Hypnotherapy is a skilled verbal communication, used during hypnosis, that by-passes the conscious mind and helps direct a client’s subconscious mind in such a way as to bring about intended alterations in sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts and behavior.

Hypnotherapy is quite different from psychotherapy. Psychotherapy often finds it appropriate to explore issues beyond those that the client identified as a problem when the client came for help. This may be appropriate for psychotherapy, but it is not appropriate for hypnotism. In hypnotism, the center of control must always remain with the client. Therefore, we work on what you came in for, and we stay on target.

Hypnosis has the capacity to work for the majority of individuals but some are more susceptible to suggestions than others.

What drives the hypnosis to take place is the willingness of the person to allow themselves to move into an altered state. A person must want to be hypnotized with a strong want for their desired change to take place. The most important thing to remember is that you must be fully committed to the process and feel that you can place your trust in your Hypnotherapist. It is also important to keep an open mind, as any skepticism may subconsciously dampen your susceptibility.

Some people leave their first hypnotherapy session saying, “I wasn’t hypnotized – I knew what was going on the whole time!” Well of course you did! Hypnosis is not a state of amnesia or of no awareness. Just the opposite true, in fact: hypnosis is a state of very heightened awareness and focus.

Hypnosis is experienced differently by each client. There is no particular “feeling” of hypnosis. Hypnosis is a trance state. If you have ever watched television and really got involved in the show that you were watching, you’ve experienced a trance state. Or when you drive from point A to point B and everything in the middle is a little fuzzy, you’ve been in a trance state.

The motivation to change must come from within the person being hypnotized. If you want someone else to change, but that person doesn’t really want to, the chances that hypnosis will work for the other person is greatly reduced.

This is also true when a parent calls on behalf of their child. Many parents, with good intentions, call for help for their children whom might not want the help or are embarrassed to receive help. Many children, unacknowledged by the parent, tell their parents they want to go in for therapy in order to please the parent.

No

Hypnosis cannot make you do something that is against your morals or ethics.

As a demonstration of this, reflect that hypnotism has existed as a body of technique for more than 200 years. If it were possible to use hypnotism to make people do things they didn’t want to do, hypnotists would be running the world. The fact that we are not indicates that hypnotism cannot be used for coercive purposes.

What hypnotism can do is enable a person to overcome resistance to doing what needs to be done in order to achieve what that person wants to achieve. It can help you get out of your own way and become successful, and it can help you stimulate your own natural healing power by soothing away the worries that interfere with that power.

Let me guess: you’ve seen a stage show where a hypnotist made people do all these crazy things. Or, perhaps you have ideas from Hollywood’s movies and TV. The stage hypnotist carefully selects his subjects (watch how many volunteers he has sit down), and he chooses people he knows WILL bark like a dog. They will because somewhere inside them is a part that loves to entertain. And they will do it because, deep down inside, they don’t believe there is anything wrong with barking like a dog.

Hypnosis cannot make you do something that is against your morals or ethics. All hypnosis is self-hypnosis, in truth, and no hypnotist can make you do something that you really don’t want to do. That’s why some people can be hypnotized to stop smoking and yet they still smoke. You have to want the change, agree with the change, and then hypnosis is an instrument for helping make that change better, faster, and permanent.

No

This is another Hollywood myth. You always have control, and you can always hear what's going on. Hypnosis is nothing but a state of relaxed deep focus. It is a natural state that you enter at least twice a day (while waking up and while falling asleep!), and probably much more often than that. If at any time you are in trance and you wish to be fully awake, you can just count to yourself "1 – 2- 3" and open your eyes.

There is more to changing a serious habit like smoking than just a few hypnotic suggestions, I’m afraid. In the simplest terms, the person must want the change, and they must have a replacement for smoking. Hypnosis can be used to find a healthy, effective replacement, and then it can be used to help flip the subconscious over to the new, healthy habits.

Serious psychiatric or mental health problems are referred to a qualified psychotherapist or psychiatrist. Medical problems with the physical body must always be treated by a physician, who can, at his or her discretion, prescribe hypnotherapy for pain control, hypnoanesthesia or relaxation.

Drug addiction, family dynamics disorders, clinical depression and other such problems need to be treated by doctors and psychiatrists, who can, at their discretion, prescribe hypnotherapy as a supplementary treatment.

If you would like to research hypnotism further, I suggest you go to the web site of the National Institutes of Health of the United States (www.nih.gov). Enter the word “hypnosis” in the search box at the top right hand side of the screen and you will get a list of hundreds of recent research articles that have appeared in refereed scientific journals. Clicking on a study will bring up a short abstract of the research findings.