Someone on Moodscope asked about hypnosis, and I really struggled deciding what to write so in the end I’ve just written a few words about my personal experiences and what I do.

I learned to hypnotise years ago, a retired GP taught me. I picked it up quickly and started using it therapeutically with clients and for daft tricks with my kids. Later I gained a Master’s degree where doing experiments on participants in a psychology lab involved measuring how hypnosis altered their experience. 

It surprised a hypnotherapist friend that this kind of research has nothing to do with therapy or helping people. It’s pure investigation into cognitive processing. Lay people often wonder, “is hypnosis real or some kind of trick?” Well, yes there’s really stuff going on in the brain, but it’s different to nearly everything you’ll hear about hypnosis -- unless you’re reading dense academic papers in experimental psychology!  

What about hypnotherapy? Do therapists need to know any of this academic stuff in order to help people? No, you can drive a car without knowing anything about the engine, or use a computer knowing nothing about the operating system. 

In the lab you can experimentally alter a participant’s perception of reality -- what they see, taste, hear, or remember -- that sort of thing. It’s all brain “stuff” about how you create your representation of the world -- and hypnosis can change it. (On that note: hypnosis cannot retrieve “hidden” memories, that’s a myth, but it can create false ones. One must be very careful.) 

In the clinic, the clients and patients I see often arrive stuck with a rigid experience of reality. Anything from, “I need to smoke”; “this will be painful”; or, “I can’t change.”  Their realities and yours are constructed from many, many predictions the brain makes about “what happens next”. You have little conscious awareness of this processing. Hypnosis uses suggestion, mainly through language, to alter the early stages of the prediction process. We’re not fully sure how this works but it produces one of the distinctive effects of hypnosis: change in perception feels easy, compelling, sometimes like it is coming from an external source. 

Generally, hypnotherapy can help with a wide range of distressing problems which may not be medical enough for your doctor and not psychological enough to warrant a clinical psychologist. e.g. you might have fear of motorway driving, or peeing in public loos, or men with beards. The therapy might be e.g. tried and tested exposure and response prevention but hypnosis is another way to deliver it. I had a client who hadn’t gone on holiday for years because of that driving thing. We did one session, sorted, holiday with her husband, lovely “postcard” text.  

Last word: it’s an unregulated profession. In fairness, hypnotherapists who are members of the larger organisations have ethical training. Personally I’d look for that, or a healthcare professional.

Oli

A Moodscope member