Hypnosis is a word that conjures up many ideas, some more fanciful than others. Since you’ve visited this page in search of hypnotherapy, you likely understand it as more than just watch-swinging Svengalis and showy stage hypnotists practicing ‘mind control’. Perhaps a friend or family member has experienced the benefits of hypnotherapy, and now you want to know a little more about how it works. In some ways, it is more helpful to begin by understanding what hypnosis is not.
Is Hypnosis a ‘Trance’?
Some believe hypnosis to be a state of ‘trance’. We are ushered into this trance state by the hypnotherapist so that we may be fixed, the brain ‘rewired’ to our advantage. The problem us that there are so many ways to experience hypnosis, whether in deep relaxation or fully alert and riding an exercise bike, as subjects did in one well known study, it becomes very difficult to define exactly what a ‘trance’ might be. There are certainly no brain scans that one can definitively point to and say this is a brain in hypnosis.
More importantly, from a therapeutic standpoint, understanding hypnosis as a trance invites a passive position – that you sit back and have it done to you. In reality, all hypnosis is ultimately self-hypnosis. The suggestions given by the hypnotist matter only as the your internal response to them. Rather than being passive recipients of an intervention, we become the architects of our change, as guided by the hypnotic suggestions.
‘Just’ Imagination? Seriously?
If hypnosis is not a trance, then what is it? Perhaps the most helpful way to understand it comes from prominent hypnosis researcher Ted Sarbin, who defined it as ‘believed-in imaginings’. Rather than having our minds hijacked and rearranged, our imagination is guided so we can experience internally a version of ourselves that feels relaxed getting on a plane, confident speaking up in a meeting, at peace with not smoking another cigarette. And this experience gives us the blueprint to go into the world be this different version of ourselves for real.
While the notion of the imagination as a tool for healing may feel easy to dismiss, consider the following: hypnosis as a search term on PubMed, a database peer-reviewed articles pertaining to medicine, produces over 16,000 hits. It has been evidenced as an effective intervention in conditions ranging from anxiety to insomnia to IBS. As a method of pain relief, it can work so well that in certain cases, people can have operations with no anesthetic.
Moreover, we can understand anxiety as a malady of the imagination – we imagine something bad happening, and act as though it were really the case. In the spirit of fighting fire with fire, what could be better, then, than a cure of the imagination? The same goes for depression: if we become depressed by engaging with an overly pessimistic story of ourselves and our place in the world, we require the means to engage with a more hopeful one. Hypnosis is the perfect vehicle.
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