in your pre-talk. Make sure this is something they know from the beginning.

Instead of: “You can’t be hypnotized to do anything you don’t want to do”

Try saying: “You always have the power to reject any suggestion or wake yourself back up.”

This framing suggests active participation and agency in the creation of safety for the subject.

Instead of: "Hypnosis is a hot thing I know how to do to your brain."

Try saying:  “Hypnosis is something we do together in your brain” or “Hypnosis is something I guide you to do in your mind.”

Mystery is for stage shows. Create shared expectations and understandings of what hypnosis is and how it works. Encourage your subjects to learn more about hypnosis. Here is a guide to hypnosis for subjects.

Express your stated intention to give your play partners a good time, do no harm, and respect their boundaries; and that nothing you say in trance should be interpreted in ways that do otherwise.

Try saying: “You know I would never want to hurt you, make you uncomfortable, or violate your consent. So you can interpret every suggestion only in ways that keep you safe, in ways you enjoy, and in ways that are within your consent and boundaries. You can reject anything else.”

Agency-Building Versus Agency-Eroding Language & Framing

Agency can be built up, but it can also be eroded. Many common hypnosis practices discourage agency and erode a subject's felt sense of agency and self-control.

Ask yourself: When we do hypnosis together, do we frame the subject as active or passive? 

Ask yourself: Are our safety practices empowering or disempowering?

At Charmed 2024, Jester said "Don't tell subjects what their boundaries are." That really stuck with me. When we handle our safeties like we are programming a computer that cannot think for itself or have its own opinions on when it wants to have an experience or do something, then we are setting boundaries for the subject, and eroding the subject's sense of agency. The subject learns that being safe means passively doing everything the hypnotist says, literally, and that the suggestions are given in a way that it is in the subject's own best interest. It is implicitly suggested that if the hypnotist did not say that hearing "banana" at the grocery store won't trigger an orgasm, then hearing "banana" at the grocery store should trigger an orgasm.

Instead, let's empower subjects to set their own boundaries around when and where to experience hypnotic effects or follow suggestions.

Instead of precise safeties: “This only happens after 3pm on the weekend when I’m the only other person in the room” 

Try saying: “Of course, you’ll only do this when you feel it’s appropriate” “Only when and with whom you choose, naturally.” “Obviously, only for so long as you’re still enjoying these effects.”

Likewise, when we do "deep clean-up" and individually tell subjects not to follow each and every suggestion that was given during a scene, it implicitly suggests that if you didn't mention a suggestion, that it should continue to be followed. You're implying that they needed you to tell them the suggestion is gone now, or else it would have continued, and so that is how they will experience it.

Instead of deep clean-up: “You will no longer believe everything I say. You will no longer be compelled to walk on all fours. You will no longer only be able to bark. You will no longer be obedient. You will no longer feel a phantom tail...” 

Try saying: “You can put away all those suggestions and bring yourself back to normal.”

This is also often more effective because by "putting away" the suggestion, the subject knows they can also "take it out again" later. The toy is going back in the toy box, but it's not gone forever. Sometimes the subject wants to stay a puppy, but the hypnotist doesn't want to play anymore. The subject should respect that, so, they can be asked to put their puppy toys away, something framed as a thing that the subject is doing.

Encouragement and Communication

The worst thing you can do when someone uses a safeword is to have a panic attack, cry, and endlessly tell your play partner how guilty you feel for having made a mistake. Second worst is probably expressing disappointment that you had to end the scene and brooding about it and acting distant afterwards. Third would be ignoring the safeword altogether, at least that way your partner knows to never play with you again and won't blame themself. If your play partner is afraid that using a safeword will somehow hurt you or disappoint you, they will have trouble using safewords during every scene in the future. Even just one bad experience with safewording can seriously erode someone's sense of agency.

Instead: Express gratitude for safewording, self-advocacy,  and negative feedback

Try saying: “Thank you for keeping yourself safe and telling me what you need. I care about you and your safety more than any scene.”

Showboating hypnotists who brag about how powerful their hypnosis skills are can be disempowering. They are taking credit for the work done by an amazing subject. It's how you work together as a team that matters most, not your skills as a hypnotist. If you convince your play partner that you deserve all the credit, you are eroding their sense of agency in having co-created the experience.

Instead: Praise subjects for how amazing their brain is that they did this!

The subjects who struggle most with agency are often the ones who don't really pay attention in hypnotist-centered classes and come to complacently think "I don't need to know any of this, my hypnotist will do all the thinking for me."

Instead: Encourage your subjects to learn and practice self-hypnosis. “Six Days Asleep” by Sleepingirl is a nice easy place to start.

When the hypnotist is totally deciding everything that happens in a scene, coming up with every suggestion, and entirely crafting the suggestions only while the subject is in trance, it's exhausting for the hypnotist, and more importantly, it trains the subject to have a passive self-image as a patient of mind control, and not an active participant in co-creating the experience. This is ultimately disempowering, even for pillow princesses.

Instead: Plan scenes collaboratively, down to how you want it to feel. This is also known as Phenomenological Blueprinting, which I can’t shut up about since Jordan Kai and Monday's class on this at Charmed 2024. Highly recommended!

If you act in ways which are manipulative, possessive, or controlling towards others, without it being a part of a consensually negotiated dynamic, then you are not respecting the agency of those around you, and may be eroding the agency of those who you influence most. Even within a negotiated dynamic, your partner's agency over that dynamic must be respected and encouraged.

Instead: Behave in generally agency-respecting ways towards others. Ask people what they want, and respect their boundaries. Let people be the guides of their own lives.

The Big Caveat, Again!

Subject agency is very good, but we’re still playing with altered states of consciousness and you should never use subject agency as an excuse to blame the subject for failing to take control in a scene where we are literally acting out a fantasy of being mind controlled and powerless. Subject agency is not a magic bullet. Nobody has total and complete control of themselves even while sober and eating a bowl of fiber-rich cereal, let alone while having an intense emotional and reality warping experience.

Don't give me none of this “but you didn’t safeword” or “but you didn’t tell me to stop” nonsense.

They’re telling you now and if you want to have a trusting relationship where you continue playing together then the good thing to do is to care less about if you’re in the right and more about how someone is feeling and how to make things better if you play together in the future. Even the most experienced subjects with tons of agency might sometimes find it easier to coast through an experience and talk about it later. Analyzing what you did comes after caring for their acute distress.

Conclusion

Subject agency as a concept radically changed and improved how I experience hypnosis. Unlike a kink like rope, subjects truly do always have the potential to take control of a scene if they need to. Agency is not a magic bullet, as we are affecting people's minds and they might lose track of reality or fail to use their agency, and it's important to be caring and responsible play partners, but the more we can empower subjects, the more likely we are to have good outcomes.

As a subject, you can build your agency up. It might be easy for you, or it might be a lifelong learning journey, but everyone is capable of exerting agency, and I hope I've equipped you with the tools to build yourself up.

Acknowledgments & Cited Sources

This article was based on a class I first taught at NEEHU 2024 and have tweaked and taught over and over again since. NEEHU 2024 was only 15 months ago at time of writing, and I've taught "Building Subject Agency: What? Why? How!" on at least seven occasions I can remember off the top of my head. That's nearly once every two months! I'll probably be teaching it many times to come too, but hopefully less frequently now that it also exists in writing.

In this community, often the most knowledge is transmitted through casual conversations more than books and articles, so I will attempt to acknowledge and cite both.

My agency class would not have come to exist if HypnoStory and PandaPet had not demonstrated subject agency at their Hypno 101 in Philadelphia in February 2023, which I was attending entirely to find local hypnokinksters and didn't think I would learn anything at given I had been doing hypnosis for over ten years. I had used subject agency many times before, but I never had a word for it, and often thought I was being a "bad subject" when I used it. The agency demo was revelatory and I thought about it a lot while in the hospital the following week on the most painkillers you can legally give someone.

Conversations with Jordan Kai at various hypnosis events in Philadelphia lead to more mind-expanding perspective shifts on how I view hypnosis. Gaining the keyword "phenomenology" really opened a world of research and learning. Jordan's perspective on overly detailed "clean-up" made it into the "don't tell subject's their boundaries" section.

Monday (CasuallySo)'s stories of learning their own agency were greatly helpful for developing the "motivations" sections of the class. I still won't ever shut up about Monday and Jordan's Phenomenological Blueprinting class.

Ellipses (...), who has been deemed the "queen of agency" by some, spoke to me a lot about her "unsubscribe" method and how she developed agency in her own life, which was hugely influential in my learning about agency as a concept and how people can have their agency eroded and how they can build their agency back up again.

Dragontize shared their slides with me from their own subject agency class taught in 2022 which formed the starting basis for my toolbox for subjects to practice agency. Our conversations about Dragontize's experiences with developing agency and the stigma around subjects who struggle with agency greatly shaped the tone that I take in this article and the class.

Jester's conversational hypnosis class at Charmed 2024 provided me the framework of agency erosion which is core to this class, and safeties as being a type of personal boundary that should be controlled by the subject.

HypnoDerg gave me some good critical reality checks on the limits of agency as a framework and in particular how it can be too easy for subjects to come to believe agency is only for "advanced subjects." Derg also was one of the major people who encouraged me to develop and teach a class on this, because at the time they felt it was difficult for people to find places to learn about agency.

WyrdWeaver is an amazing man who I have learned an insurmountable amount of stuff from. He talked to me at length about how the framework of agency has been used and abused in the kinky hypnosis community, and where the concept originates from in academia. His CREAM model has been immensely helpful in how I teach hypnosis in all areas. His Phenomenawork class was hugely influential on this class as well, particularly sections explaining how hypnosis works. It would be impossible to cite him every single time his influence could be seen in this article.

Drifting Oneiros introduced me to the lectures of Zoltan Dienes, which were also hugely influential on the development of this class and my other classes. Whenever I talked through my class in development with him, he always had some idea or concept that was new to me that he would bring up and further helped me flesh out and deepen what I was trying to communicate.

Sources Cited

Astrid Zigliotto, "Personal Agency," Discord post dated April 25th, 2024

Delusioness, "How to Teach Hypnosis 101," lecture at NEEHU 2025

Andy Clark, The Experience Machine, published by Pantheon Books, 2023

Cold Control, Zoltan Dienes, Lecture at the University of Sussex, March 2015

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1781

Evelyn Evy, "Hard to Swallow: Willing Suspension of Disbelief" lecture at NEEHU 2025

HypnoStory and PandaPet, "HypnoKink 101," Lecture at the Nest, Philadelphia, February 2023.

Jester and Trancefeminine, "Conversational Hypnosis," lecture at Charmed 2024.

Jordan Kai & Monday, "Phenomenological Blueprinting," lecture at Charmed 2024.

WyrdWeaver, "Phenomenawork," lecture at NEEHU 2024.

WyrdWeaver, "A Retrospective on C.R.E.A.M.", 2025

Zepeng Fang et al. Human high-order thalamic nuclei gate conscious perception through the thalamofrontal loop. Science 388, eadr3675 (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adr3675

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