If you explore hypnosis online, especially Erotic hypnosis, it’s easy to feel as though the entire field belongs to English-speaking cultures.
The hypnotists, the scripts, the tutorials, especially the erotic forms of hypnosis all seem to come from the US, UK, Australia or other English-dominant spaces. But this is more about branding, and history, than any cultural monopoly. Hypnosis, and altered reality, is a universal human experience! English-speaking countries just happened to package it in a way the modern world could see it.
Before the word “hypnosis” existed, cultures around the world developed their own ways of inducing trance and hypnosis. India has yogic trance and mantra-based hypnotic focus. China has Daoist guided visualisation. Japan has ritual meditative traditions, and African and indigenous cultures use rhythmic trance, drumming, or storytelling to access these altered states of reality.
These all follow the same principles as modern hypnosis: narrowed attention, absorption, suggestion, and engagement of the imagination, to create changes to perceived reality. But because they are not labeled as “hypnosis” they are often excluded from the field.
The reason hypnosis feels very English, has a lot to do with Scottish surgeon, James Braid, who coined the term “hypnosis” (from the Greek hypnos meaning sleep) and framed it as a scientific technique, rather than a spiritual or mystical one. (Fun fact: He later decided that hypnosis wasn’t sleep and changed the name to monoideism, alas the original name stuck.)
British and American physicians experimented with hypnotic anaesthesia (still taught today) and of course stage hypnosis emerged from English vaudeville/variety-shows before evolving into modern entertainment.
Later, Milton Erickson and Dave Elman’s famous use of hypnosis as a means to deliver therapy, further cemented English-language as the default and accepted form of hypnosis. Of course other cultures continued to use trance, but often within spiritual or ritual frameworks rather than under a modern, secular or medical frame.
The internet seems to have amplified this imbalance. Most global online content is in English, and English-speaking creators were early adopters on platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and Patreon. This included everything from therapeutic hypnosis and meditation to ASMR and (hello!) erotic hypnosis. As a result, English-language material flooded and drowned out the visibility of other traditions.
The fact is, hypnosis isn’t less common in other cultures… it’s just less globally visible.
Is there a language barrier?
There is a linguistic element here. English is comfortable with ambiguity, metaphor, and permissive phrasing, which underpin modern hypnotic language. Structures like “you might begin to notice…” or “you can allow yourself to…” translate cleanly into hypnotic suggestion. Many languages can absolutely be hypnotic, but some have more rigid grammar or less flexible modes of indirect suggestion, making the English style harder to replicate without significant change. Allowing the mind to fill in the gaps is one of the core underpinnings of the art of hypnosis.
Another factor is cultural expectation. English-speaking audiences grow up surrounded by depictions of hypnosis in films, books and media, so they already have a pre-formed idea of what “being hypnotised” looks and feels like. That expectation becomes a powerful pre-frame: people anticipate trance, believe it should work, and therefore unconsciously cooperate with the process, which then feeds back into belief causing the hypnotic loop. In cultures where hypnosis isn’t portrayed as often, or is framed very differently, that automatic expectation simply isn’t there, making the phenomenon harder to achieve.
One area where this cultural skew is especially visible is erotic hypnosis and roleplay-based hypnosis. A slight generalisation, but English speaking cultures tend to be more open about kink, fantasy, and intimacy. And this follows the current zeitgeist of opening up, shedding the last traces of Victorian repression, and embracing a more candid, emotionally literate way of talking about desire, sex and sexuality. As conversations about consent, fantasy, and inner experience become more mainstream, people feel increasingly comfortable exploring hypnotic play as a form of “guided experience” rather than something taboo or dangerous.
With the huge explosion of ASMR and Erotic Hypnosis communities, and platforms that support creators financially, this has produced a niche that is overwhelmingly English, much more so than therapeutic hypnosis, which is more evenly distributed.
A quick detour
Even with this growing openness, erotic hypnosis still faces significant obstacles alas. Misconceptions about it being “mind control” and fears of coercion continue to shape public opinion on the craft and large payment processors like MasterCard have pressured websites to restrict or even ban erotic hypnosis content altogether. A good reminder that while culture may be opening up, we have a way to go yet in the understanding of what hypnosis is and what it can and can’t do. I’ll be covering this in depth in a separate article soon.
So is hypnosis really an English-language phenomena?
No! Not at all.
Trance belongs to everyone. What English-speaking cultures did was take something that’s been used for centuries and name it, brand it, formalise it, and distribute it globally through media, science, and online communities.
If you’re ready to explore hypnosis in a way that feels safe, fun, sensual, and deeply mindful, you’ll find plenty to discover in my work.
