The Voice

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When I was learning hypnosis and hypnotherapy, one of the very important parts of that was developing The Voice. Basically, The Voice is a way of talking you adopt when you mean business as opposed to the rest of the time.

What I mean is that when you have someone you hypnotise on a regular basis, whether it is someone you hypnotise as part of therapy they are undergoing with you, or whether it is someone else who you hypnotise for pleasure such as for recreational erotic hypnosis, the fact is that they are going to become used to being hypnotised by you and might "pop off" into a trance when you don't really want them to.

While it might sound as though hypnotherapy is always about hypnosis, there are times you want your client in a trance and times when you don't, such as when you're arranging their next session, when you're discussing their bill, or if you have to ring them up to reschedule an appointment.

To prevent unplanned trances, many hypnotists and hypnotherapists develop The Voice. It's a different set of verbal habits and intonations which we use when actually hypnotising someone compared to the way we speak the rest of the time. The Voice is usually deeper, more insistent and slightly slower than normal. By switching into The Voice we often don't need to actually do much hypnotising with regular clients or subjects because once they hear The Voice they're mostly "gone" straight away.

BDSM also has The Voice. Or, more precisely, many dominants and masters have The Voice. It's the way they speak to their slave or submissive when they mean business. In other words, when they're focussed and intent. And, for exactly the same reasons why hypnotherapists develop The Voice, masters and dominants should all develop it, too. If you're a submissive or slave reading this and you've been around the block a few times, you can probably think of a few masters and mistresses from your past who used The Voice, who had a very different way of talking to you when they meant business compared to when they were simply chilling out.

Developing The Voice helps dominants and masters in a couple of ways.

Firstly, just like in hypnosis and when you're with an experienced subject, The Voice acts like a trigger. It puts your slave or submissive instantly in a responsive state of mind. Even without telling them to do anything, by adopting The Voice you'll find they're suddenly sitting up straighter and are keenly focussed on you. If they're trained in different protocols, The Voice will immediately shift them into a higher one. It gets their attention.

Secondly, The Voice prevents miscommunication and confusion. If you like teasing your submissive or joking around sometimes, then you can do that to your heart's content in your normal voice and they'll know exactly what's going on. But when you switch into The Voice they'll know immediately that there are no more jokes and it's time to be very serious.

For those dominants and masters reading this, The Voice is an extremely useful tool. If you haven't done so already, it's worth devoting time to it. Try to think about how you sound to your slave or submissive at different times. Think about what you're feeling and how it's reflected in what you say and especially in how you say it. The Voice is typically calm and determined. It carries authority. It's definitely not high or shrill.

And, of course, then there's The Look, but we'll leave that for another day...