What is Hypnotherapy? And what is Hypnosis

HOW AND WHY IT WORKS 

What is hypnosis?

Hypnosis is the state of being very deeply relaxed, it’s like a daydream. During hypnosis, as you go into a pleasant relaxation, you drift into a trance, and trance is a natural thing, something we may experience many times a day. If you drive, you may have noticed sometimes, you suddenly look around and think: how did I get here? What happens at
such times is that you have been in trance. 

And the interesting thing is that you have
been safe; if there was a red light, you would have stopped; if you needed to, you would
have slowed down. And that is because while we are in trance, a wonderful thing
happens, and it has to do with the way our brain works: although part of your mind was
thinking various things that had nothing to do with driving, another part of your brain
was watching over you, as it were, to make sure you were safe.

What is hypnotherapy?

Hypnotherapy is not the same as stage hypnosis which is used for entertainment. Those
on TV have been selected from hundreds or thousands of applicants; they are people
who like being the centre of attention and very susceptible to whatever the hypnotist
asks them to do. Those on stage, perhaps in a club or theatre, too, do not mind doing
silly things. Nobody can make a person under hypnosis do what they do not want to do.

Hypnotherapy is the practice of using hypnosis in order to achieve therapeutic changes
to unwanted conditions: feelings such as stress, anxiety, depression, or strong fears, or
behaviour, for example insomnia; or harmful habits: smoking, and overeating are two
such examples. Hypnotherapy has the power to help overcome even very strong
reactions (which may persist or be expressed many years later) resulting from rape or
other forms of violence, such as sexual abuse or post traumatic stress disorder.

An advantage of hypnotherapy is that it can take effect very quickly, requiring very few
sessions – sometimes even one (for example, most of my clients quit smoking after just
one session). This is because hypnotherapy works with our mind rather than trying to
work against it, activating our inner resources.

One brain, two functions

You may have seen pictures of a human brain. Like a walnut, with two halves, two
hemispheres. Together they make us who we are, yet, each hemisphere has a different
role to play. The left part of the brain is where language is located; it is about logic, and
concepts, and numbers and words; it deals with the detail, and it perceives the world in
units, in chunks (I call it the digital part of ourselves). It guides our daily life as we go
about our business, analyzing, thinking, organizing, choosing and then consciously doing
(or deciding not to do). Our left brain, our conscious mind, resists change. 

On the other
hand, our right half of the brain does the opposite: it lets us dream, create, imagine…it is
childlike, emotional and playful; it is nourishing and relaxing; it works with images rather
than words, with sounds and colour, variety, symbols and dreams (we can think of it as
the analogue part of ourselves, because it perceives the world as variations of a whole,
rather than as discrete units). And it is in the right half of the brain, the part of our

subconscious mind, where changes can easily be realised; it is when we are in what
sometimes we call our deep mind that we are in our most active learning state.

The subconscious – our protector

Most of the time, most of us are aware (if we think about it) of the conscious mind
processes of our left brain; at the same time, subconsciously, our right brain, together
with structures at the back of our brain (the amygdala), quietly keep us safe and alive –
we have evolved to do so. Our subconscious does this in different ways, for example, by
making some of our actions automatic. As children, we learn how not to get burned. We
may burn our fingers once, twice, and the subconscious thinks “oh, oh, this is
dangerous”, and makes the withdrawal of our hand automatic by setting up the necessary
internal processes, so that we respond without consciously thinking. If we relied on the
left brain, it would go something like: “oh, interesting, this is hot, getting hotter on my skin,
I wonder how many degrees it is. I don’t like it, and last time it was as hot as this, I got
burned. I’d better withdraw my hand” – by then, it would be too late.
Something else the subconscious mind does is to help us learn how to do sequences of
actions quickly and without thinking, in other words, establish routines – you know for
example, how fast you can tie your shoe laces, but now imagine this: I have come from a
small village in a distant part of the world and I don’t know how to do it, so I ask you to
guide me. You will find it far more difficult to remember and explain all the actions in the
right order. In this example, not having to think is not about keeping us safe and alive, but
it does free us to concentrate on more important things. Creating habits is similar.
Smokers often light up a cigarette without even being aware of doing so. This is because
smoking has become a habit. “But hang on a minute” you may say, “I thought the
subconscious was there to keep me alive and safe, and smoking is killing me”. The
reason why this happens is because when people first start smoking, there is usually a
positive, beneficial aspect to it (feeling grown up, belonging to your peer group, being
rebellious, and so on). But habits can easily be unlearned, and new ones created, and
this is where hypnotherapy comes in.

Why hypnotherapy works

A good hypnotherapist can achieve what may look like miracle transformations because it
is possible to re-programme the brain – and the brain, after all, is what makes us who we
are: what we think, what we feel and what we do.

Breaking our habits consciously, changing the feelings and thoughts we have had for
years is very hard. Just telling ourselves to eat less, quit smoking, become confident, stop
being depressed, stop panic attacks, and so on, is not enough for most people, most of
the time. This is because if there is a conflict between what we consciously wish and
what originates from our subconscious, the latter always wins – after all, habitual
thoughts, feelings and behaviours have been formed to keep us alive and well. Even
what is clearly now an unhealthy, unwanted behaviour would have started as something
to keep us from harm: I had overweight clients who, as children, learned to eat everything
on their plate because if they did not, they would get a beating, or were made to feel
guilty; women, who as adults became alcoholic to mask the pain of child sexual abuse;
others who became obese after being raped, to prevent men finding them attractive.
Every person is different, the original trauma and the way they dealt with it internally is
unique to them. A good hypnotherapist may be able to find out what the original source of
the present problem is. But even if it is not possible to do that because the client has
buried or repressed the initial cause, hypnotherapy can still work.

A bit about neuroscience (if you skip this part, the rest will still make sense)
EEGs (Electroencephalograms) have shown for some time that the electrical activity of
our brain varies according to the state of our alertness. It ranges from the faster Beta
waves of our awake, conscious state, to the Alpha waves of hypnosis (between 7-14
Hertz, or waves per second), to the slow Delta waves of sleep. Hypnosis is not sleep, but
it’s interesting that when we dream, our brain waves are similar to those of hypnosis. We
can often tell someone is dreaming because their eyes move under their closed eyelids
(this is the REM, Rapid Eye Movement, of sleep). The latest theory of the function of
sleep is that that this is the time when, as we dream, new learning takes place from what
we have experienced: we process information in order to make sense of it, discard it,
commit it to memory, or learn from it. And it is significant that under hypnosis often the
hypnotherapist can also observe REM; new learning is taking place.
In addition to knowing about the different functions of the brain (through strokes and split-
brain patients), and in addition to knowing about the different frequencies of brain
electrical activity, MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) of how our brains function has now
started to help us understand how the different parts work – for example, the neurons of
the right hemisphere have longer dentrites, they reach and connect with far more neurons
than the shorter dendrites of the left brain do; the connections or the right brain are more
vague, they lack the precision of left brain activity. But, we do not need to know the
science to benefit from being hypnotised for therapy. The important thing is that scientific
advances are now shedding even more light onto the reasons why hypnotherapy works.

So, how does hypnotherapy work?

We know that learning takes place during a particular range of electrical brain activity;
that this range is active during hypnosis; and that new habits can be learned. Under
hypnosis, while the dominant, left brain is occupied with a particularly confusing language
(the “artfully vague” hypnotic language), and while it is trying to work out the logic of what
is being said, the subconscious becomes more active and sensitive to beneficial
suggestions. By “understanding” that the old habit has served its original purpose, it can
now find better, healthier new patterns and create new brain circuits, as it re-programmes
itself – the original neural connections (the ones controlling the behaviour or habit we
want to change) are re-calibrated, as new neuro-chemical and physiological changes are
put in place instead. It is as if the old record (the cassette, the CD) is changed and is
replaced with a better one which fulfils the required need for healthier feelings and
behaviour.

During a typical hypnotherapy session, after a discussion of what is to be achieved, and
talking about the problematic feeling or behaviour, the therapist helps you to relax more
and more. And when trance is reached, there are suggestions and often journeys of the
imagination which will help the subconscious to re-set the pattern we want to change. For
the vast majority of people (I never had a client who did not enjoy the experience) it is a
positive and very safe experience – and anyway, you can always come back from this
state if you want to). Different people experience it differently, and sometimes, when they
come back they say: “Was that it?”; others wonder: “How strange, I was in a different
place!”. However each person experiences it, it should be above all something very
relaxing.

Hypnotherapy is not magic, but the results may feel as if magic has been done. The only
requirements are that the hypnotherapist is competent and that you really want to achieve
the transformation.