What is Hypnotherapy, and how does it work?

Hypnotherapy uses hypnosis as a tool to help people to become more self-aware, overcome subconscious barriers, let go of unwanted beliefs or associations, and create more choices for better living.

To just recap from the hypnosis section, psychological barriers in life develop from our experiences.

While you may aspire to conscious goals and ideals, the subconscious mind is the more poweful mind, generating all of your automatic impulses, thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

Everyone’s subjective reality is unique and calibrated by their experience – an everchanging complex network of automatic, unconscious imaginings shaping automatic responses, feelings and thoughts about things.

The raw ‘unit’ of that network would be an association from one thing to another – a literal connection in the brain that means ‘this’ is linked to ‘that’.

‘This’ or ‘that’ could be the sensation of an emotion, or a concept, or a memory. Eventually these clusters of associations form beliefs, attitudes, expectations, ideas about things – all of which automatically guide responses to either avoid imagined pain or move toward rewards.

In its many guises, these associations are absorbed by the same suggestive dynamics as hypnosis. The unwitting, negative suggestions of our parents, friends, partners, teachers, colleagues and bosses, repetition of attitudes or perceptions through the media and adverts, our own experiences, and the basic natural mechanics of trying to simplify a complicated world.

Pattern recognition and the tendency to form beliefs help us navigate in life – but the brain is automatic, and prone to mistakes.

Often, as a result of faulty subconscious programming during childhood or adult life, you can acquire patterns that just aren’t useful.

But your subconscious is there to help you – so with a little re-education and re-programming, you can utlilise its power in a far more positive direction. Hypnotherapy is one of the most direct and powerful skillsets to achieve this – but it isn’t always simple.

If you’re curious about hypnotherapy, then you probably recognise that some kind of unwanted, compulsive response has developed within – perhaps anxiety, an addiction, an unprocessed event which continues to wreck havoc. You may have developed an attitude of being all strong and independent, when deep down you crave for the option to just have a cry and not feel bad about it. You may have learned to associate public speaking with fear and rejection, when you want to have the option to be confident and charismatic instead.

Hypnotherapy is about forming a direct channel of communication with those deeper areas of unconscious belief – to enable a greater degree of flexibility in helping you to develop healthier, more beneficial responses and options.

The arachnophobe doesn’t choose to be afraid of spiders, it is automatic. They don’t have the option of not being afraid. I wouldn’t want the arachnophobe to never be afraid of spiders, because not having that choice is just as limiting as only being afraid.

If you’re wondering whether hypnotherapy could help you for a particular issue, there are all sorts of wonderfully complex answers that will leave you more confused that to begin with.

Here are some thoughts to get you thinking a little, before reading more:

• Hypnotherapy can only help issues of the mind – beliefs, cognitive thought processes, attitudes, automatic responses of emotion, thought or behaviour. It doesn’t help neurological issues such as Parkinsons disease – although it can assist with symptoms of pathology such as pain or frustration.
• Having said that, the mind can influence the body in powerful ways. This means that hypnotherapy can be used sometimes to help certain psychosomatic issues such as insomnia, enuresis, skin disorders (psorasis, excema), and even Crohns disease.
• The level of therapy required depends on the size and depth of the issue. Core self-image beliefs that stem from early childhood (which can lie at the heart of many issues) definately require a longer commitment to ensure you’re integrated, intact and ready to cope with any changes.
• Treat your mind with respect – any efforts to cut corners or go with the cheapest practitioner could cost far more in the long run.
• Be ready to learn and listen to your practitioner – it’s not about sitting back and having easy results.
• Don’t be too distracted with the ‘hypno’ bit of hypnotherapy – the ‘therapy’ bit is far more important.
• Choose your practitioner carefully – there are lots of superficial practitioners who have minimal training and are trying to make a fast buck. We’ll cover this in more detail at the end of this section.
• Remember that your mind works perfectly – it’s because your mind learned so well during all your unique experiences and associated so many things together that you ended up with the issue you have. Hypnotherapy uses those same processes to program your mind in a much more positive way for a change.

So to summarise, there are processes that occur naturally to gradually limit our choices over how we think, behave, perceive or feel. These processes have been carefully researched, studied, practiced and developed by the hypnotherapist in order to reverse the limitations, and free up more choices for you.

Hypnotherapy in practice

Hypnotherapy should begin by exploring exactly what you want.

Not just a vague idea – but exactly what you want to achieve. How will you know when you’ve got there? How will life be different – what will you notice, how will it feel, what will and won’t be happening? What else might change, and how will you respond to that?

This is important – specificity gives something to work towards, and prevents vague notions (e.g. to ‘just feel better’) which could lead to messy, unfocused work.

Goals should also be in the positive – there is no use in wanting to ‘not feel anxious’ because: you aren’t filling the gap with what you do want to feel; and you are feeding the idea of ‘anxiety’ back to yourself all the time.

The majority of hypnotherapy is then about finding out where exactly your subconscious mind has become ‘mis-educated’ by experience. It could be a belief you absorbed from a parent that says “I’m not good enough”. It could be a belief that “if I don’t eat for comfort I’ll be miserable”. It could be an automatic association which has built up between ‘people I don’t know’ and ‘feeling anxious’ (eventually this will lead to uncovering more beliefs about where the feelings of threat could lead).

Directed tools of hypnosis can then be used to re-educate your subconscious mind. This can take many forms. It could be:

• Direct hypnotic suggestion (once you are in a relaxed state of mind, your subconscious absorbs new positive ideas more readily)
• Realisation or belief-modification through discussion or visual exercises
• Emotional work such as regression or Gestalt therapy to release blocked emotions (and allow the beliefs they held to emerge and dissolve)
• Learning new psychological skills for self-awareness or emotional regulation
• Exercises to help re-pattern automatic responses
• Creative hypnotic work to adjust your ‘mental movies’ so you respond to something in a more positive way

It’s also important to then re-integrate new learnings, ideas and beliefs by ensuring that they won’t undo themselves. For example, other people or situations may exist who threaten to ‘undo’ a lot of the good work, if they haven’t been taken into account and prepared for.

Multiple sessions are necessary to:

• Ensure that you uncover enough about what’s really going on (and what’s influencing it)
• Develop increasing rapport and trust, as well as responsiveness to hypnotic processes (hypnotic training)
• Allow the repetition of suggestion to increase its absorption
• Allow adequate time to adjust and reflect on thoughts and changes to feedback into the sessions
• Ensure you have reached your goal – rather than just hoping ‘things work out from now on’ (because they may not – often new responses can uncover other, even deeper issues).

“It was probably the most productive therapy session I have ever had! My experience with 99% of other therapists is the exact opposite…”

Mary, Crediton

Approaches to Hypnotherapy

There are two main approaches to hypnotherapy, and ideally you’ll want a practitioner that uses both.

The first approach is to ‘add’ stuff – they’ll listen to your needs (e.g. for more confidence, more self-control, better emotional regulation) and then build these things by way of suggestion.

Typically, with a script-reading sort, this might entail some nice light relaxation while generic affirmations are read to you, like “…and as you imagine the warmth of that summer sun on your skin, you notice a sense of confidence begin to grow inside…” etc.

After twenty minutes of this, you may very well feel immensely relaxed and unusual, and hopefully the suggestions will take hold. It can feel like a nice mental bath, washing away cobwebs of self-doubt, and leave you with an optimistic spring in your step.

I call this approach ‘relaxotherapy’, and while I’ve seen many, many such scripts in various books and course manuals all aimed at any ailment or need you can possibly imagine (even breast enlargement and hair growth), as a hypnotherapist I never read a script to a client ever in my life.

The second approach may incorporate a little of the first (a nice mental bath does sound appealing, right?) but is more about removing stuff – the barriers, negative beliefs, false associations and limiting expectations that people have learned through their unique experiences, that get in the way of the natural flow of potential.

You could say it’s more about de-hypnosis.

As an analogy, consider a stream running through a field (this is your natural potential). Some rocks (bad experiences) have fallen into its path, diverting it across a pavement (ugh).

Relaxotherapy is like pouring some water over where the stream was supposed to be. For a while it might feel nice and normal – but for how long? I won’t criticise it too much, as people can get the results they need with this (enough water might loosen the rocks after all, and let water start to flow again).

But focusing on the rocks, loosening and removing them, will always lead to better results.

The only issues which are suitable, in my opinion, for very short term work are:

• Confidence boost for a presentation or interview
• Goal setting for an upcoming project, to boost motivation
• Simple relaxation (a mind-bath)
• Phobias (although not always)
• A one-off ‘blast’ of discussion, exploration and hypnotic training just so you can get a better idea of your situation (and what you need to do).

Three Types of Hypnotherapist

There are hypnotists who then learned therapy, and therapists who then learned hypnosis.

Hypnotists (who have sometimes cultivated their craft of suggestion from the field of magic and illusion) tend to have a good, confident understanding of hypnosis, so should be excellent at building positivity (whether feelings, beliefs, goals etc).

Therapists should hopefully have a better awareness of how your mind works, and be more person-centered, but their add-on hypnosis course might only be used here and there, and with a great deal of optimism rather than confident know-how.

The third kind is someone who saw an ad for a training course (“Become a Hypnotherapist online for just £299!”), thought “that sounds cool!”, left their tedious job in sales and/or marketing and thought it would be perfectly reasonable to sell their time and brand-new skills to often vulnerable people with complex needs.

Choosing a hypnotherapist is something we’ll return to at the end of this section, when you’ve got a better understanding of how to navigate your own issue and solutions.

Why hypnotherapy is effective

I have worked with many clients who previously had many sessions if not years worth of psychotherapy or counselling – only to make significant breakthroughs and transformations in just one or two sessions of hypnotherapy.

Traditionally, therapy has been thought of as a long-term, expensive and arduous task, which is ridiculous. Therapy that doesn’t know when to stop is usually counterproductive because it undermines the innate creative resources of the client and fosters dependency.

Careful, intuitive exploration and techniques allows the core fixed-ideas, beliefs and ‘programs’ to be found. Hypnosis then provides a quick, powerful route to subconscious change, releasing positive, useful and life-enhancing differences. What ‘talking’ therapies can take years to achieve through repetition and endless meandering, good hypnotherapy can achieve in a a few sessions (sometimes even one).

“Since I’ve seen you, things have changed so much for me. I think that I had got to a point where I couldn’t help myself any more and one visit to you was just the thing I needed.”

Rebecca, Cullompton

If you remember just one thing…

The important thing to remember is this – an issue is an issue because you don’t have conscious control over it.

You don’t have conscious control because there are subconscious dynamics going on outside of your awareness. Basically, you don’t always know the reasons why.

It is tempting to think about why you do, feel or behave a certain way and to think you know.

But the truth is that a vast majority of clients are quite surprised when they begin to become truly self aware.

In the hypnosis section I discussed the mind’s amazing ability to confabulate – it’s this process which gets a lot of people into a lot of problems – because the conscious stories are misleading, they can distract the person from realising or acknowledging that something else is going on.

Because often, it ain’t what you don’t know that’s the problem – its what you think you know, that just ain’t so.

Also of course, people are often afraid of facing the true causes of their problems, which is often why they’re repressed and hidden in the first place. People can be brilliant at being evasive and side-stepping important issues – especially when talking therapies are being used. We all know people who have been to see a therapist or counselor many, many times without making progress – because it’s “the problem” vs “the therapist”, and the unconscious mind usually wins at keeping its secrets hidden.

Which is why it’s always helpful and useful in life to bounce off other people and seek their opinions and perceptions – especially someone who knows their stuff.

With some good hypnotic approaches and a good trusting relationship, you become more open, courageous and dynamic in solving your problems. Remember, in hypnosis, you switch off that bit of the mind that is concerned with pointless cluttered thoughts like worrying about what people think, or how something might sound.

You’re aware, but you just don’t care.

It’s a magic state of mind where you can achieve all kinds of useful changes.

Now we’ve explored what hypnotherapy is about, let’s have a look at some of the more common issues, and why they can often be just the tip of the proverbial cliched iceberg.