How Hypnosis Works

Hypnosis is quite often portrayed as an almost mythical and magical thing. Sometimes it is shown as a dangerous and dis-empowering. People’s minds being ’controlled’ by a dark force. However this is not the reality of it at all. Hypnosis is actually a very safe and natural state of mind where the subject is fully in control.

I have been a professional clinical hypnotherapist for many years now, and I know what a safe yet powerful tool hypnotherapy is for helping people change their lives. It still continually amazes me how much a subject can change in such a short space of time. For example a person may have had a fear of birds for 20 years, only for this to be resolved in just an hour of hypnotherapy. This sort of thing can and does regularly happen. How does this work? Let me explain.

A hypnotic trance is, like I said earlier, a normal and natural state of mind. It is not where a hypnotist has power over you. This is a very wrong but unfortunately common misrepresentation. As hypnotherapist merely ‘guides’ a subject into trance. A hypnotherapist helps you to achieve a trance state. A subject can go along with it, or very easily resist it. It is actually easier to resist it than it is to go along with it. Some mental skill is required by the subject in order to achieve a trance state. So when people proudly state that they believe they cannot be hypnotised, they are missing the point.

A hypnotic trance is a very normal and natural state of mind. Most people slip into a trance several times every day. They may achieve this state of mind when relaxing to music, or when deeply engrossed in a good book or movie. It is that daydream like state of mind where you are so absorbed in something, that you block a lot of what is going on around you. A person may for example try and talk to you, but you don’t hear them at first because you were ‘miles away’.

What happens in a hypnotic trance is that the rational conscious part of the mind is ‘tuned down’ allowing for more access to the subconscious part of the mind. This is important for therapy as our habits, fears, urges, and other automatic functions are controlled by this part of the mind.

On a conscious level you may understand that spiders are not a thing to be feared as they are so much smaller than you. However it is the subconscious part of the mind that triggers the automatic fear response. Therefore it is the subconscious part of the mind that needs convincing that spiders are not dangerous.

A hypnotherapist will therefore guide a subject into a trance in order to gain more access to their subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is not that great at processing speech, which is why hypnotherapists usually speak very slowly and clearly. The subconscious mind better understands symbolism and metaphor. That is why I may for example guide a subject to visualise a spider dressed in clowns clothes, dancing clumsily to a silly tune. This tells the subconscious mind in a symbolic way that spiders are nothing to be feared.

The process of change can be very quick. A person can literally walk away after a one hour session and no longer have a fear of spiders. You can talk to the subject every day about how spiders are safe, and get nowhere because you are communicating on a conscious level. Once the subconscious gets the message, then the work is done.

So if there are any changes you wish to make about yourself, I would urge you to give hypnotherapy a go. You could find that very quickly you can make the changes that you’ve always wanted to make. Sometimes you can make a change in just an hour that you’ve tried years to achieve. There is so much misinformation about hypnosis which puts off a lot of people who would otherwise benefit from this safe form of therapy. Don’t let the person who misses out be you!

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